The standard design-theorist argument hinges on the assumption that there are three logically distinct kinds of explanation: chance, necessity, and design. (I say “explanation” rather than “cause” in order to avoid certain kinds of ambiguities we’ve seen worked out here in the past two weeks).
This basic idea — that there are these three logically distinct kinds of explanation — was first worked on by Plato, and from Plato it was transmitted to the Stoics (one can see the Stoics use this argument in their criticism of the Epicureans) and then it gets re-activated in the 18th-centuries following, such as in the Christian Stoicism of the Scottish and English Enlightenment, of which William Paley is a late representative. Henceforth I’ll call this distinction “the Platonic Trichotomy”
There are at least two different ways of criticizing the Platonic Trichotomy. One approach, much-favored by ultra-Darwinists, is to argue that unplanned heritable variation (“chance”) and natural selection (“necessity,” if natural selection is a “law” in the first place) together can produce the appearance of design. (Jacques Monod is a proponent of this view, and perhaps Dawkins is today.) The other approach, which I prefer, is to reject the entire Trichotomy.
To reject the Trichotomy is not to reject the idea that speciation is largely explained in terms of the feedback between variation and selection, but rather to reject the idea that this process is best conceptualized in terms of “chance” and “necessity.”
So what’s the alternative? What we would need here is a new concept of nature that is not beholden to any of the positions made possible with respect to the conceptual straitjacket imposed by the Trichotomy.
This doesn’t respond to OM’s question as both the tailor and the chef are “in nature” throughout the analogies. Or, if they are not at some point, that point is not defined as I see it. So what is “outside nature”; what does that mean. And, if something can be defined as “outside nature”, how can it then interact with something “inside nature”?
In order to tackle the question, one must first define nature in such a way that one can then conceptualize and define “not nature”. Thus far I’ve not encountered anyone that can do so without question begging.
One way to do that is to accept the Platonic Trichotomy:
(1) the category of agency is logically distinct from the categories of chance and necessity;
(2) therefore, agency cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, chance and necessity;
(3) all descriptions and explanations of nature are exhausted by chance and necessity;
(4) so agency must be explained in terms of something non-natural.
I think that (1) and (3) are highly controversial premises, and in particular it’s (3) that I’m most concerned to argue against. (I would accept a modified version of (1).) The design argument is question-begging insofar as it assumes (3) and doesn’t argue for it — or, to put it another way, the design argument assumes a disenchanted conception of nature.
Feynman explains well why defining a force through Newton’s second law makes no sense:
If we define a force in a way independent of Newton’s second law then the second law can be used to deduce something interesting. For instance, if we have figured out, by some other means, that a spring stretched to such-and-such length generates a force of 5 newtons then we know that an object of mass 1 kilogram will accelerate at 5 m/s^2 if attached to the spring.
This alternative definition need not be based on Hamiltonians and Lagrangians. One can go about it in a phenomenological way. One may start with a standard of force, 1 newton, as a reference spring stretched to an agreed-upon length.
We can determine whether an unknown force equals 1 newton by applying it and the reference spring so that they pull an object in opposite directions. If the object does not accelerate then the net force is zero, which means that the unknown force is equal in strength to the standard. Note that this way of comparing forces relies on Newton’s first law and is thus independent of the second law.
We can also add forces by combining two or more standard springs in parallel. This allows us to standardize forces of any integer number of units. Fractions can be generated, too. We make two identical stretched springs whose combined force is 1 newton. Then each of the new springs generates a force of 1/2 newton. And so on.
Again, the point is that Newton’s second law does not define what a force is. It uses an independently defined notion of force to predict the acceleration of an object.
Potential energy, likewise, is not defined through Newton’s second law. One looks at the work done by a force in moving an object from point A to point B. If the amount of work (integral of force over distance) is independent of the path and only dependent on the initial and starting points then we declare that the work equals the difference U_A−U_B, where U_A is the potential energy at point A. This definition does not rely on Newton’s second law, provided that the force is defined independently of the second law. Conservation of total energy (kinetic + potential) is derived from the second law, but potential energy must first be defined independently.
I would recommend going back to some of the curriculum modifications of the 1960s and 70s. Back then, there was PSSC Physics, and Harvard Project Physics. The ideas used in these courses may have gone a bit overboard or were a bit pedantic, but they did result in many improvements in the introductory physic course.
Both of these emphasized measurement; but Harvard Project Physics delved more into history, philosophy, and operational definitions.
The existence of a force comes from the observation of the movement of an object that has mass. Aristotle believed motion stopped when the forces were removed; and that observation was only approximately right. If we were creatures who lived in a low Reynolds number environment, that is what we would conclude.
We have since learned that the existence of a force – more correctly, an unbalanced force – is betrayed by the observation of the acceleration of a massive body. Accelerations and mass are further observable as operational definitions of time and distance and operational definitions of mass by means of using a balance and an agreed standard mass or “weight.”
So, ultimately force is operationally defined. The problem with putting all this into an introductory high school or college course became a matter of excessive pedantry; so a pedagogical compromise has gradually been achieved that uses less detailed “pedantry” and makes use of data loggers connected to graphing calculators and computers to get the concepts across.
