KairosFocus, he who shall not be real-named (Henceforth KF), habitual censor over at Uncommon Descent, perpetually crows about his long-standing challenge:
provide a 6,000 word feature-length article that justifies the Darwinist tree of life from its OOL roots up through the Cambrian revo — as in Darwin’s Doubt territory — and other major formation of body plans up to and including our own origins, and we will host it here at UD, one of the leading ID blogs in the world. We are perfectly willing to host a parallel post with another site. Only, you must provide thesis and observation based evidence that solidly justifies your conclusions in light of inference to best explanation, the vera causa principle and other basic principles of sound scientific induction. Also, you must actually argue the case in outline, a summing up if you will. You must strive to avoid Lewontin’s a priori evolutionary materialism, and if you would redefine science on such terms you will have to reasonably justify why that is not a question-begging definition, in a way that is historically and philosophically soundly informed. Of course, you may link sources elsewhere, but you must engage the task of providing a coherent, non-question-begging, cogent argument in summary at the level of a feature-length serious magazine article . . . no literature bluffs in short.
[some format lost because I can’t be arsed]
KF is of course free to set the bar for his personal satisfaction at whatever pathetic level of detail he requires, but given that he’s often accused of being a massive hypocrite I’m sure he’ll be happy to provide us with a corresponding ID narrative.
I mean, ID isn’t just a negative case against Evolution, is it? 😉
Things I’m sure he’s eager to include:
Who is / was the designer?
What was their motivation(s)?
What was their method of fabrication?
How many design interventions were there?
What specifically was designed?
What specifically wasn’t designed?
Please feel free to add your questions in the comments.
I’d ask that if math is invoked for any design justification then it is comprehensively completed and not just talked about in a big numbers / hand-wavy sort of way. Any new concepts you bring to the table must be empirically tested rigorously so we can attest to their design detection capabilities.
Thanks in advance KF, we know you’ll engage us in good faith and we’re eager to have productive dialogue.
EDIT: vjtorley has started a parallel thread over at UD. Thanks VJ.
Let’s hope we can have some good, scientific dialogue.
I’d like to know the specific time frame(s) in which the designs were done, especially with Meyer’s recent bullshit about the Cambrian radiation.
– A one shot deal with “fromt-loading” done 3.5 BYA?
– Multiple trips to Earth when a tweak was necessary?
– 6000 years ago?
Was there just one Designer or multiple Designers working at cross purposes?
How did the Designer allow for major extinction events like the Chicxulub impactor?
Question questions questions for KF but we’ll never get his answers.
How does design explain cladistic patterns?
But we know, don’t we? It’s just a happy-go-lucky whim of the Designer to make life appear to have evolved without intelligence being involved.
Beat that, Lewontian materialists!
Glen Davidson
I do not need 6000 words.
Evolution is the better model because it can be right or wrong, and its rightness or wrongness can be tested by observation and experiment.
For evolution to be true, molecular evolution must be possible. The islands of function must not be separated by gaps greater than what we observe in the various kinds of mutation. This is a testable proposition.
For evolution to be true, the fossil record must reflect sequential change. This is a testable proposition.
For evolution to be true, the earth must be old enough to have allowed time for these sequential changes. This is a testable proposition.
Evolution has entailments. It is the only model that has entailments. It is either right or wrong, and that is a necessary attribute of any theory or hypothesis.
Evolution is a better model for a second reason. It seeks regularities.
Regularity is the set of physical causes that includes uniform processes, chaos, complexity, stochastic events, and contingency. Regularity can include physical laws, mathematical expressions that predict relationships among phenomena. Regularity can include unpredictable phenomena, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, turbulence, and the single toss of dice.
Regularity can include unknown causes, as it did when the effects of radiation were first observed. It includes currently mysterious phenomena such as dark matter and energy. The principle has been applied to the study of psychic phenomena.
