Guys, as your scientific output is lacking at the moment, allow me to point you towards Benford’s law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford’s_law
Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, refers to the frequency distribution of digits in many (but not all) real-life sources of data. In this distribution, the number 1 occurs as the first digit about 30% of the time, while larger numbers occur in that position less frequently: 9 as the first digit less than 5% of the time. This distribution of first digits is the same as the widths of gridlines on a logarithmic scale. Benford’s law also concerns the expected distribution for digits beyond the first, which approach a uniform distribution.
TSZ team: Can we build this into a statistically testable (Null hypothesis?) ID Hypothesis?
This one piqued my interest:
“Frequency of first significant digit of physical constants plotted against Benford’s law” – Wikipedia
I think it proves beyond doubt that god has ten fingers.
MOAR: http://videos.kirix.com/data-and-the-web/2008-07-22-benfords-law/2008-07-22-benfords-law.htm
It’s been used to query the integrity of American elections:
Election Forensics: The Second-digit Benford’s Law Test and Recent American Presidential Elections
Apparently intelligently (if nefariously) manipulated numbers don’t obey it.
: Benford’s law, also called the first-digit law, refers to the frequency distribution of digits in many (but not all) real-life sources of data.
IOW, it has limited applicability, may not be a law at all, and depends on the capability to store and transfer of information in a material medium. Begging the question.
What’s the challenge for ID?
Oh noes Mung! Possibly applicable science! Quick – denounce it, or assert that “ID predicted this”, or “Semiotic something!” but certainly don’t explore it, or think of ways you might use it.
This is established science. So unfortunately you wont get to make up your own acronyms and pretend you can measure without providing any….numbers.
Editz4Spellz
I don’t think there is one. But is an example of how “mainstream” scientists have attempted to find evidence of “design” in patterns of data (something that ID promoters often accuse “mainstream” scientists of not doing. But we do.
I guess what Mung fails to understand is that the important part of the phrase “evidence of design” is the “evidence” part.
People seek evidence. What it is evidence of is a different, secondary thing.
If there was verified physical evidence of ID that did not depend on a tree of ID derived assumptions (e.g. the long debunked tornado/junkyard) then it would be front page news on every science site.
Mung does not believe this to be the case I suspect. Yet a Nobel awaits anyone who can show that the universe was “designed”. Or that the flagellum was “designed”.
Show me the evidence for ID and I’ll believe ID. Simple really. Yet Mung does not offer the same in return. There is all the evidence one needs to explain the many of the observed instances of evolution, none for ID, and yet ID manages to retain its position in the mind of IDers as the “better explanation”.
The real problem is that the tests for ID in biology (as proposed so far) don’t distinguish between the output of intentional agents and the output of Darwinian algorithms. Even Dembski agrees that evolutionary process can produce CSI, although he claims that it only does so by “smuggling” information in with the algorithm. Sure. But it’s smuggling in plain sight in the case of biology – the information is sitting there for any self-replicator to find, in the form of th environment itself.
So that argument fails. It leaves us with the problem of whether an intentional agent was necessary to make self-replicators in the first place, but I am not seeing a test of that hypothesis from the ID proponents – but until we have a better understanding of how simple the simplest Darwinian-capable self-replicators had to be, it will be difficult to know where to look for the fingerprints of intentional design, even were we to come up with a test.
But this is why I think ID is barking up the wrong tree – the “I” would be more appropriately short for “intentional” than “intelligent”. I’d like to see an ID proposal for testing for intention in the product of a putative process.
Mung,
A scientific law is not an explanation. It is a mathematical description of a phenomenon that can be used to anticipate some characteristic of new data sets. Usually a formula or equation. As with gravity, it may be limited to a range of conditions. Laws are descriptions of observations. They offer no causes. Theories deal with causal relationships.
So Benford’s is a classic example of a law. It’s not impossible for a law to be overturned or found to be limited in applicability.
UD don’t seem to have taken this up, which is a shame. Too statistical?
TSZ is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Waste of time. but ok.
