Lizzie asked me a question, so I will respond

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Sal Cordova responded to my OP at UD, and I have given his post in full below.

Dr. Liddle recently used my name specifically in a question here:

Chance and 500 coins: a challenge

Barry? Sal? William?

I would always like to stay on good terms with Dr. Liddle. She has shown great hospitality. The reason I don’t visit her website is the acrimony many of the participants have toward me. My absence there has nothing to do with her treatment of me, and in fact, one reason I was ever there in the first place was she was one of the few critics of ID that actually focused on what I said versus assailing me personally.

So, apologies in advance Dr. Liddle if I don’t respond to every question you field. It has nothing to do with you but lots to do with hatred obviously direct toward me by some of the people at your website.

I’ve enjoyed discussion about music and musical instruments.

Dr. Liddle asked I respond to this:

My problem with the IDists’ 500 coins question (if you saw 500 coins lying heads up, would you reject the hypothesis that they were fair coins, and had been fairly tossed?) is not that there is anything wrong with concluding that they were not. Indeed, faced with just 50 coins lying heads up, I’d reject that hypothesis with a great deal of confidence.

It’s the inference from that answer of mine is that if, as a “Darwinist” I am prepared to accept that a pattern can be indicative of something other than “chance” (exemplified by a fairly tossed fair coin) then I must logically also sign on to the idea that an Intelligent Agent (as the alternative to “Chance”) must inferrable from such a pattern.

This, I suggest, is profoundly fallacious.

First of all, it assumes that “Chance” is the “null hypothesis” here

No, I’m afraid it’s not. That is your representation of the ID procedure. That is not the way I’ve ever stated it, nor has any other ID proponent to my knowledge. There is no null (default) hypothesis in the Explantory Filter (EF).

You can reject a hypothesis after examination without ever making it the null hypothesis at the beginning of your inquiry. Just as I have done in my analysis of a system of 500 fair coins heads. In the 10 years I’ve defended ID, I’ve never assumed “chance” is the null hypothesis. The general assumption starting out is the system could be the result of:

1. chance
2. law
3. something not-chance and not-law

That is the EF. If anything, the null hypothesis is “anything is possible” which would be kind of useless null hypothesis. I’ve suggested “not chance” as a null, but that’s not exactly right either.

Further, the EF is not purely a statistical test, but a PHYSICAL test. That is, if we see the coins are two-headed, then we can reject #1 and #3 as causes. Most null hypothesis tests I see in literature are purely statistical as far as I know.

You are trying to frame the EF as purely statistical null hypothesis test, it’s not. It is not, or shall I say, it’s not the way I infer design.

Also, “it is useful to separate design from theories of intelligence and intelligent agency”. That means we can talk about design this in minimal terms of statistics without invoking ID. We can simply talk about systems of objects in terms of whether the configuration is the result of expected physical behaviors due to chance and law. The reasons I’ve adopted using the Law of Large numbers is it is a natural way of expressing physical behaviors in terms of expected or predicted outcomes. The original versions of CSI only implicitly capture this, and in order to appeal to intuitions I’ve framed elementary examples in terms of the Law of Large Numbers and expectation.

Finally, if something passes the EF, given Bill’s advice, it doesn’t necessarily logically imply that a conscious intelligence did it. That is a separate argument (obviously ID proponents will argue for intelligence on circumstantial grounds).

An intelligently designed machine may have created the system (like a coin sorting machine). ID proponents have defined design as “negation of chance and law”.

The principal advantage of characterizing design as the complement of regularity and chance is that it avoids committing itself to a doctrine of intelligent agency…Nevertheless, it is useful to separate design from theories of intelligence and intelligent agency.

Why would Bill do this? This simple definition of design is good enough to form a critique of OOL and evolutionary theories. I did not have to commit to a doctrine of intelligent agency, for example, to critique OOL using coin analogies:

Relevance of coin analogies to homochirality and symbolic organization

I hope you’ll forgive me for not responding to your questions more frequently, and I hope you’ll understand if I miss some of your future querries.

I hope you have a Merry Christmas Dr. Liddle and I hope you’ll spend some time with good music. I think when I visit my Mom for Christmas, I should perform lots of piano.

116 thoughts on “Lizzie asked me a question, so I will respond”

  1. See what I mean, folks?

    Thorton blathers on and on cuz he wants to win an argument, not because he has anything worthwhile to say.

    He did this tirelessly on Cornelius Hunter’s site. But now that he was finally banned (Hunter’s patience was so deep and wide that Thorton lasted for a couple of years there) for his inanity, he comes to roost here.

    A bit more polite, for obvious reasons but still the childish, argumentative style, where he uses worn rhetorical ruses to score brownie points.