Regularity can include design, so long as one can talk about the methods and capabilities of the designer. One can study spider webs and bird nests and crime scenes and ancient pottery, because one can observe the agents producing the designed objects.
The common threads in all of science are the search for regularities and the insistence that models must have entailments, testable implications. Evolution is the only theory meeting these criteria.
One could assert that evolution is true, but it is more important to say it is a testable model. That is the minimum requirement to be science.
I count 323 words. I would be happy to post it in response to Kariosfocus’ challenge, but unfortunately I am not allowed to post.
*applause*
You don’t want a PS, PPS or FN?
*PS:
My references are the peer-reviewed literature. We can take them one by one, if kariosfocus deems it necessary to claim the publishing journals have overlooked errors of fact or interpretation.
PPS:
To make Dembski’s explanatory filter relevant, one must demonstrate that natural history is insufficient. So I will entertain ID arguments that can cite the actual history of the origin of life and point out the place where intervention was required or where some deviation from regular process occurred.
Same for complex structures such as flagella. Cite the actual history and point out where a saltation event occurred.
Or cite any specific reproductive event in the history of life and point out the discontinuity between generations.
PPPS:
If CSI or any of its variants are to be cited, please discuss whether different living things have different quantities of CSI. For example, does a human have more CSI than a mouse? Than an insect? Than an onion? Please show your calculation.
Alternatively, discuss whether a variant within a species can be shown to have more or less CSI than another variant. Perhaps a calculation of the CSI in Lensky’s bacteria before and after adaptation.
These are just proposed examples. Any specific calculation would be acceptable, provided it can provide a direct demonstration of different quantities of CSI in different organisms.
*I believe this raises my word count to 543.
petrushka,
Yes, but you forgot to finish with this:
KF also wants to know if you’re getting as many hits as vjtorley.
Perhaps KN could post it for you?
See how much work you create for yourself by being an “evolutionist”. Do you realize how much easier your life would be if you could admit that complex form, function, etc emerged instantaneously via divine miracle. [Stating the obvious, Glen Davidson already beat me to it.]
I’d rather not. Though I wasn’t banned and my account there is still good (so far as I know), I found my participation in those discussions not merely frustrating but also unhealthy for me personally. There’s an old saying, “never try to teach a pig to sing — it’s a waste of time and it annoys the pig”. So what do you say about someone who continually tries to teach pigs to sing? Isn’t that a kind of masochism?
This is not complicated. KF promised to start a thread in the name of anyone who responds to his challenge.
This is the second time I’ve offered an essay dealing with his questions and criteria. Let him keep his word.
OK, you want details? Here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth.
Who is / was the designer? God.
What was their motivation(s)? To make a universe fit for living things, and especially conscious, intelligent beings, and to make it in a way that intelligent beings could discover His existence.
What was their method of fabrication? Divine fiat, beginning with the laws and constants of Nature, and subsequently, at the dawn of life and at various times during the history of life. A few cosmic events may have also been achieved through direct intervention (e.g. formation of the solar system, or the Earth-moon system, or the collision of the comet that killed the dinosaurs with planet Earth).
How many design interventions were there? At least 10 trillion, or 10^13. Justification: (1) Most of the species that have lived on Earth have arisen since the beginning of the Cambrian period, 542 million years ago. (2) The proportion of species that have ever lived which are still alive today is about 0.1%, or 1 in 1,000. (3) The number of species living today is about 10 million (some estimates go as high as 50 million). (4) Each species, according to Dr. Branko Kozulic’s online paper, “Proteins and Genes, Singletons and Species,” has about 1,000 singleton proteins (and a similar number of genes) which are chemically unrelated to any other proteins (or genes) and which we can safely assumed were designed. 1,000 x 10,000,000 x 1,000 = 10 trillion. Front-loading all these proteins would have been infeasible, as Dr. Robert Sheldon shows in his 2009 article, “The Front-loading Fiction” at http://web.archive.org/web/20090715062610/http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2009/07/01/the_front-loading_fiction.thtml .