“Show me the evidence for ID and I’ll believe ID.”
Any evidence for ID? Really? Any evidence?
So shall we begin with assuming that your post requesting evidence for design was itself the result of processes having nothing to do with design, appearing on a blog also existing as a result of processes having nothing to do with design.
Really?
lame
lame is right, Mung. You really think communication technology amounts to evidence for the involvement of ID in creating primitive life, or whales, or anything else in the biological world?
Allan Miller,
It’s all they have, conflation. So they use it, boy do they ever use it!
Just like KF’s “billions of messages online” prove FSCI/O exists and is created by designers and life has FSCI/O so therefore life is designed.
When you can measure the FSCI/O in those comments and discriminate between design/non designed comments then perhaps you’ll have a point here.
Oh, what’s a “non-designed comment”? Well, I have some strings of ASCII characters I’d like you to meet. One is random, one is not. You’ve had a few months now and you’ve yet to tell me which is which. So on that basis, it seems that “nothing to do with design is ID.
Mung, is the theory of ID the theory that intelligent designers exist? In which case, no problem. I fully agree that they do. I also fully agree that it is possible to infer a designer from the products of their design – that design can be tested against the null of non-design.
If that is all ID is, then I am an ID proponent, I just profoundly disagree that the design-detection methods so far proposed for detecting design in the pattern of living things differentiates between the products of design and the products of natural selection.
And I don’t think Benford’s law will help.
I think that applies to many of us.
Some things are designed. That they are designed can sometimes be determined.
Nothing controversial there at all.
Mung,
If you mean that you feel like you’re being scraped off the bottom of some barrel, I think you should be less harsh on yourself.
We’re not “scraping” as much as pointing out obvious flaws in the ID position, and it is defending that indefensible position, that is causing you and Joe some anxiety.
Have an Easter egg, and while you’re munching on it ask yourself, how would humans, Earth’s intelligent designers, design “biology” if designing something as comparatively simple as the “F-35”, is so difficult?
Allan Miller,
Are you familiar with the phrase” Moving the Goal Posts”?
Let’s Review:
Where’s the requirements for all the things you added? Are they just supposed to be inherent in any challenge of ID Theory?
But let’s let OM speak:
Typical incoherence from the alleged “skeptics.”
So when people here at TSZ claim there’s “no evidence” for intelligent design, what on earth do they really mean?
Elizabeth:
“Mung, is the theory of ID the theory that intelligent designers exist? In which case, no problem. I fully agree that they do.”
Why the silly games Elizabeth? Surely, after all the time spent at UD, you understand that the theory of intelligent design depends upon the existence of intelligent designers.
“I also fully agree that it is possible to infer a designer from the products of their design – that design can be tested against the null of non-design.”
This might be a good place to insert an OP inviting people who disagree with you to explain why they disagree. You seem to be in the minority at your own blog!
“If that is all ID is, then I am an ID proponent.”
I sincerely doubt it.
“I just profoundly disagree that the design-detection methods so far proposed for detecting design in the pattern of living things differentiates between the products of design and the products of natural selection.”
What would differentiate?
Blog posts by assumed personages posting under a name such as OMagain can’t be distinguished from a post generated by an EA?
OMagain:
“Some things are designed. That they are designed can sometimes be determined.
Nothing controversial there at all.”
You claimed that there was no evidence for ID and that’s why you did not believe in ID. But now you admit there is plenty of evidence for ID and that you believe in ID.
Like I said, a waste of my time. So what, then, is your objection to ID?
Sorry Mung, I don’t really understand your comment. Are you talking to me or OM regarding “all the things you’ve added”?
When people claim there is no evidence for intellligent design they mean there is (to date) no evidence for the theory that biology (or physics/chemistry), or parts thereof, has been designed intelligently. Pointing them to the obvious fact that some things are intelligently designed is just silly.
Of course. I am not understanding your point (nor am I playing “silly games”). I also understand that at least one of the projects of Intelligent Design movement is the science of identifying patterns that indicate that they were produced by an intelligent designer.
