I am working on a series of tutorials to cover the basics of Intelligent Design, especially the mathematics of it. This is my tutorial on Specified Complexity, and I would appreciate any thoughtful criticism of it.
Note that I am specifically requesting criticisms on the content of the video itself, not on applications of the concept that are outside the bounds of the video. This is both to help me (I’m trying to improve my presentation of ID) and to help clarify the conversation (is the criticism of *this* information or of some *other* information).
If you have a way to exclude design that doesn’t beg the question, I am all ears.
What objective empirical evidence do you have that snowflakes are not the product of design? If any. If you can’t provide any then you need to retract your claim. Just ask Patrick.
“Mung: Haha. Funny. You see the word SELECTION and don’t notice the AGENCY lurking behind it.”
I wonder what’s the psychological purpose of playing these word games when deep down you know you’ve lost?
Intelligent design creationism destroying Winston Ewert’s career before it started isn’t enough? You want to sacrifice another student on that altar?
Your mask is slipping. The creationist underneath is peeking out.
I made it very clear that I did not and will not, and why, in the section you failed to quote.
Your point scoring exercise failed.
colewd,
If there is any homology at all, then this is a damned curious fact, on a design view. The Designer has the entirety of protein space to go at (with, to repeat, no obvious means by which ‘intelligence’ tells it anything about where to find it) and yet it repeatedly mined the same corner for multiple components. This protein space that has hardly anything in it, but does have a whole bunch of neighbours just here – just where the Designer found ’em.
If, OTOH, the apparent homology indicates real common descent at the protein level, your invocation of BigNumbers as if the entirety were assembled by plugging random monomers together dipped from a sack would be rather irrelevant. If you want to critique the natural process, it’s no good strawmanning it. You have to take the case on terms that make sense within the paradigm.
And what can we infer about such a designer?
According to my calculations, snowflakes are not superspecificandcomplexialidocious enough to be designed
Dembski says snowflakes are not designed. That’s good enough for me. 😉
colewd,
It also discusses evolutionary history, extensive homology and the surprising (on a Design paradigm) congruence of the flagellar protein tree upon a species tree constructed from non-flagellar proteins. I’d say it supports my contentons much more than yours.
It isn’t clear what you mean by “validates”, but the typical tests for such situations are bootstrap and likelihood ratio tests. Why are they not sufficient?
You know full well that if the tests did not show the high probabilities of relatedness that they do, the IDists would crow that this proves that evolution didn’t happen.
For once, they’d be right.
But get what evolutionary theory predicts, and the excuses abound.
Glen Davidson
Which evolutionary theory?
He probably used Boolean probability, factoring in the physics of ice crystal formation and the randomness of snowflake nucleus formation and tentatively concluded that invoking a designer wouldn’t add any explanatory clarification.
But nobody can be sure that the Abrahamic god didn’t design every damn snowflake that ever formed and will continue to do so until our sun dies. When you’re infinite, like the Big Guy, you can spend an eternity on that kind of thing.
And why deny the Big Guy credit? He might not like you doing that.
A few notes from the discussion, since I’ve been out of it for a bit.
I should point out that, while I do disagree with the grand unified tree hypothesis, there is literally nothing in Intelligent Design on its own which precludes the possibility of a universal common ancestor. Now, there might be practical constraints (i.e., the size of genome that would be required to have a universal common ancestor may be way too big), but design theory itself does not say specifics. So, an argument against ID saying “it looks like its ancestors” is not actually an argument against ID. It might be an argument *for* common ancestry, but not against ID.
I think people read *way* too much into ID. It is a precise tool for a precise task. It’s about identifying, quantifying, and analyzing design-as-design. The idea that it is a full replacement theory is simply untrue. It is, at most, a component of such a theory.
The reason I hate the conflagration of ID with creationism is not because I think I’ll be labelled a fundy (I *am* a fundy and rather proud of it), but rather I think it muddies the intellectual waters, so that people don’t even know what they are talking about. When people use complaints against creationism as if they are complaints against ID, it is just so much noise. When people use the word Intelligent Design when they mean creationism (including by creationists) it again muddies the waters making noise.
What makes ID interesting is that it *doesn’t* aim to be a full view of life, but rather attempts to restrict itself to one aspect of the question.
That’s also what makes it worthless as a scientific concept with zero explanatory power.
I’m still curious to see how your specified complexity calculations fare when applied to iterative processes involving feedback.
“The reason I hate the conflagration of ID with creationism”
is because you don’t understand that ID was a renaming of creationism as a legal strategy, which failed in 2005, which is why ID has been withering for 11 years?
