Over at Uncommon Descent, Jonathan McLatchie calls attention to an interview that Scottish Christian apologist David Robertson did with him. The 15-minute video is available there.
The issue is scientific evidence for intelligent design. As so often occurs, they very quickly ran off to the origin of life, and from there to the origin of the Universe. I was amused that from there they tried to answer the question of where God came from, by saying that it was unreasonable to push the origin issue quite that far back. There was also a lot of time spent being unhappy with the idea of a multiverse.
But for me the interesting bit was toward the beginning, where McLatchie argues that the evidence for ID is the observation of Specified Complexity, which he defines as complex patterns that conform to a prespecified pattern. He’s made that argument before, in a 2-minute-long video in a series on 1-minute apologetics. And I’ve complained about it before here. Perhaps he was just constrained by the time limit, and would have done a better job if he had more than 2 minutes.
Nope. It’s the same argument.
His Specified Complexity argument is William Dembski’s pre-2005 argument. It turned out that the argument required a conservation law to show that natural selection could not put this Specified Complexity into the genome. Dembski did have such an argument, but it turned out not to work (see my 2007 article for the details).
In 2005-2006 Dembski changed the argument, by redefining Specified Complexity to have an additional condition. Now you could only call a pattern Specified Complexity if it was not only complex and conformed to a prespecified pattern but also could not be brought about by natural evolutionary forces such as natural selection. A number of people here and at Panda’s Thumb pointed out that this fails to show us how this condition is to be evaluated. It makes SC something that comes in after one has somehow decided that an adaptation cannot have been achieved by natural selection. In short, it has been safeguarded against the criticism that evolution could bring about SC by defining the issue away. That makes SC a useless criterion.
But McLatchie has somehow missed all this history. He is back where Dembski was in the book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased Without Intelligence, published in 2002. McLatchie has totally missed both the refutations of Dembski’s original criterion, and the 2005-2006 fix that rendered the SC criterion useless. In spite of having 15 whole minutes to clean up the mess, McLatchie and Robertson preferred to spend the extra time back at the origin of the Universe.
According to a source I found on Haeckel:
http://tinyurl.com/zfeudg9 (p. 27)
Assuming that’s true (I’m hardly a Haeckel expert, so I defer to the source), Sal’s quotemine involves leaving out the mystical magical nature of all too much of Haeckel’s writings, which clearly distinguishes him from mainstream evolutionary thinking and moves him more toward Gary Gaulin (if far more adept at using words). But no matter, this is just a war against science, nothing to do with discovery and advancing knowledge, so other weapons may be found, or, all too likely, the same context-free garbage can be spewed again where no one will object.
Glen Davidson
Thanks for the additional information on Haeckel. He was clearly more comfortable with mysticism than I realized.
As you note, none of that changes the fact that Sal’s quote suggested something other than Haeckel’s actual views. (I looked up the context based simply on the hypothesis that creationists can never be trusted to quote accurately. The evidence supports it, again.)
Glen:
The adjective “Gaulinesque” already has a small foothold among ID critics.
Probably won’t catch on with the greater public, though. 🙁
Gaulinesque seems to go back at least to 2011.
Or the “sure you can have steps, but they can never add up to a staircase”-argument. In the latest flavor of rethoric it’s “not mechanically feasible”.
John Harshman,
You say Joe’s math is hypothetical? Is Lynch’s math hypothetical?
No working through the sequential space is not a lot easier form a working copy of a protein. The odds are extremely high that it will degrade on random change vs finding an advantageous mutation and then having a transcription factor bind at the right time.
Lynch in his 2010 showed the long time and populations to get a successful adaption. I agree with your correction of 14000 advantageous adaptive mutations in the protein coding regions. Getting 14000 proteins to have advantageous change that allows one specie to evolve to another given the genome is a sequence is a massive mathematical challenge. I am highly skeptical you can make a real case here.
John this is a real problem to work through to get one node of common decent validated or falsified in order to move the argument away from being circular.
No, you didn’t understand that paper. It’s about the time to establishment of complex adaptations requiring multiple neutral intermediates.
Lynch 2010:
No, you really, really, really don’t understand what you are talking about. It is amazing that you guys keep having problems with this considering how it has been explained to you(creationists) literally hundreds of times.
Rumraket,
How do you get a complex adaption without multiple neutral intermediates?
colewd,
Why does it take 14000 advantageous changes?
Multiple beneficial intermediates?
Your formatting failed here. Is this your question?
If so, why are you asking it?
Has anyone suggested that adaptations don’t involve neutral intermediates?
Is this a Texas Sharpshooter question?
colewd,
Did you notice or answer my request to lay out simply the argument on the circularity of Universal Common Descent? I’m not getting this.
Rumraket,
Can you show me how you would get multiple beneficial intermediates.
Rumraket,
This is an argument from personal incredulity.
No it isn’t. It’s an argument from relentlessly consistent observation.
Plant and animal breeders have been doing this for years.
