ID is based on three premises and the inference that follows (DeWolf et al., Darwinism, Design and Public Education, pg. 92):
1) High information content (or specified complexity) and irreducible complexity constitute strong indicators or hallmarks of (past) intelligent design.
2) Biological systems have a high information content (or specified complexity) and utilize subsystems that manifest irreducible complexity.
3) Naturalistic mechanisms or undirected causes do not suffice to explain the origin of information (specified complexity) or irreducible complexity.
4) Therefore, intelligent design constitutes the best explanations for the origin of information and irreducible complexity in biological systems.
So to falsify ID all you have to do is show that undirected causes such as natural selection and drift can produce CSI and/ or IC.
The positive case can be simplified by:
Our ability to be confident of the design of the cilium or intracellular transport rests on the same principles to be confident of the design of anything: theordering of separate components to achieve an identifiable function that depends sharply on the components.- Behe in “Darwin’s Black Box”
” Might there be some as-yet-undiscovered natural process that would explain biochemical complexity? No one would be foolish enough to categorically deny the possibility. Nonetheless, we can say that if there is such a process, no one has a clue how it would work. Further, it would go against all human experience, like postulating that a natural process might explain computers.” Ibid
The positive case for ID is very similar to the positive case for archaeology and forensic science- we look for signs of work and/ or counterflow.
Dr Behe responds to some critics:
Now, one can’t have it both ways. One can’t say both that ID is unfalsifiable (or untestable) and that there is evidence against it. Either it is unfalsifiable and floats serenely beyond experimental reproach, or it can be criticized on the basis of our observations and is therefore testable. The fact that critical reviewers advance scientific arguments against ID (whether successfully or not) shows that intelligent design is indeed falsifiable.
In fact, my argument for intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal. Here is a thought experiment that makes the point clear. In Darwin’s Black Box (Behe 1996) I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can’t be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process. To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a flagellum–or any equally complex system–was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven.(1)
How about Professor Coyne’s concern that, if one system were shown to be the result of natural selection, proponents of ID could just claim that some other system was designed? I think the objection has little force. If natural selection were shown to be capable of producing a system of a certain degree of complexity, then the assumption would be that it could produce any other system of an equal or lesser degree of complexity. If Coyne demonstrated that the flagellum (which requires approximately forty gene products) could be produced by selection, I would be rather foolish to then assert that the blood clotting system (which consists of about twenty proteins) required intelligent design.
Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes?
Even the explanatory filter demands a positive case for ID- one of specification on top of the elimination of necessity and chance. And the elimination of necessity and chance before considering a design inference is mandated by science- see Newton’s four rules of scientific reasoning.
“Thus, Behe concludes on the basis of our knowledge of present cause-and-effect relationships (in accord with the standard uniformitarian method employed in the historical sciences) that the molecular machines and complex systems we observe in cells can be best explained as the result of an intelligent cause.
In brief, molecular motors appear designed because they were designed” Pg. 72 of Darwinism, Design and Public Education
Cause and effect relationships-> science 101.
Frankie,
It’s round for a start.
Allan Miller,
Why is the demand for evidence of a designers methods more rigorous than what the evolutionist is expected to give?
phoodoo,
I’m looking for a reason to agree that Design was involved. You dismiss evolution because of the lack of a step by step audit. I could dismiss Design on the same grounds. Where does that leave us? How is the flagellum a positive argument for ID, if ‘no detailed audit’ is the means by which a hypothesis can be dismissed?
Anyone who rejects the explanation “evolution did it” on the grounds that that explanation isn’t detailed enough, really ought to also reject “the Designer did it” on exactly the grounds that that design isn’t specific enough. Of course, people who think “the Designer did it” is an adequate explanation are rarely bothered by inconsistencies like that when it’s them being inconsistent.
Clearly that isn’t actually correct.
You might think this doesn’t have enough level of detail for you, but it’s significantly above zero.
So the goalposts have in fact moved.
You can start by actually matching the level of detail supplied by Matzke. Impress me.
There is an entire list in “The Privileged Planet”
No, why would it?