Yes, I have done the math. I realize that 10^13 interventions over 500 million-odd years means 20,000 per year, or about 60 per day (most of them, I assume, in places like the Amazon, which abound in species). Incidentally, I don’t necessarily think the tempo of evolution is uniform: probably speciation takes place in waves, so the rate may fluctuate. Also, I’m not sure how many individuals get new proteins implanted in them by the Creator when a new species (as defined by Kozulic) originates. I’ve assumed it’s 1, but if it’s 1,000, then you’d have to multiply my 10^13 figure by 10^3, which gives you 10^16.
What specifically was designed? Proteins. RNA. DNA. Molecular machines. The first living cell. The eukaryotic cell. The different body types for complex animals. The different cell types in each plant, fungus and complex animal. The human body. All these systems were designed incrementally, for two reasons: (i) the design process had to occur in sync with the Creator’s terra-forming of planet Earth over the last 4 billion years, to make it fit for life and especially, complex life-forms like us; (ii) incremental design would have ensured maximal stability, minimizing the need for any further Divine intervention to prop up systems in order to prevent them toppling over. An incremental design process also means that new organs & organelles were designed by modifying pre-existing biological systems – which is why human embryos have tails, and why systems like the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve look awkward from an engineering viewpoint (although they actually do quite a good job – see http://www.icr.org/article/recurrent-laryngeal-nerve-not-evidence/ ).
What specifically wasn’t designed? Junk DNA (yes, I’m happy to acknowledge there is some, though nowhere near as much as evolutionists assume).
Happy now?
Now all you have to do is demonstrate that the trillions of interventions were actually necessary and that the variants produced by intervention could not have happened stochastically. It’s not really useful to declare they could have been done by intervention. You need to find a way to demonstrate they would not have happened otherwise.
Perhaps there’s an ID research program waiting to hatch.
For the time being, I would point you to the work of Dr. Douglas Axe as proof that singleton proteins cannot originate via stochastic processes within the time available. I’m no scientist, but he has published previously in PNAS, he always seems to be one step ahead of his critics, and he never loses his cool. That’s why I believe him.
I don’t think anyone in the biological community has asserted that proteins form ad nihilo, so I don’t see how that would be relevant.
To vjtorley, etc.
The recent greatly publicized debates of creationism vs evolution, featured a young earth creationist, who believes that the universe was created six thousand years ago by a divine miracle. The reason that more nuanced creationist advocates like Dembski, et. al are not featured in such a debate is that they readily accept huge swathes of the evolutionary paradigm already, but only demand that everyone accept the existence of some unspecified designer/God behind it all, and their arguments for such are esoteric and complicated, and not easily conveyed to a general public. YEC advocates are at least advocating something specific, and something that is diametrically opposed to the scientific consensus. If “secularists” for some reason assented to ID’s philosophical arguments for the existence of God, would that in fact get them any merit points from the real God — would that assent to some “designer” on philosophical grounds be a substitute for saving faith in God? Is it a substitute for ID advocates themselves? AFAIC, God is behind ALL aspects of nature ultimately — volcanoes, the movement of the planets, etc, and yet we don’t demand that geologists, vulcanologists etc agree to some philosophical argument for the existence of God behind it all. And what do YEC advocates, or creationists in general think the reason the universe exists for, if not as necessary machinery for the emergence of life. For many creationists, the universe seems to be just so much junk wrt to ourselves. Is there a natural process, an incremental history by which life emerged, unfolded, incrementally grew in complexity, etc. if ID implicitly accepts such a process, then what is the argument about — the fact that “secularists” won’t agree to some inscrutable “designer” behind it all? Sorry, if this response was rather oblique. Maybe its a candidate for deletion for being off topic, but I did read your post, and the article you provided on “The Front-Loading” fiction.