What, if anything, do you think I have misunderstood? I fully agree that it is possible to identify features of objects or events that indicate that they were the product of intelligent designers. I am not playing games here – my problem with ID claims (capital I, capital D) is that I do not think that the methods ID proponents have proposed for detecting design are adequate. To be technical, they lack both sensitivity and specificity. They produce both false positives (products of evolutionary processes can produce the same patterns) and false negatives (many designed objects to not meet the criteria).
Well, there’s this one. Benford’s Law is sometimes used to detect design.
So what do I lack? The conviction that Dembski’s method works? In that case, let’s critique Dembski’s method (again). The conviction that evolutionary processes can produce designed-like systems? Sure. We can discuss that at the same time. The belief that the universe was intelligently created? Well, I wouldn’t want to assume my conclusion, but, in any case, for half a century, I held that belief. The belief that OOL is impossible? Well, I do lack that belief, but until someone shows that it is possible, I guess the jury is out. Promising leads so far, though.
The design-methods so far proposed (e.g. Dembski’s; Behe’s, and I remain profoundly unpersuaded by Upright Biped’s, which seems to be different from either of the other two, which is at least to its credit).
Yes, I think they probably can, with a fairly high degree of both specificity and sensitivity. But no test is perfect, and I’d want to take into account external evidence, for example, strong evidence that human post-writers exist, and that EAs that produce internet posts are, to my current knowledge, rare.
Given those priors, the posterior likelihood of a given human-like post being written by a human is pretty high.
In contrast, with regard to biological organisms, we have no evidence that non-biological (or even reason to think that non-self-replicating designers) exist, and plenty of evidence that self-replicating things, of which biological organisms are a prime exemplar, evolve.
Given those priors, my posterior for an non-self-replicating ID as the origin of biological organisms is going to be low. Although my posterior for a self-replicating, but not necessarily biological-as-we-know-it ID (e.g. an alien designer) would be marginally – marginally – higher.
We can argue about the reasonableness of my priors, but it’s clear that a design inference is perfectly possible and can be perfectly valid.
I’d be surprised there was much disagreement with this claim.
Real scientists can and do detect design. The way real scientists detect design involves forming a hypothesis of how the putatively-designed whatzit was manufactured, and then testing that hypothesis. This general methodology does not detect design directly, to be sure, but since Manufacture is a fundamentally necessary characteristic of any designed whatzit, testing for Manufacture is, in practical terms, every bit as good as testing for Design.
ID-pushers, contrariwise, assert that the quality of having been produced by a designer, in and of itself, is directly detectable by some methodology which does not require any knowledge of, or hypothesis of, how the putatively-designed whatzit was manufactured. This assertion, if true, would be downright worldshattering in its significance. Alas, no ID-pusher has yet succeeded in providing any reason for any non-ID-pusher to accept that the aforementioned assertion is true.
Dembski’s Explanatory Filter? No, because this Filter must necessarily yield a false result of “yep, it’s Designed” when it is applied to any entity which has a non-Design origin which the Filter-applying investigator is not aware of. This means the Explanatory Filter is not a gauge of anything but the ignorance of the Filter-applying investigator.
Dembski’s concept of Complex Specified Information? No, because Dembski’s CSI is ill-defined to the point of incoherence, as a result of which it cannot be rigorously applied.
Apart from the unrelieved impotence of any and all pro-ID rationalizations yet provided by ID-pushers, there’s also the historical evidence that ID is a wholly-owned subsidiary of good old Creationism. Since Creationism is, itself, completely sterile from a scientific point of view, it makes perfect sense that Creationism’s illegitimate child, ID, would share its parent’s absolute scientific sterility.
I do not expect that Mung will ever address the above points, seeing as how he consistently pretends that lowercase-id (the kind that’s used by real scientists) is the same thing as uppercase-ID (the kind that’s used only by ID-pushing crypto-Creationists), but if he did address said points, that would be very interesting indeed…
“Real scientists can and do detect design.”
Really?
Is it only “real scientists” who are capable of detecting design?
How do they do it?