    Stale stuff, Thorton the Creationist! (see, that’s one of your worn rhetorical devices in action, banging you in the head).

    How about peppering your mimicy comments with a bit of wit or some such other rhetorical device that would at least make for more entertaining reading!

  2. Steve: Scientists are now actively in the hunt for a more suitable candidate to the simplistic notion of small incremental change as the driver of macro-evolution.

    I’m very interested in hearing more about this, as I like to keep up with developments.

    Can you provide a link/further information?

  3. Steve:
    Of course there is a barrier to macro evolution, Thorton.

    It is called the biosphere.Ever heard of it?You know the one that is fully developed and mature, where every niche has been filled by living organisms?

    Yeah, that one.See, macro-evolution has no work left to do.So nature shut down the program.It is dormant.

    That is why we only observe traits oscillating in tandem with oscillating environmental conditions.It would take a humongous natural catastrophe to trigger the restart of macro-evolution.

    You have unwittingly provided the huge amount of evidence that supports theobservation of macro-evolution in history for the simple reason that the biosphere was undergoing development.

    You just told us macro-evolution happened in the past. Your words, not mine.

    You also just told us that the only barrier to micro-evolutionary changes accumulating into macro-evolutionary ones was because the biosphere had no more open ecological niches. Your words, not mine.

    Please tell us what scientific evidence finally convinced you that macro-evolution happened in the past?

    Please tell us what evidence finally convinced you that micro-evolutionary changes can accumulate into macro-evolutionary ones if there are open ecological niches?

  4. Steve:
    See what I mean, folks?

    (snip the guano material)

    I’m civilly trying to get you to discuss the claims you made. I’ll ignore all the off-topic insults except for the lie that I was banned from Cornelius Hunter’s blog. Hunter disabled ALL comments over about four months ago, including yours. So if I was banned so were you.

  5. thorton: Hunter disabled ALL comments over about four months ago, including yours. So if I was banned so were you.

    I think that was more than 4 months ago. In any case he appears to be allowing comments once again.

  7. Neil Rickert: I think that was more than 4 months ago.In any case he appears to be allowing comments once again.

    OK, thanks. Has he changed his style and posted anything of scientific value worth reading and responding to? It use to be pure bullshit Creationist propaganda, much of it pretty over-the-top and ridiculous. It was like UD after sniffing glue.

  9. LOL! I note with some amusement that as Coldcoffee has abandoned any attempts to defend Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt here she reappeared at UD this morning with a long whiny post complaining that all we do is insult the poor DI shill.

    Coldcoffee, these questions about Meyer’s claims are still waiting for your answers:

    Why don’t you explain to me how Meyer’s timeline shows macro-evolution is impossible?

    We have over 2.5 billion years of life on Earth before the Cambrian period, including over 100 million years of multicellular animals. Meyer’s explanation for that is…?

    Meyer says over a 10 million years span some 530 million years ago the Magic Designer showed up and created most (not all) of basic animal body plans. There is no mechanism offered, just POOF. It took the MD 10 million years because…?

    For the next 520 million years we have a huge amount of new species appear like the great great ordovician biodiversification event. We also have at least five mass extinctions and subsequent rediversification of the remaining species. Meyer’s explanation for this is…?

    Coldcoffee, why don’t you post my list of questions above at UD and see what kind of responses you get?

  10. thorton,

    Why don’t you explain to me how Meyer’s timeline shows macro-evolution is impossible?

    Where did Meyer say Macro evolution is impossible? Here is my comment on this thread:

    Macro evolution requires tertiary proteins to form, which has to have right folding to form new structures. Not just that, you need new body plans for macro evolution. If you think all these happens because the environment changes from land to water or from hot to cold, you are deluding yourself.

    I think you should read the last line again.It is about Macro evolution not happening by chance environmental change, or random mutation because you need tertiary protein folds for new structures for new species.

    We have over 2.5 billion years of life on Earth before the Cambrian period, including over 100 million years of multicellular animals. Meyer’s explanation for that is…?

    Why would you want Meyer to talk about that in a book about ‘Cambrian Explosion’. The whole point of the book is to show that Darwinists claim random process over a LONG period of time created various species so how can they explain an ‘explosion’ of diverse species in such a short time of Cambrian period.You should be aware that the term ‘Cambrian explosion’ and the timeline of Cambrian explosion was not set by Meyer.

    530 million years ago the Magic Designer showed up and created most (not all) of basic animal body plans. There is no mechanism offered, just POOF. It took the MD 10 million years because…?