Consider any major food crop, such as maize or wheat.
Or consider cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and kai-lan. All simple variations of one species; all desired by someone who is willing to ensure their propagation.
Allan Miller,
The data shows that the closest DNA match to humans is chimps and that is then established as a common ancestor because of the theory of UCD. This assumes UCD is true therefore the argument is circular. This has been Sal’s point and no one has established a solid counter argument.
Are you channelling Gary Gaulin? Try writing a sentence that makes sense.
Meiosis, crossovers (during meiosis), and perhaps junk DNA also plays a role.
Hmmm. What do you mean by this?
The fossil record?
Watching your house pets not evolve?
Except for the simple fact that without common descent (which would hardly have to be universal with respect to just human-chimp relatedness) explaining the similarity you’d have to resort to an unobserved cause. Besides which, this unobserved cause could only account for the specific effect via ad hoc just-so “explanation,” while the sort of effects we see are entailed by common descent.
It’s really that simple. The “alternative” is indistinguishable from magic, and wouldn’t be allowed in the courts or in any legitimate science. Only wishful thinking keeps it alive.
Glen Davidson
colewd,
Why, I ask again, are we so interested in chimps? Is there something special about them, as a species? Anyway, chimp-human has nothing to do with universal common descent. It’s that you say is circular.
If this is simply a representative species pair, then you are saying that sequence alignments cannot be used to indicate relationship in any species pair. You might think that, but descent is hardly circular reasoning. It is after all, an expectation of common origin that sequence similarity be retained, given a certain rate of change.
So you seem to be placing the boundary firmly at the level of the gene pool. Sequence similarity indicates common descent within gene pools (non-circularly?) but not between them (circularly). Is that what you think?
“M’lud, the data shows that the closest DNA match to the sample is my client and that is then established as related because of the theory of the relationship of DNA samples to people. This assumes it is true therefore the argument is circular. I submit that my client should be exonerated completely”. How do you think that would fly in court?
Maybe you just don’t get it (either). If (as I illustrated) sequence amendment through genuine common descent can still leave residual sequence similarity, then this is a possible cause of the similarity in two given sequences presented for analysis. It is hardly ‘circular’ to regard the similarity as supportive of the hypothesis of (local) common descent, since that is precisely how paternity and forensics work. Especially if you do it again with a different gene. And again, and … It is driven by data. The data could be different. It just so happens it isn’t.
I guess my questions to Sal, colewd and phoodoo would be:
1. What do you think really happened?
2. When?
3. How?
No, I was referring to this:
” It is amazing that you guys keep having problems with this considering how it has been explained to you(creationists) literally hundreds of times.”
Allan Miller,
This is a discussion about like species. Common decent tries to link real ancestral relationships between different species. How do you establish this happened by known evolutionary mechanisms? We have discussed the origin of eukaryotic cells and the origin of man both on opposite ends of the evolution of multicellular life yet both are hard to reconcile from the genetic data.
Perhaps you could help us understand your position by citing an example of an event required by evolution that could not have happened in accordance with known laws of nature.
GlenDavidson,
You are absolutely right here and thats why people have made the UCD inference. Before the molecular data became available over the past 50 years this was a reasonable assumption but the fact the genome is a mathematical sequence makes this pattern of life very hard to explain. IMHO there is too much contrary evidence to assume UCD is true.
The genome shows the same evidence of common descent.
We fail to be persuaded that what is indicated by the sequence is negated by repeated IDist claims that it is impossible, or at least highly improbable.
Glen Davidson
colewd,
Not sure how you are drawing the distinction between ‘like species’ and ‘different species’. Chiffchaffs and willow warblers are only 97% related on DNA analysis – less related than humans and chimps, it seems – but are almost indistinguishable.
For present purposes, who cares? If you take genetic data and conduct molecular phylogenetic analysis, it does not matter a damn what the organisms (their multicellular forms) look like. You have introduced an arbitrary boundary whereby species that look alike can be related by common descent (genetic data admissible as supporting evidence) but species that look different maybe can’t (and their genetic data can go hang). But the genetic data scoot right across this boundary as if it isn’t there.
No idea what you really mean here. It’s not at all hard to reconcile the origin of man with the genetic data. The number of mutations separating Man from Chimp (evidently, our favourite species for some reason) is entirely in accord with 6-7 million years of accumulated mutation, at known rates.
Eukaryote origins are much deeper in time, are unicellular, don’t fossilise well and are lacking transitional data. But again, not hard to reconcile with the genetic data. The genetic data indicates a chimaera from an alpha-proteobacterium within an archaeal cell. This hypothesis has been lent support by many lines of evidence since first proposed.
It is literally the other way around. The genetic data so overwhelmingly supports common descent it would be perverse to reject if you actually understand it.
It really is this simple: If all species share universal common descent, then we should observe nesting hierarchical patterns when we do comparative genetics.