Is there some way to distinguish between front-loading and continuous intervention, or does all this fit in the big tent?
JT: Thanks for your post. Just a quick reply. Belief in the existence of a Designer is not the same as faith, which implies an element of trust and a willingness to follow someone’s guidance. The sticking point in the ID debate is not whether a Designer exists, but whether the Designer has left scientific evidence of His agency. Arguments aimed at showing that everything in the world is maintained in existence by God are philosophical rather than scientific arguments. ID has nothing against an incremental unfolding of life – I’m an ID advocate and I accept common descent. The question that concerns us is not when these acts of design occurred but rather, which events in the history of life on Earth can be identified as acts of design. Finally, I would have to disagree with your assertion that Professor Dembski’s arguments are esoteric. It’s pretty easy to argue: “Living things contain a genetic code. We know that intelligent agents can generate codes, but we know of no unguided natural process which is capable of doing so. Therefore it’s rational to infer that living things were designed by an intelligent agent.” If even that’s too high-falutin’, try this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W3KxU63gcF4
Hi Petrushka, Both front-loading and continuous intervention count as versions of ID. Personally, I’m of the opinion that front-loading would have been too much of a hassle and that continual direct intervention would have been easier, after reading Dr. Rob Sheldon’s article. What I maintain is that these interventions were performed incrementally, by modifying the genes and proteins of existing organisms. Hence I accept common descent. 10^13 interventions might sound like a lot, but it’s a tiny fraction of the 10^120 events that have taken place since the Big Bang.
One could say the same about any unsolved puzzle.
Curiosity about the way things work is not necessarily rational, but it is a pretty common human trait. Not knowing how something happened is a perfectly acceptable condition in science, but it leads to the question, can we figure it out.
That really seems to be at the heart of the debate. Those who think it can be figured out and who are driven to try, vs those who are content not to try.
Hi vjtorley, thanks very much for you answers, which seem carefully considered. I’d like to ask how you came about / what methodology you employed to get to these answer?
Thanks.
Also, I’d like to ask posters not to attack vjtorley for any perceived religious implications of his opinions, let’s try and collectively examine them in a scientific framework. Thanks all.
VJ has stared a parallel discussion thread at UD here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/a-darwinist-responds-to-kfs-challenge/#comments
In stark contrast to VJT’s thoughtful and lengthy responses, Joe has given his responses on his blog. Joe can’t answer any of the questions, disagrees with VJT asserting that “In contrast there is Intelligent Design, which is a top-down approach.” (VJT @ UD says “I deny the possibility of any agent’s designing an organism from the top down.”) – swears a bit and limits ID to design detection only. He then later edits to add “… ID is not a scientific dead-end as it is obvious the design inference opens up new questions that we will attempt to answer via scientific investigation.”
Joe, if that is true pick something that is designed and explore those new questions. Or tell us conceptually how you’d explore them.
Please note, I’m not pretending Joe’s views have any weight in the ID community but I am interested in what the more gifted IDers think and how much consensus there is.
(1) Living things contain a genetic code.
(2) We know that intelligent agents can generate codes, but we know of no unguided natural process which is capable of doing so.
(3) Therefore it’s rational to infer that living things were designed by an intelligent agent.
The problem is that (2) is an assertion that the generation of the genetic code is not an unguided natural process.
There is also an equivocation on the word “code”. For this argument to be valid, the differences between the genetic code and human designed codes must be addressed.
Are there any scientific arguments that show that anything in the world is maintained in existence by God?
Indeed. Apart from the fact that the argument is invalid and both premises not demonstrated to be sound, it is a brilliant argument.
I think these questions are stupid, but since stupid questions get stupid answers…
Who is / was the designer?
My god. Nobody else’s.
What was their motivation(s)?
Who cares? What difference does it make?
What was their method of fabrication?
Magic
How many design interventions were there?
Hey, who’s counting? How should I know?