“The way real scientists detect design involves forming a hypothesis of how the putatively-designed whatzit was manufactured, and then testing that hypothesis.”
Really?
Why formulate a hypothesis about how some thing was manufactured if there’s no reason to think the putatively-designed whatzit was manufactured?
“I do not expect that Mung will ever address the above points…”
Wrong yet again.
And you’ve already been quotemined by Mung on UD
Elizabeth:
“We can argue about the reasonableness of my priors, but it’s clear that a design inference is perfectly possible and can be perfectly valid.”
As science? So you’re willing to go beyond Todd Wood’s version of faith-based ID?
It probably wont. But its telling they’re not exploring it.
Richardthughes on April 7, 2013 at 2:58 am said:
And you’ve already been quotemined by Mung on UD
Yup. I quoted Elizabeth as saying:
“We can argue about the reasonableness of my priors, but it’s clear that a design inference is perfectly possible and can be perfectly valid.”
And I provided a link back to where she said it so people can validate the context.
whine more
I don’t think you conveyed the full sentiment of the post, Mung. Obviously you can pick your own ethical bar, I’m simply noting that you quotemined. Thanks.
I agree with Richard. Here’s more of the context:
WIthout including at least the priors that Lizzie specified, your excerpt qualifies as a quotemine.
Anyone interested in a rational discussion with the goals of achieving a better understanding of the truth and presenting one’s opponents position fairly would not remove so much context.
Yes, really.
No. Anyone, be they a real scientist or otherwise, who actually has a design-detection methodology which genuinely is capable of detecting design, may of course use their design-detection methodology to, like, detect design.
Yes, really.
Show me a Thing X that was Designed, and I’ll show you a Thing X that was Manufactured. So if a person has reason to think that Thing X was designed, that person necessarily has reason to think that Thing X was manufactured. Because if Thing X wasn’t manufactured, Thing X wouldn’t even be there in the first place.
If you disagree, I invite you to provide examples of designed Thing X’s that were not manufactured. Be interesting to see whether you point to stuff like, say, blueprints of machines that were never built.
Patrick,
Is that a sock puppet?
Or was MathGrrl a sock puppet?
http://www.softwarematters.org/mathgrrl.html
Richardthughes:
“I don’t think you conveyed the full sentiment of the post, Mung. Obviously you can pick your own ethical bar, I’m simply noting that you quotemined.”
Ethics? lol. @TSZ? Are you kidding?
You accused me of quote mining. You didn’t post the quote. You did not say how the alleged quote constituted a case of quote mining.
My ethics? Whine Less.
Patrick:
“Anyone interested in a rational discussion with the goals of achieving a better understanding of the truth and presenting one’s opponents position fairly would not remove so much context.”
I just have to post this over at UD.
You did quotemine, Mung, which is a shame because IDists hurt themselves when they do this – and they do this often. If you’re confused how you changed the meaning, please refer to Patrick’s comment above. I’m sure you’re eager to not be portrayed as a person who scours text for snippets that could be construed as pro ID (or more usually anti-evolution).
Of course – please do, because we can’t. Mass bannings, moderation and loyalty tests, don’tchaknow…
Editz 4 spellz
“I just have to post this over at UD.”
Please do. There seem to be a number of people there who are quite fond of the Christian scriptures but who are strangely unaware of the proscription against bearing false witness. Quotemining certainly falls within that unethical domain.
You’re embarrassing yourself.
Strongly disagreed. In fact, I think you have it completely backwards.
I’ve seen I.D. proponents frequently mentioning areas of so-called “mainstream” science in which various forms of design detection are applied; archaeology, SETI, forensics, etc.
Their problem isn’t that they feel as though “mainstream” science doesn’t deal in detecting design, as you claim. They know that they do, and they frequently cite those areas as evidence that design detection can be, and often is, a valid concept.
Their problem is that “mainstream” science is very selective with regards to the areas in which they’re willing to employ design detection.