Whatever, Joe. You don’t have anything anyway. If you did it would be in peer-review
I told you how to test ID, Alan. Just because you can hand-wave it away doesn’t mean anything.
Try leading by example.
Frankie,
I shall waste no time in reading it. How many books get published on planets that cannot support life? If Life is rare, the places it occurs are bound to look ‘privileged’ even if they aren’t.
I told you how to falsify ID. Obviously you have other issues.
Is that supposed to be some sort of refutation?
I told you what “entail” means. Obviously you also have other issues.
Matzke hasn’t provided anything but imagination and hope.
AGAIN- evolutionism is the position tat says it has a step-by-step, ie detailed, process for producing the diversity of life. ID doesn’t make such a claim. ID claims to have a step-by-step process for determining design exists and we have shared that.
Kimura was more subdued about the implications of his theory, and Nei and Lynch and others realized the significance of what Kimura discovered.
Evolution would be mostly random except for really lethal traits. Neutrality is in abundance especially in small populations, and small populations are often the case if there isn’t a lot of stirring (or no stirring) due to geographic isolation. If the S-coefficients for traits are less than 1/4 Ne, Ohta showed you approximately model the traits as neutral.
There is good reason Larry Moran and I often have strained agreement on the lack of selection on most of the genome.
And as I’ve suggested, the genome might only be a fraction of the information processing and storage in a cell, for multi cellular Eukaryotes especially, the Glycome might hold equal if not greater weight than the genome, and the Glycome, if it is as highly redundant as I suspect, may not be very evolvable except when the blueprints for the proteins in the DNA get changed — but the Glycome may hold the developmental mechanism, the post-translational information that doesn’t reside in the DNA.
What’s wrong with saying, “we don’t know for sure, but we believe….”. I don’t know for sure, but I believe CLOCK didn’t evolve, but God did it because chance and Darwinian selection don’t seem adequate to solve the problem of Payley’s watches in biology. Blindwathmakers don’t seem equal to the task of making CLOCK or even more complex well-timed, well-orchestrated systems.
I think Payley had a powerful argument. Darwin framed his case agaist Payley’s watch, but I think Kimura unwittingly helped Payley.
You might of course be right in the end, but there is the notion of due process in demonstrating a claim. I don’t think much of evolutionary theory has followed due process relative to theories (albeit approximate ones) like Celestial Mechanics or Geometric Optics.
I’ve said there is no positive case for ID because of lack of direct observation. I think, at least with respect to the major claims of Eukaryotic evolution, multicellular animal evolution, there is no positive case for UCA either — it’s all circumstantial.
Frankie,
Pretty much. Some fuckwit draws a circle where the arrow landed and claims that it landed in a ‘privileged’ position. It is a bogus argument at its root, so doesn’t require detailed point-by-point refutation.
Of course the conditions on this planet are benign for life. That’s why we observe it. It does not require that some intelligence made then so – put the moon just there, and Jupiter just there. All the places whose detailed alignments weren’t right for life have no life. Duh.
Sal, you don’t know what you are talking about. By your “logic” there can be no positive case for anything. Your “positive case” = absolute proof and science doesn’t deal with that.
WTF?
My argument was published in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education in 2007. And your argument was published … where?
Anyway, you have confirmed that, when you say that when you say that starting with a genome is “starting with the very thing that needs to be explained”, that your argument is that all the Specified Complexity is present from the beginning in the first genome. An extreme front-loading argument.
And that means that you have no argument that later natural selection is somehow unable to put information that codes for adaptations into the genome.
Unfortunately for you that is not what happened. And all you have to explain the earth and all the factors required to sustain life is “it just happened, dude”- untestable and not science.
And all you have is sheer dumb luck to explain it all.
Joe Felsenstein,
You don’t have an argument that shows natural selection can produce SC even starting with SC. I read what you published on NCSE and it totally misses the point. It’s as if you didn’t read Dembski and just made it all up.
Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes?
Still waiting, Joe.