And not just superficially, there should, if common descent is true, be all kinds of peculiarities to these patterns in the types of genes and genetic loci and the branching patterns they produce.
Go out and observe -> There are nesting hierarchical patterns of comparative genetics. And they have all the expected peculiarities too.
Common Descent is therefor the best explanation for the pattern -> infer: Common Descent is extremely highly probably true.
Colewd, enough of this sillyness over and over again. I must once again recommend you to read this:
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution
Regarding genetic data and common descent:
This is just a small part. Read the whole thing. Several times.
Or provide an alternate account that explains what really happened, and when, and how.
Or provide and example of an event required for UCD that could not have happened.
Rumraket,
Again, Mikkel, you are validating Sal’s thesis. Assume UCD and therefor….We discussed the transition to eukaryotic cells. It is very hard to get past step 1 in this discussion.
GlenDavidson,
I agree with this and we can reconcile the differences I will believe the theory has credibility.
A version of what I wrote a little while back:
Glen Davidson
colewd,
You know why? You are 100%, ball-breakingly wrong. ‘UCD’ is not an assumption. It is a conclusion from analysis of the data. Further, though you talk of ‘UCD’, none of your examples has anything much to do with it, all being about individual nodes.
Imagine: one starts with the assumption that dandelions are descended from … lions. Can one find that they are from this standpoint, using the data? Or does the data not, in fact, reject the hypothesis? Only assumptions that are borne out by the data remain standing. It is not circular.
This is the JoeG gambit.
Take the biologist;s argument, reverse it.
So you get:
1. There is no evidence for evolution.
2. Genomics refutes common descent.
3. Radiometric data supports a young earth.
That was easy.
Rumraket:
colewd:
Jesus, colewd. You can’t possibly be this dense.
Here’s the logic:
1. If A is true, then we should observe B.
2. If A is not true, then B is extremely unlikely. Mind-bogglingly so.
3. We observe B.
4. Therefore we conclude that A is true.
The best part of the JoeG gambit is it requires absolutely no knowledge of the subject, no thought, and no intellectual honesty.
Again, you really need to concentrate on communicating some thought clearly and coherently. Try to avoid mere allusion to claims and evidence; actually state them. Try not to leave out crucial words. Proofread.
I think Joe’s statement (and I actually know that he said that, as I haven’t seen what he said, only your version) that half of amino acid changes on the human lineage were advantageous must be hypothetical. Not sure what in “Lynch’s math” you are referring to.
Yes, deleterious mutations are more common than advantageous ones. That’s where natural selection comes in. Not sure how “then having a transcription factor bind at the right time” is supposed to mean. There’s some gross misunderstanding involved, but what that is is not clear.
No, not 14,000. Using your own figures, it’s 7,000. Nothing in that, incidentally, has any necessary connection to speciation. What is your mathematical case that 7,000 fixations of advantageous mutations in 6 million years is unlikely?
And whatever does this have to do with the question of common descent of humans and chimps, or with circularity?
Again, you really have to work harder to communicate what your point is and what arguments you have to support it. Too many missing connections in what you write for easy understanding.
You might start by coming clean that you’re a creationist, i.e. that you lean heavily toward separate creation of species. Are you a young-earth creationist or an old-earth creationist? What do you think corresponds to separate “kinds”, in general? How would you tell?
What complex adaptation? At the moment we’re talking about single amino acid substitutions. One substitution, one adaptation.
No, he isn’t validating Sal’s thesis. He’s talking about observing the data and accepting only those hypotheses that fit the data. Or to put it another way, you reject hypotheses that don’t fit the data. What we see is what we would expect to see if there were common descent but would not expect to see if there were separate creation. Therefore the data allow us to accept common descent over separate creation. Common descent is the conclusion, not the prior assumption. Try again.
Funny thing is, molecular phylogeny is just the icing on the cake, for general theory. Evolutionary relationship at broad scales was pretty much done and dusted years before we even had the first protein sequence. It was no surprise, when sequence data became available, that it aligned pretty well with morphological patterns.
It did provide an embarrassment of riches, because fine-scale resolution of ‘like species’ and genera became possible. Journals are stuffed with papers making arcane statements like “molecular data now strongly support movement of the frugivorous euphonias and chlorophonias from the Thraupini to a completely different subfamily, with the finches “. All based, supposedly, on circular reasoning!
Be careful. If you say his name three times you may conjure him.
John Harshman,
John,
I fully believed in the theory of evolution until 18 months ago until I discovered through a conversation with my son that DNA and Proteins were sequence dependent, This over time has made me seriously doubt the theory. Your, Mikkel and Allens reluctance to question the theory despite strong counter arguments is very surprising and makes be believe your connection to evolution is more than scientific. I think you are broad brushing very serious issues and your lack of rigorous questioning again is surprising to me.
John Harshman,
How does natural selection select for a gene that is copied and not active?
Wait, you mean the DNA is actually a sequence? And proteins are sequences of amino acids? Hmmm. I’m going to have to reconsider!