Design detection is open game for any branch of inquiry… except for biology, and, to a lesser extent, cosmology. When applied to either of these areas, it goes from being something that’s considered valid, to being looked at as the single worst idea in the history of humanity, a huge threat to not just all of science, but to the entire universe, and a force of evil that must be stopped at all costs.
It’s absurd.
Not only is it a form of hypocrisy, but it’s a hypocrisy that’s justified by pleading to some of the most asinine exaggerations and scare tactics I’ve ever seen.
For a true skeptic, like myself, this throws up enormous red flags, and leads to two questions:
(i) What is it about biology and cosmology that not make these two areas off limits to design detection?
(ii) Why is there such an extraordinary sense of hostility towards the mere notion of employing design detection in either area?
I’ve heard what seems like a billion-and-one answers to both questions — “I.D. is a science stopper!,” and of course the legendary, “CREATIONISM!,” for example — yet I’m certain they’ve all been cheap coverups for the real answer.
We all know what that is. 😉
Well, I approved your comment, JJ. I thought Mung was hostile to a potentially fruitful avenue for ID. Why would he do that?
Can true skeptics (c), like you, also be Scotsman?
Do you think timescale and availability of designers might be an issue for design detection in biology and cosmology, JJ?
Why would I do that? I don’t fancy investing effort in posts that may never be displayed in that highly moderated venue, when all can speak freely (except for porn posting Joe G) here.
The need for moderation / message control or not tells its own story though, eh?
Sure; it’s unreasonable to plead to an explanation which is nonexistent. Translation: You can’t have intelligent design without an intelligent designer.
I completely understand your argument. I just think it sucks.
My counterargument is that the argument for design, as so eloquently explicated by many I.D. proponents, is significantly stronger than your argument that a designing intelligence could not have existed prior to Earth-based life, thus, I side with I.D.
Their reasoning and evidence trumps your reasoning and evidence.
To be blunt, I find your position irrational, and I’ll tell you why.
Your position requires that nature, in itself, be capable of producing advanced intelligence, like human beings, while simultaneously requiring that no such intelligence could have existed prior to that which exists on Earth.
See the problem? If nature is capable of producing advanced intelligence, then that undercuts the premise that no advanced intelligence could have existed prior to that were familiar with on Earth.
Now, your predictable follow-up will be that if nature, in itself, is capable of creating life, then I.D. becomes superfluous. I disagree. If nature is capable of creating intelligence (you say it is), and this intelligence is capable of bioengineering, then we must be open to the possibly that any life we discover anywhere throughout the cosmos is a product of that intelligence, including ourselves. Yet you’re completely hostile to that possibility. How strange.
To develop this idea further, here’s a quick thought experiment:
Let’s say the our own bioengineers create life, and we seed that life on five other planets throughout our solar system. That would mean that of the six planets we known which contain life, five of them would be known to be the result of intelligent design.
Do you see where I’m going with this? All if takes is one sufficiently advanced intelligence, anywhere throughout the cosmos or beyond, to create life and to seed it elsewhere. And, if that created life is designed to developed advanced intelligence, the process will grow, exponentially.
If life forming naturally is a relatively rare event, then this intelligently-designed life will quickly overtake abiogenesis as the most prevalent cause for life throughout the cosmos.
In short: Not even abiogenesis-supporting atheists have a reasonable excuse for dismissing I.D., a priori, and yet, from my experiences, most of them do.
Of course, these are the same people who often reject the basic laws of logic, and claim to be free thinkers while simultaneously denying free will. I think it’s safe to say that logic isn’t their strong suit. 😀
Richardthughes,
You’re right, the need for moderation does tell its own story, it’s just not the story you think it is. The story it tells is that design-deniers tend to be vile trolls, and giving them free reign on a blog like Uncommon Descent is a recipe for disaster.
Go to the comments section of any I.D. article posted across the Internet. See how uncivil the design-deniers tend to be. U.D.’s moderation policy helps keep that nonsense under wraps, and, as a frequent reader, I thank them for it. Quite frankly, I shudder to think of how many vitriol-spewing, foul-language-filled comments U.D. moderators must delete every week.