Darwin said:
That is the SAME TYPE of falsification that ID offers. So thank you, evolutionists, for showing your hypocrisy. Unfortunately Darwin never said how to test the concept that his proposed mechanism could produce any complex organ
Frankie,
The way to settle this is to ask people what “positive case” means to them. If the majority agree with the way I defined “positive case” then you’re just using your own definitions to suit your arguments. Thus your usage of “positive case” doesn’t make it any more a positive case in the eyes of those who have a different definition of “positive case” than you.
I suggest using phrases in a way that has wide range consensus on the meaning. Your usage of “positive case” strikes me as highly idiosyncratic.
Frankie,
My argument is about Specified Complexity and CSI. You seem to have them conflated with Irreducible Complexity.
My whole effort has been to work out whether Dembski’s Specified Complexity) and CSI arguments work. They don’t. The arguments I presented in the NCSE paper are correct — I am sorry to hear that you did not understand them.
Norm Olsen,
We can determine design exists absent a mechanism. As a matter of course design is determined first and then the other questions. And there are artifacts that humans made that we still don’t know how they did it, but we know they are artifacts.
Joe Felsenstein,
CSI and SC pertain to origins. Joe. And your “argument” doesn’t even address them. Your “argument” proves you don’t grasp the concepts.
Sal, I use what science uses. It is the same as investigators use. Unlike you I have actual experience with this sort of stuff.
Frankie,
What did happen, then? What did the Designer do?
As opposed to your ‘it exists and is inexplicable to me, therefore Design’. Which is all fully testable and oh-so-scientific.
Jeez. Scientific discoveries aren’t made where scientific discoveries cannot be made. I take it all back; it’s a work of genius.
Hahahaha!
As the parameters change incrementally from too small to too big, observers happen by – and this could not be explained by coincidence? Solar eclipses happen nowhere they cannot be seen? They have to be designed? LMAO. I want my money back; I went to Devon to see one and it was cloudy.
Frankie,
Extreme front-loading again.
How about it, Mung? Salvador? Fifthmonarchyman? Do you agree with Frankie’s position that Dembski’s argument is about the Origin of Life, and not evolution after that?
I would phrase the question like this:
What did the first word refer to?
There are situations however we can frame what the expected results should be, no need to draw a circle after the fact.
If RNAs have a half-life I expect the probability to be low of an RNA world lasting long enough to make life. You may still say the odds were somehow circumvented, but Frankie would be right to say the odds are expected to be fairly remote at some point.
The claim of low odds is not an after-the-fact inference (inference of expected result, not inference of ID necessarily), it is based on accepted theories of science.
It is not unreasonable to ask, “how big a pool of RNA do you need to get the desired outcome to happen, and what classes of RNAs are we talking about.” Koonin doesn’t think a single universe like ours could support the requisite number of trials. The IDists aren’t exactly on the fringe in their probability arguments in light of the fact Koonin (and a few others) arrive at similar conclusions (albeit with different mechanism like multiverses to solve the problem).
Joe Felsenstein,
I haven’t said anything about front-loading. You are fishing and failing
Allan Miller,
Thank you for proving that you have nothing. Using coincidence to explain it is the same as sheer dumb luck. And sheer dumb luck isn’t science.
Dr. Felsenstein,
I don’t read much of what Frankie writes to be honest, but if he said that about Bill, I think Frankie is wrong. Frankie has made a few other claims I don’t think are defensible.
Bill wrote a lot about evolution after OOL in a book called No Free Lunch.
I think you are correct, Dr. Felsenstien.
PS
I would call you Joe, but some might mistake that for Joe G, not Joe Felsenstein.
Ah FrankenJoe, you’re back!
On your earlier ID thread you ran from you claimed species were “designed to evolve”. I asked how the Designer got the specific results he wanted then
You told us the Designer has no pre-planned goals.
If there are no pre-planned goals then all life forms including humans are random outcomes. Don’t you agree?
Frankie,
Neither is “someone musta put ’em there”. Thanks for the laugh, anyway. I hadn’t realised we were that privileged, that someone went to the trouble of making our existence coincide with the alignment as it transits gradually from too-small to too-big. And the evidence you provide that it must be that rather than coincidence is overwhelming. Or it will be when you post it, anyway.