    In which page did Meyer say anything even remotely similar to what you are claiming? and that statement of POOF applies to Evolution too- Here’s my comment from another thread:
    =================================

    Coldcoffee Said:Thanks for the clarification , so now I have ‘Filter’ which means random climate change + random Natural calamities + random Predator/prey ratio ?
    Wouldn’t it mean that Evolution is a random process- even the ‘selection/Filter’- whose components are nothing but a set of random process? Since no one knows the probability distribution of these random events and Evolutionists don’t want to use uniform distribution,how would you know evolution hypothesis is true?

    ===========================

    For the next 520 million years we have a huge amount of new species appear like the great great ordovician biodiversification event. We also have at least five mass extinctions and subsequent rediversification of the remaining species. Meyer’s explanation for this is…?

    You have Ordovician period akin to Cambrian explosion – so you agree that there is no way random mutation and slow process envisioned by Darwin can create diverse species?
    Wouldn’t the five mass extinction deplete the ‘neutral mutations’ pool from which Natural ‘selection’ can ‘select’ and bestow new features to species?
    Doesn’t your last question support Meyer?

  11. Thanks CC for posting a huge word salad of non-answers and evasions, along with copypasta of the just plain dumb things you’ve claimed (“you need new body plans for macro evolution.”) that have already been refuted.

    Thanks for agreeing that Meyer’s scenario makes zero sense when you consider the other 3+ billion years’ of data on life’s development we have.

    No, nothing in the known history of the planet I described has supported Meyer. I just pointed out how much evidence Meyer completely ignored in spinning his Magic Designer fantasy.

    I still challenge you to post my questions at UD and see what sort of answers you get.

  13. Thanks for doing that, coldcoffee.

    ETA: btw I have just given you posting permissions here. Just one thing I try (but fail) to remember to tell all new posters: you will find that you have the technical ability to moderate posts on any thread you start – please don’t use them! I just haven’t figured out how to disable them yet!

  15. We’ve had out first UDer, Jerry, make an attempt at answering my questions. Sadly, all he can do is the usual blustering evasions without actually supplying any explanations. All quotes are from Jerry.

    The term macro-evolution has no good definition. Theoretically any speciation process is an example of macro-evolution thus making the term of no use in a debate.

    Bad start already. Of course macro-evolution is well defined in science. It means evolution at or above the species level. Strike one for evasion.

    All this is saying is that for 2.6 million years some forms of single celled life existed on the earth followed by a period of some very simple multi-celled life. Of this simple life, there were substantial differences between some of the organisms. There are theories out there trying to explain the origin of these different species but all are just speculation. It is just a different issue that some find interesting but is fairly low on the totem pole or relevance in the over all evolution debate.

    That’s 2.5 BILLION. Jerry hand waves away 2.5 BILLION years’ worth of Precambrian data as unimportant while offering no explanation. Strike two for evasion.

    There is no way of knowing just how long the MD (using your term) actually took so the question is specious. Meyer never said the MD took 10 million years.

    Yes, he does.

    Meyer: “In any case, treating the first appearance of the small shelly fossils as the beginning of the Cambrian explosion does little to explain the main pulse of the morphological innovation that occurs later during the 10-million-year window that paleontologists commonly designate as “the explosion.” “.

    Finally we get to the post-Cambrian 520 MY, the mass extinctions and major speciation events.

    .

    Meyer doesn’t address this. But each of the examples raised would run into the same problem, the origin of new information..

    Again we have no explanation, just the same hand-wave ‘Evolution couldn’t have done it!!”. Unless he’s saying the Magic Designer hung around for the last 520 million years and popped up new species, hundreds of millions of them, whenever He felt like it. Strike three for evasion. YER OUT!

    Same ol’ same ol’ for the ID Creationists. Lots of bluster, lots of hand waves, zero supported explanations.

  16. To be fair on jerry, I was pleased to see his stipulation that there is no clear definition of “macro-evolution”.

    There isn’t, and I’m a bit fed up of having “macro-evolution” declared as a clear white line between what is possible (“micro-evolution”) and not (“macroevolution”). Sure, “macroevolution” refers to investigation of evolution at above species level, but even that isn’t a clear line (speciation itself is a gradual process, ring species are possible, hybridisation and reversal remains possible quite a long time after divergence, and bacteria don’t strictly speciate at all).

    And it’s a division between domains of study rather than between processes. Nobody claims that “macroevolution” is some separate process from “micro” – it’s evolution seen at a different scale. And thus includes different processes, such as speciation, but also, perhaps, the occasional key innovation, such as the beginning of the eukaryotes, of the first hox genes, or possibly sight.

    And of course include mathematical models at different scales – between-population dynamics as well as within-population; rates of evolution; rates of adaptation, etc.

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