As we know, everyone who proves themselves to be respectful will have their comments approved. If a low percentage of comments are being approved, then that can only mean a low percentage of commentators are being respectful.
That doesn’t surprise me. Mung often doesn’t even bother to quotemine, he just makes shit up, like his claim that I think that skepticism must start from ignorance, or some such (I can’t be bothered to check it, I’ve already told Mung that it does not represent my view).
Naah. Real scientists are perfectly willing to apply design-detection methodologies, of whatever kind, to pretty much any field. The catch is, real scientists want to employ real design-detection methodologies which actually do detect design, as opposed to… oh… bogus crap which is falsely presented as if it actually were a genuine design-detection methodology. And thus far, every putative design-detection methodology which has yet been promulgated by the people who push uppercase-ID, has turned out to fall in the “bogus crap misrepresented as valid” category, not the “valid ‘coz it does what it says on the tin” category.
I’m sure you disagree with the paragraph just previous, Jared. Not a problem. Can you cite any counterexamples? Just one little design-detection methodology that comes from the uppercase-ID movement, and has been demonstrated to work?
And meteorology. We don’t seem to have any design inferences for hurricanes or thunderstorms, for instance.
Oh, and subatomic physics. Is anybody pining away for the opportunity to invoke a Designer as part of their explanation for electron flow? No, there isn’t any such person. Funny, that.
You forgot meteorology and subatomic physics!
There isn’t any such hostility. Now, there is hostility towards bogus claims of employing design-detection, but this hostility (a) seems to be equally directed to all such bogus claims, regardless of which specific field the bogus claim lies in, and (b) would seem to be eminently merited. I mean, why shouldn’t real scientists’ response to bogus claims be a very hostile response indeed? Do you think real scientists are somehow under an obligation to make nice with bogus claims, and/or the people who promote said bogus claims? More generally, why shouldn’t real scientists react with hostility towards liars and deceivers?
Given that uppercase-ID postulates a wholly unconstrained Designer of wholly unconstrained capabilities, yeah, uppercase-ID is a science-stopper. Once you’ve invoked ID’s wholly unconstrained Designer, where do you go from there? Answer: You don’t. Because you can’t make any further progress in understanding a process, after you’ve said “
GodThe Designer did it”.As for “CREATIONISM”, well, uppercase-ID is a wholly-owned subsidiary of good old Creationism. See also: the Wedge Document, and “cdesign proponentsists”. Game over, man.
So detect it, already! If you can come up with a methodology and convince the skeptics, you can dance around and thumb your nose to your heart’s content. But people doubt it can be done, and they have sound reasons for thinking that it can’t be done. So when other people insist, with varying degrees of belligerence, that their own viewpoint WILL prevail [Kuhn! Kuhn!], and the consensus doesn’t know squat, but then do nothing to provide anything remotely rigorous in support of that view, yes, they get hostility. “Design detection” in biology does not have to be pseudoscience, but as practiced, it is.
Nature cannot create intelligence (because … well, it just can’t), but intelligence can just, somehow … exist (because … well, it just can). While you may be far and away the superior logician (after all, all philosophers either agree with you & WJM etc or they are incapable of thinking straight 🙂 ), it is not a position with the killer appeal you seem to think it possesses.
Welcome to TSZ, Jared, and thanks for coming over.
Yes, indeed, which makes the accusations even odder! I just haven’t seen anyone deny that it is possible to infer an intelligent origin from a pattern of data, so when people say that scientists rule out intelligent causation a priori, this simply isn’t true. But we seem to agree on this, so, cool.
OK, that’s clear, thanks.
Well, I don’t think so, and it’s certainly not my view. But nor do I think the design inference from biology (or even from “fine tuning” is valid). Not because ti’s a threat to science, but because it is fallacious.