Forces are now measured either by measurable spring extensions or by the voltage output of a piezoelectric transducer. Those are perfectly good operational definitions; but they can be traced back to even more basic operational methods.
Blas,
What should she apologize for?
Barry wrote:
Lizzie replied:
You are missing the point, I think. Defining force through potential field just postpones the problem, because the relationship between force and potential is purely analytical – it does not express anything physical (well, except for the fact that the force in this case must be conservative).
Physical relations are given by constitutive equations, such as Hooke’s Law. They can be written in terms of forces, or stresses, or potentials (in the special case of potential forces), or whatever other ontology your theory employs.
Mike Elzinga,
Forces are measurable by way of other measurables + theory, but the same can be said about anything else for which there is a theoretical account.
That passage does the opposite, SophistiCat: it defines potential energy in terms of force. Which, in turn, was defined independently from Newton’s second law. Reread my comment.
Recently, Gregory challenged me on my use of “design-theoretic argument” in setting up what I call “the Platonic Trichotomy”. I used this phrase because I wanted to capture at once two (slightly?) different things:
(I) the design argument, as a line of thought that begins in Plato (or perhaps Socrates?) and continues through the Stoics, medieval philosophy (it is one of Aquinas’ “Five Ways”), and into the Enlightenment and beyond;
(II) what is called today “design theory”, with Dembski and Behe as the major proponents. As most here realize, it is has been one of my principle contentions that design theory does not really deserve to be called a “theory” because it is untestable — I use the term “design theory” as an honorific. It is best seen as the design argument dressed up in scientific drag.
Of crucial importance here is the difference between an argument and an explanation. An argument purports to establish that something is the case; an explanation purports to show how something is the case. What gets called “design theory” (“the theory of intelligent design,” “intelligent design theory”) doesn’t count as a theory because it doesn’t explain anything; it works as an argument against the sufficiency of other explanations, not by explaining anything in its own right.
Personal anecdote: many years ago, I saw a talk advertised as “science stumbles on design”. It turned out to be about “intelligent design”, which intrigues me. But I didn’t attend, because I didn’t know what “design” meant in this context, and I assumed it was about the science of interior decorating!
Too funny. There’s got to be a way to compress that anecdote into a snappy term for the Interior-Decorator-didit crowd.
hotshoe,
Clearly it’s my a priori dogmatic commitment to materialistic atheism which explains why I have a hard time seeing how the unity of utility and beauty at work in cellular metabolism is really all that similar to the unity of utility and beauty at work in a customized kitchen.
That may be the way that we do it now; but historically, the notion of a force originated in the sensations humans felt as they pushed and pulled things. Those sensations were later “quantified” by the deflection of something like a spring.
Thus, a given compression or extension of a spring – measured as a length but “calibrated” to read a “force” – became an operational procedure for “measuring” a force.
You will find in history similar operational definitions for other phenomena. For example, the notion of temperature emerged out of the measurement of “degrees of heat.” The earliest definitions were crude in that they related the “in-your-faceness” of heat, if you like, by comparisons with other phenomena, such as when wax melted, or when iron turned red, or a human body. Even Isaac Newton used such references.
However, Galileo was already using the expansion of wine in a glass tube as a measurement of “degrees of heat.” Later, experimentalists, not using the word “temperature,” referred to the intensity of heat as the “number of degrees of heat on Mr. Fahrenheit’s thermometer.” The word “thermometer” referred to a device that measured degrees of heat.
The evolution of operational definitions is a fascinating history; and the integration of those definitions with a theory emerged as a gradual trend. So, in the context of Newton’s theories, forces are betrayed by accelerations because we have a theory that connects them. That definition replaced the compressions or extensions of springs as a measurement.
In thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, temperature is now defined in terms of how entropy changes with energy; however, empirical temperature is defined by a number of different empirical links to measurable quantities.
The connections between empirical temperature and the thermodynamic definition of temperature are based on our understanding of the construction and behavior of matter containing different amounts of internal energy.
I am not going to get into the Platonic Trichotomy, or any philosophy. But (unless someone above has already mentioned it) I think there is one more reason that opponents of evolutionary biology want to talk of evolutionary mechanisms as being basically Chance.
And that is a matter of pure propaganda. Creationist debaters like to tell their followers that evolution is a theory in which everything in biology, and particular all the amazing adaptations, are “pure chance”. This of course is a totally misleading argument — it in ignores the directionality of the response to natural selection, which is generally toward adaptation. A listener will of course immediately dismiss this theory of biologists as totally misleading — how could “pure chance” be responsible for birds flying or fish swimming? So getting biological processes labeled as Chance serves the purposes of totally misleading the audience.
From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it does not matter whether or not we describe some process as Chance. We are probably best off using words like “stochastic process” or “modeled by random processes” for the random parts of evolution, and for the effects of natural selection we should hammer home that it changes phenotypes and genotypes in a direction that is highly correlated with the direction that leads to higher fitnesses. That in that sense it is very far from being a model of remarkable adaptations arising by, say, mutations whose occurrence is uncorrelated with whether they change the phenotype in the direction of higher fitness. We have to make this point because creationist debaters are doing their best to confuse their listeners on this.