The authors of Of Pandas and People certainly understood that ID and creationism were different names for the same thing.
and it’s conflation, not conflagration. Conflagration means big fire.
I can understand people wanting ID to be science. But if you look at the history of science, and how it works, and the history of ID, you should be able to see that ID is a pseudoscience scam. If you can’t, well, there’s still hope for you, but I don’t expect much.
Dembski’s fake “science journal” PCID stopped publishing in December 2005. The month the Dover decision came down. Does that sound like an actual scientific journal to anybody? When the legal strategy failed, they lost a lot of effort.
Do you have an example where this was actually done then?
This is up there among the dumbest statements ever uttered on this site, which is saying something.
Bacteria is a DOMAIN of life, Human is a GENUS. Reversing the roles, you’re basically saying Lenski’s experiment should have resulted in Homo Sapiens becoming something else than EUKARYOTES in 1.5 million years. Why in the flying fuck would you expect or demand that?
Yes, the bacteria in Lenski’s experiment still belong to the DOMAIN bacteria. Just like Homo Sapiens still belong to the DOMAIN eukaryota, despite the DOMAIN having existed for at least 2 billion years. Are we now to think there has been little to no evolution within the eukaryotic domain, just because they’re still eukaryotes?
The degree of difference, both genetic and phenotypic, between the species of E coli bacteria Richard Lenski started his experiment with, and the bacteria that are growing in his flasks now, is AT LEAST as great as the difference between Homo Sapiens now, and our ancestor 1.5 million years removed.
This is confusing. So ID is a tool, not a theory, that might be a component of some other theory. What theory is that?
Instead of ID, I suspect he meant to say specified complexity.
Which is why it’s weird that in your tutorial you give up on the outset any specific application to it. Without application, whatever it is you’re explaining is useless, and your tutorial about it is also useless. Redo the whole thing, show how it’s a precise tool for a precise task and exactly what task it is for.
Show the thing in live action. It would be the best way from the pedagogical point of view.
A “precise tool” for saying “it’s designed” whenever complex functionality is found. It really does nothing but conflate functional complexity and design, while ignoring the fact that life is missing the ordinary traits (especially those coming from being able to think beyond merely tweaking inherited information) that lead us to conclude that intelligence was involved in its making. In the honest sense of “complexity”–rather than using Dembski’s redefinition of “complex” to mean “unlikely to be produced without intelligence”–ID would be incapable of identifying normal tools and other artifacts in archaeology as having been manufactured by humans, because these are almost invariably rather simple.
No, or it could actually identify a simple knife as designed. It can’t do so using an honest definition of “complex,” and it has no purpose other than to claim that life was designed even though it looks like it evolved without anything like intelligence transcending and overriding evolutionary processes.
Then why is it sold as an alternative to evolutionary theory? Of course it’s meaningless tripe unworthy of the name “theory,” but Stephen Meyer wrote two pages (pp. 391-392) in Darwin’s Doubt on “Reasons to regard Intelligent Design as a Scientific Theory,” using that subtitle to introduce his discussion.
So would the full theory be called “creationism”? And why doesn’t Stephen Meyer know what you know?
Glen Davidson
Johnnyb has just given the secret password that will allow anyone to pass the ID Turing test.
If you understand ID you understand this simple statement. Those on both sides who don’t understand it will inevitably slip up and portray it as more than this.
Peace
I would agree that ID is incapable of this as it is currently understood. The solution is not to abandon the exercise and throw up our hands it’s to modify it look for other ways of identifying design.
peace
Like Stephen Meyer did.
Glen Davidson
What is design? Next: What makes you say it can be identified? Identified as in distinguished from something else? From what else?
We do archaeology (you really don’t read very thoroughly, do you?), meaning that we already know how to identify design far better than does ID. And I don’t mean “we” in the sense of including you.
But real indications of design, such as using particular designs to fit particular needs, rather than tweaking vertically inherited form and function to fit particular needs (as is typical in vertebrate evolution), are missing in life. IDists don’t like that.
Glen Davidson
Because those who are trying to “sell it” as an alternative don’t understand it.
I have a theory as to why this is the case. 😉
Seriously why the resistance to calling ID a theory? It’s a theory according to the dictionary definition
Theory- The analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another.
Calling ID a theory does not mean it is a replacement for Evolutionary Theory any more than speaking of the Gene Theory means you reject Darwinism.
http://biology.about.com/od/geneticsglossary/g/genetheory.htm
peace
Archaeology is one place where we attempt to identity design there are others as well like forensics.