You’re right Allan, you don’t need to read the book. But if you’re not going to read it you shouldn’t pretend as if you are familiar with its contents There are arguments in the book that go beyond your simplistic caricature.
No, I don’t agree with Frankie on that. But unlike the rest of you, I bow before Frankie’s superior knowledge and wisdom.
Mung,
How have I pretended I am familiar with its contents? I am familiar with the kind of argument typically presented – the Goldilocks Zone, all that. And the same basic rebuttal is available to all of them. Take a bazillion planets, and if there is a1-in-a-bazillion chance one can support life, that’s probably the one you live on, and Life looks unremarkable and in no need of invocation of a Designer to rumble everything into place. Classic Texas Sharpshooter.
Shame Frankie chose the solar eclipse, then.
Good to know that you admit IC is then simply a useless, tautological argument, and that it poses no threat to naturalistic processes and random mutation.
Shall we tackle CSI now? Then we can go on with the rest of the list of “positive” pieces of evidence for ID… wait a minute, it’s just IC and CSI. This should be quick
I wanted to see Frankie’s reply before I stepped in, and now I’ve seen it.
Can you explain a little more about what you mean when you say “organisms that are Specified by being far out on the scale of fitnesses,” in particular, how you are using the term fitness.
Are you using it in some way that isn’t related to comparative numbers of offspring? 100 offspring would suggest greater fitness than 99 offspring, but hardly suggests that 100 offspring is “way out on the scale of fitnesses.”
Tell us FrankenJoe, what peer-reviewed science journal did Privileged Planet appear in?
What I think is obviously wrong is that the “I believe” part, with no supportive evidence, can be whatever you want. Like when you assign arbitrary probabilities. How can anyone claim that can get you anywhere is beyond me.
You keep ignoring multiple independent lines of evidence. Circumstantial? What are the odds that they all converge and point to the same conclusion?
BTW, sort of unrelated, but being a YEC, do you think the speed of light is not constant?
I seem to remember you reject jDNA, and also natural selection. Is that right?
True. But it still makes me smile.
I thought we were going to talk about the octopus. But we can do a bacteria if you want. Pick one, and I’ll find what I can on how it evolved. You have to commit to giving me the corresponding design narrative. Deal?
Frankie doesn’t understand ID.
Implicit in the notion of Specified Information (as used by Orgel and by Dembski) is that there is some sort of scale. Explicit in Dembski’s Complex Specified Information, as he used it in 2002 in No Free Lunch, is that one has CSI if the organism is far out enough on that scale that an organism that extreme or more extreme would have a probability less than
under an hypothesis of “chance”.
You can imagine a monkey with a 4-letter typewriter typing strings of A, C, G or T (or a mutational process doing the same, in the absence of natural selection). If we have a moderately well-adapted species such a fish that can swim, what is the probability of getting an organism that does that well if its genome is typed by the monkey? Surely far less than
, so I agree with Dembski, and disagree with many of his opponents here, that the organism has CSI.
That is using fitness as the scale. Keep in mind that fitness is not just number of offspring but also probability of survival. It is the expected number of offspring of a newborn. So in your example almost all the organisms whose genomes were typed by the monkey would be random piles of organic chemicals without even organized cells. Their fitness would be basically zero.
(I have used only processes like mutation for “chance”, because I think that this is what Dembski meant in 2002 — he wanted his Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information to be a guarantee that natural selection could not cause an organism to have CSI if it didn’t have it originally. Later, in 2005, he defined Specified Complexity so as to include natural selection as one of the “chance” mechanisms, and later claimed that this is what he meant all along. That later definition has its own problems, mostly by being useless and forcing the reader to do all the important work.)
Oh! Oh! Can I play?
Start with a strain of bacteria that contains no flagella, or the genes necessary for the proteins needed for a flagellum, or DNA strings that would only require a few mutations to result in the genes necessary for the proteins. I’m sure that there are millions of such strains out there.
If we observed a flagellum appear in a monoclonal culture of one of these strains from one generation to the other, then the idea that the only way for flagella to appear is by Darwinian processes would be falsified.
Maybe Gauger and Ax should start doing this research instead of the nonsense that they currently do for ID.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/1014