And any “ID theorist” who denies that they are talking about creationism has a lot of explaining to do if they insist on perpetuating this confusion.
I have never understood why TSZ commenters jumps in in defense of Lizzie. Specially when they jump in quoting Lizzie, that usually eat the cake and claim to have it.
I agree, she was discussing with BA about what a null hypothesis is. But the big claim here is :
“So can we please jettison this canard that “Darwinists” propose chance either as as an explanation for the complexity of life” Lizzie´s words.
That is the same point Mk Elzinga is doing over here, trying to convert a metaphysycal argument in a scientific one.
KN, the only one familiar here with metaphysics, realized the problem and brought in the “Platonic Trichotomy”.
And the true is that unless you wait for the “in between” solution of KN you have to choose one of the options of the trichotomy. Usually darwinits choose chance as a cause as you can see in the examples of Monod or Gould I cited. Lizzie is wrong denying it.
The Platonic Trichotomy was introduced in order to illuminate just why it is that critics of evolutionary theory persistently fail to understand it. It isn’t that Darwinism is committed to the Trichotomy, but that critics of Darwinism are committed to it, and that it why they insist on this whole “chance and necessity” business. It is true that Monod is committed to it, and perhaps other Darwinists (e.g. Dawkins), but that is a metaphysical commitment entirely separable from ones acceptance of evolutionary theory — as indicated by the history of non-Epicurean naturalists, esp. those in the Aristotelian, Thomistic, and Romantic traditions.
In other words: naturalism does not entail materialism and naturalists need not be committed to materialism. So Murray et al. are just mistaken when they accuse naturalists of having inherited the contradictions of Epicurean metaphysics.
The very most that Murray et al. are entitled to is to say that non-Epicurean or non-materialist naturalists have not done the hard work necessary to articulate the conception of nature that they presuppose. And this is certainly correct in one sense and incorrect in another. Practicing scientists are simply too busy actually doing science to worry about the underlying metaphysics of nature that their work presupposes. There is a long and fascinating legacy of speculative philosophy of nature through the 18th through 21st centuries that does develop a non-materialist, non-Epicurean, non-disenchanted conception of nature. That’s precisely what I’ve been talking about here for the past few months.
The problems I’m pursuing here can be developed along a slightly different line of thought that begins with the question: why does the theistic opponents of naturalism and evolution (TONE) misunderstand what naturalism is and is not committed to?
The answer is that TONEs assume what’s called a bifurcated model of reality. (The historical roots of the bifurcation are fascinating but tangential to what I’m doing here.)
On the bifurcated model of reality, reality comes in two distinct categories. One category, which we call “spirit”, is the domain of rationality, consciousness, agency, value, purpose, intentionality, final causes, subjectivity, and normativity. The other category, which we call “matter,” is the domain of spatially and temporally located particular objects obeying laws (or law-like generalizations) about efficient causal relations between the particulars. Nothing that belongs to spirit is essential to matter, and nothing essential to matter belongs to spirit. Certain kinds of things — paradigmatically, living human beings — are mixtures of the two domains. On some versions of the bifurcated model, this is extended to living things as such — e.g. “life as ensouled matter”, which is central to Thomism.
Now, if one accepts the bifurcated model of realty to begin with, and then denies the reality of one of those domains, then what’s left over is not able to explain what’s explained by other domain.
TONEs therefore think of “materialism” as completely unable to explain rationality, consciousness, agency, value, purpose, intentionality, final causes, subjectivity, and normativity — all the phenomena that, for them, are on the other side of the bifurcation. And that is why TONEs think that naturalists are irrational for accepting some or all of those phenomena.
On the other hand, however, it is also true that naturalists have not done a great job of presenting a conception of nature that doesn’t rely on the bifurcation model of reality to begin with. There is a huge body of philosophy, art, literature, and science that does exactly that, but it hasn’t trickled down to the level of pop-culture at which the squabbles between naturalists and TONEs are conducted.
And this is a real problem. If I had to identify an accessible, non-technical writer who clearly expresses the Romantic, non-bifurcated, non-disenchanted conception of nature, I’m not sure who I would refer to. The best I can think of would be Stephen Talbott, and maybe David Abram.
I don’t know where else the spirit of Goethe, Coleridge, Emerson, Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty has received popular expression.
KN, this is a case where philosophy is the enemy of reason.
If you would take the trouble to write a simply toy GA, you could test different sources of variation, and you would find that it matters not a whit whether variation is truly random, pseudo- random, or whatever, so long as no particular mutation occurs statistically more frequently than any other. The whole chance thing is a diversion, not unlike a stage magician’s patter, which distracts you from what is going on.
ETA:
It doesn’t matter whether God makes the variations. It just doesn’t matter. The system simply doesn’t require any particular kind or source of variation.
petrushka,
Isn’t it perfectly obvious that I agree with you? I mean, how hard is it for you to realize that I’m explicating the point of view of design theorists in order to criticize it? A little reading comprehension would go a long way here.
If you had said that the entire intelligent design movement is a case where reason is the enemy of evidence, I’d be inclined to agree.