If ID could generalize the inference it would be a good thing right?
So are you saying that it is impossible to design in this way? Or are you only saying that there is no possible way to identify design that is accomplished in this fashion?
peace
I think that what we are really talking about is inferring consciousness in the source of an object or event. That is why I’m so interested in Turing tests right now.
ID is an attempt in my opinion at developing a Turing test for the author/source of life and the universe.
peace
Amazing, it surely has evolved a bit since it meant calculating a complexity or detecting something. One can hardly recognize it. One might even ask if it’s the same thing.
Not really calculating a complexity is simply one proposed method for conducting a Turing test it’s not the only one. And you are detecting something that something is consciousness in my opinion.
peace
ID is whatever the fuck you want. Priceless
Instead of spewing profanity why not explain why ID is not a Turing test?
peace
I already said why it’s all pointless, and you just confirmed what I said: namely, that ID is so devoid of an explanatory narrative that it’s whatever the fuck you want it to be… in your opinion, a Turing test..
Hey! Look how I pass your test:
“ID is an attempt at developing a Turing test for the author/source of life and the universe”
yippee!
Looks like we’re all agreed ID / specified complexity is absolutely worthless when it comes to detecting design in any real world inanimate object, let alone detecting “design” in biological life. But if we ever run into a gang of crooks trying to rig the results of a coin flipping contest we’ll nail their asses cold. 🙂
ID is neither precise nor a tool. It’s only task is to avoid the separation of church and state in the U.S.
If you disagree, please take up the challenges to demonstrate how to calculate CSI that have been posted in this thread.
cdesign proponentsists
When you can replace every instance of “creation science” with “intelligent design” in an entire book without changing the meaning, it is painfully clear that the two terms are synonyms.
Those are instances of human design. We know the capabilities and constraints of humans. What are the constraints of your
goddesigner? If an entity can do literally anything then there is no way to determine if a particular artifact is the work of that entity.Why don’t you explain why you think ID is a Turing test?
Do you even know what a Turing test is?
johnnyb,
I plan to write a few more comments on your video. Thanks for posting. Regarding the coin flips, the improbability can be calculated based on the binomial distribution. We don’t have to have 100% heads, it can be some fraction, and the binomial distribution can deal with NON-equiprobable distributions as well.
The homochirality argument fits well with the coin flip analogy for Specified Complexity in the OOL question. Less well known are situations were certain classes of amino acids must be located on a protein in such a way that when the protein is properly folded, an over abundance will occur in certain 3D locations.
Below is conceptual depiction of 5 different kinds of transmembrane proteins that are shown as integral parts of the cell membrane.
Notice the over abundance of “blue” amino acids (charged residues) on the outer parts of the cell membrane and scarcity of “blue” amino acids within the cell membrane.
One can plug in the numbers of blue vs non-blue to some sort of binomial distribution, and I suspect the remoteness of the configuration would approach astronomical. I haven’t done the calculations. It would be worth doing as it shows the improbability of forming a transmembrane protein randomly with less of the difficulties of Doug Axe’s work.
BTW, Bill Dembski occasionally uses the term Specified Improbability, which I think is a more accurate term than Specified Complexity. Although I’ve lobbied to drop all these unique terms from ID altogether in favor of more traditional terms in statistics.
johnnyb,
Whaaat? It would not need to have anything more than the genes required for its immediate survival and reproduction.
Not necessarily. At the moment we don’t know how to differntiate between actions based on “will” and actions based on “predefined law”. Design requires “will”. We might be design tools for other beings, like Jesus.
stcordova,
As usual, imagining the probability of something arising in one go.
Alpha helixes have an amphipathic moment – an asymmetry in the distribution of hydrophobic and hydrophilic residues. This arises quite at random. If weak membrane binding occurs as a consequence and is favourable, there is clearly a selection pressure in favour of retaining further hydrophilic substitutions on one side, and hydrophobic on the other, which will enhance the binding. Thus an initially random perturbation is reinforced. Such helixes can form a pore, by forming bundles with the hydrophilic sides to the inner part – an orientation they will adopt very readily. And, amphipathic sequence can migrate from one protein to another, providing membrane binding for nothing, once it has arisen initially.
It’s not an amino acid bingo machine.
Sal is an idiot, and Johnnyb is an idiot. Not much left to say.
“I’m gonna make a 45 minute video tutorial about some fake science that doesn’t work!” is not the work of a smart person.
I suspect Sal is just terrified of the idea that god doesn’t exist. He should get some courage.