What specifically was designed?
Life
What specifically wasn’t designed?
Who cares?
I think lots of people including IDists care.
By golly, upon reading VJTorley’s response, I seem to have replicated it (without the verbosity).
OK, I’ll have to reword some replies. The motivation was to produce US, or at least cdesign proponentsists.
And what wasn’t designed was anything my creationism doesn’t bother with.
Others have already hammered on the equivocation over the definition of ‘code’ so I’ll let that go. There are other glaring mistakes that are just as bad.
What we know is that only intelligent agents can generate abstract codes, where symbols are used to abstractly represent other pre-specified meanings. There are plenty of naturally occurring non-abstract codes where natural processes encode information about their surrounding environment. The simplest example is tree rings whose width and spacing encode a history of the weather in the years the tree grew. Similarly, DNA is a non-abstract code that also encodes information about the environment at the time the particular gene was being formed.
Since premise 1) is incomplete and 2) is flat out wrong that makes the conclusion just as worthless.
vjtorley,
This is in regards to the article the “Front Loading Fiction” in which the author makes a big deal that if the output of a Turing Machine feeds back to the input, then there is no way to predict what it will do. Having a hard time understanding his reasoning there. That feedback loop doesn’t make the Turing Machine nondeterministic or something. Once you have the output, then you know what the next state of the TM will be (unless of course it never halts, but that condition is not contingent on there being a feedback loop present). And feedback loops like he describes are what memory in your computer is fundamentally. Guess you could humor me and explain what he’s talking about it, if you understand it.
Joe G is having a regular hissy-fit meltdown over at UD. It still chafes his ass no end that he was the only person ever banned from TSZ. Oh well!
vjtorley,
You seem most persuaded by studies highlighting the rareness of functional proteins, and abundance of proteins with no relatives. I’d be a bit cautious.
For example, Douglas Axe’s PNAS paper, which you mention above, concludes:
“These results imply that hydrophobicity is nearly a sufficient criterion for the construction of a functional core and, in conjunction with previous studies, that refinement of a crudely functional core entails more stringent sequence constraints than does the initial attainment of crude core function. Since attainment of crude function is the critical initial step in evolutionary innovation, the relatively scant requirements contributed by the hydrophobic core would greatly reduce the initial hurdle on the evolutionary pathway to novel enzymes.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8643620
That isn’t helping your case. At all. Now perhaps Axe doesn’t believe his own data (and owes us a retraction) or chooses to cherry-pick it, focusing on other, less well-received publications. I think this relates to a larger issue. It is experimentally impossible to comprehensively evaluate sequence space, as amino acid sequences grow at n^20, and one quickly runs out of resources. So various estimates have been made, which vary from 1 in 10,000 proteins folding, to 1 in 10^10 having a given function, to the big big numbers you at UD like more. But in truth, this is cherry-picking data, and it must be a bit frightening when one of your advocates seems to run from his own PNAS published data.
Another bit of advice: when estimating de-novo, or singleton genes, realize that the number of sequenced species is still quite low (though growing quickly). For instance, there is 1 amphibian and 1 crustacean genome sequences. I bet they’re ripe with lonely genes! Branko Kozulic’s paper on “http://vixra.org/” is not peer reviewed, and has not, to my knowledge, been published elsewhere (including BioComplexity, which he is an editor of). Perhaps a red flag.
And for genuine de novo genes why must these require an intervention? You just assume design.
I would like to know, does an adult human have more CSI than a baby human?
We won’t know until someone shows us how to do the calculation.