Well, I’ve seen much to object to on both sides of the argument, frankly, That’s why I set up this place. It’s true that each side feels deeply misunderstood by the other, and it’s almost certainly true that the complaints on both sides are justified. That’s why the stated goal of this site is to try to drill down below the prejudice and hypocrisy (whether perceived or real) and discover, like adults, about where we really differ. That is why I encourage people of all views to post here, and will not ban anyone for a dissenting view. Or for much else, in fact, although I and the other admins will try to implement our editing principles in order to try to keep discussions reasonably disinterested and on track.
I think those are two very excellent questions. Would you like to turn them into a post – two posts, in fact? I have given you posting permissions so that you can do so. if you would like. But a quick response to each here:
(i) What is it about biology and cosmology that not make these two areas off limits to design detection?
I don’t think the same answer applies to both domains. Regarding biology, I don’t think it’s off-limits at all, and, indeed, we know that already there are organisms in existence in which designers have had a hand – by breeding or by direct genetic engineering, and will be possible for future biologists, long after we are forgotten, perhaps when humans are extinct, and molluscs have taken over as the most sentient species, to figure out just what effect human farming practice had on allele distributions, and indeed, what role genetic engineering played in the lineages of organisms. For sure, genetic engineering will have to be taken into account when considering the genetic phylogeny, as it is a vector for horizontal gene transfer.
And it is perfectly possible (although I don’t think the evidence supports it) that life on earth was the result of seeding by an intelligent alien, or genetic engineering in the pre-cambrian by an intelligent alien, and there are various approaches that might enable us to test that hypothesis against the hypothesis that life on earth spontaneously emerged from non-self-replicating molecules, and/or radiated spectacularly by evolutionary processes during the Cambrian. As I say, I don’t any reason to posit such a hypothesis, but it wouldn’t be off-limits, in my view.
As far as the cosmos goes, I think the problem is quite different, because we cannot use pattern-detection methods to detect a designed pattern if we have only one exemplar. It would be like trying to discover whether a man was murdered or died naturally with only one dead man in the entire universe to consider.
(ii) Why is there such an extraordinary sense of hostility towards the mere notion of employing design detection in either area?
I don’t know, but I think there is great fear on both sides of the divide, and I think the hostility you are aware of on the side of anti-IDists is echoed really very symmetrically by the hostility I am aware of on the side of ID proponents. There is a real fear of theocracy on the one side, and a real fear of amorality on the other. And I do think that raises the stakes in ways that are profoundly unhelpful. Hence this site.
I think that in certain quarters (and “cdesign proponentsists” didn’t help) there has been a real fear, and a justified fear, that Intelligent Design was just a mask for introducing religion into US education. Interestingly, I’d say that the debate is much less acromonious over here, in the UK, where, ironically, religious education is compulsory, not proscribed, and nobody suspects anyone of smuggling it in. I also think that in certain quarters there is a real fear (made explicit, frequently, at UD ) that if evolution is thought to be true, we will have no basis for morality, and Anything Will Go.
And in that atmosphere, the clear religious implications of a Design Inference in the absence of any evidence for a material designer, looks like an attempt to prove God (no matter how much IDers claim it is just about Design, and the Design could be an Alien), which in itself, would be fine, were it not for the fact that those of us who think ID is flawed do so not because we are hostile to the idea of a divine designer (I am not) but because we think it is self-evidently fallacious. In other words, for me, at least, the issue of whether the world was intended by an Intelligent Creator is completely orthogonal to the issue of whether we can infer that from the world itself. And my own “hostility” to ID (and I wouldn’t really characterise it as such) because that for me it is a fallacious inference, and yet, when I try to point out the fallacy, I am accused of being a “materialist” with an a priori bias against intelligent, or divine, causation.
I don’t think they are cheap cover-ups, but I do think they are superficial. I don’t think ID, in principle, is a science stopper, but I do think that some of the reasoning is tantamount to stopping science when we reach a null result, and instead of concluding “we don’t know the answer to this yet, let’s keep going”, concluding “Design”. And the Pandas episode really did look like someone was trying to pass off Creationism as something else with a different name. Its definition of Intelligent Design certainly did not resemble the one given at UD.
Guys, can you move the meta discussion to the sandbox? Some posts need moving, but I’ve got to go out.