This is funny. KF is miffed that vjtorley took the initiative to post Petrushka’s essay at UD:
vjtorley,
This encapsulates some of the difficulty inherent in these conversations. Axe has made no impact on experts in the field, but you believe him because he anticipates criticisms and is unflappable. We discussed (in an across-the-canyon kind of way) some of these issues after my ‘Protein Space’ posts last year (response here with links to the prior discussion). But there seems to be a significant amount of confirmation bias in your assessment of the pros and cons of the ‘function is isolated’ case. You don’t indicate which of Axe’s papers you find persuasive, but one I checked after your prior reference to it related to resistance to substitution of amino acids on the protein surface. Evolution just doesn’t work like that. There is no part of a protein coding gene that says ‘surface’ or ‘interior’ – mutation is equally likely at every site. This greatly increases the dimensionality of the sequence space. Proving the evolutionary isolation of a given modern protein requires a substantially more persuasive methodology, saturating all paths, not just a targeted subset invisible to the actual mechanism being challenged.
Axe’s work stands in stark and lonely opposition to a great deal of work indicating the malleability of proteins, the function richness of protein space in general, and the connectedness of the protein space which has actually (on common descent evidence) been explored.
Nearly all invention of protein sequences took place prior to the Cambrian. In bacteria. The entire biosphere sees maybe one new protein domain every million years or so. So the designer is not exactly poofing themnout like popcorn.
Axe occupies a rather unique niche in science. He specializes in research projects designed to yield negative results. No mainstream biologist would expect to find a straight line path up the side of mount improbable. So failing to find one is a waste of time, career and one’s life.
My posts at UD continue to fall into the bit bucket. Not even into moderation.
So I will ask VJ and gpuccio, would Axe’s protocol have found Lensky’s citrate metabolizing function? Would Axe’s protocol have traversed two sideways mutations to reach a new island of function?
Does Axe address multidimensionality in functional space?
Some housekeeping notes:
Petrushka: “My posts at UD continue to fall into the bit bucket. Not even into moderation.” I believe you should only posts here due to KF’s history of censorship.
I see that the NoMath / Bignum handwaving has already begun.
VJT: Could you please copy my original post in its entirety to UD? I did specifically ask:
“I’d ask that if math is invoked for any design justification then it is comprehensively completed and not just talked about in a big numbers / hand-wavy sort of way. Any new concepts you bring to the table must be empirically tested rigorously so we can attest to their design detection capabilities.”
Thanks all.
Yes, details would actually be most appreciated!
Sigh…
No, not really. Apparently you are unfamiliar with the difference between “details” and “opinions”. The latter, at least as far as providing any sort of explanation or understanding is concerned, is of little value.
The other problem is that (2) is an equivocation; genetic code is not actually like any type of code humans make, but the implication is that genetic code is like computer code.
ETA: Oops…I see Patrick beat me to this point. Never mind…
I guess I’ll Axe again.
Douglas Axe appears to be a competent lab technician. My question is, would his protocol have found the citrate metabolism sequence found by Lensky’s population?
I’m interested in whether Axe has experimentally considered multiple enabling mutations.
If not, of what probative value is his work?
If VJT or gpuccio would respond, I’d appreciate it.
The flaws in this argument are plenty big enough for both of us to fit a boot in. 😉
As long as they are arguing from analogy and metaphor, I’d like to ask gpuccio what language is spoken in Italy, and what language was spoken in Italy 2000 years ago, and whether the transition was a saltation.
And while on the subject of language evolution, I’d like to ask him whether Basque was created by the designer to have nothing in common with any other known language.
I think it was. I think the designer also created their cheese and then taught them a special language so that they could discuss their divine cheese making process and no one would be able to steal it.
I have asked gpuccio a number of times about language evolution. He never responds.
He and his ID cohorts are quite comfortable arguing analogies (information, computer programming) until you confront them with an evolved system for which we have all or most of the intermediate steps documented.
Another analogy:
I would liken Axe to an investor who is unwilling to accept any temporary losses. What Axe does with protein evolution is argue that an investor cannot make money unless the value his portfolio increases with every trade and with every change in the market.
No sideways trades allowed, and no temporary losses.
What Axe does with his experimental work is lose money and argue that because he lost, it is impossible to win.