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.
Hi Joe,
I guess I’m confused by the association of specificity [or specified] with fitness. I’ve never really thought of it in those terms and don’t know [yet] how to make the transition to that mode of thinking about it.
I think more along the line of a sequence of bases specifying a polypeptide, or a sequence of amino acids specifying a protein.
In your example of the monkeys, I would think of of everything they produce as close on a fitness scale because they all come from a typewriter, which is itself specified to produce output from a finite set. Not fit would be throwing the typewriter against the wall and having it shatter on the floor.
Let’s say we have two different enzymes. I suppose we can both agree they are specified. How do we decide which once is more specified than the other or which one is more fit than the other? What do we do to get them on the same scale?
If you don’t want to use enzymes, how about coins? 😉
I see phoodoo disappeared after my last two posts. Weird.
Can somebody add an l to the .htm link in that post? The full URL is http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html
Somehow the l in html disappeared.
A loss of information mutation!
One might get the impression that some url’s are irreducibly complex, except we all know you can build up a url from a gradual step-by-step process.
Done.
Thanks Nei
Rumraket,
Were these the points you wanted to highlight?
Expected by who?
Is fitness affected by the person doing the expectations?
Not who, what. Expected by the mode.
The expectation of the mode, which was constructed by a person.
Happy New Year phoodoo!
Who the eff is steaing a the ‘s???
Pease stop!
Mung,
Happy New Year!
Expected by the mode, or the mod? I am confused.
All I know is that there is no such thing as fitness. Except that there is.
No worries. 🙂
There is a missing character. Another word for character is _etter.
The missing character is the etter, erm, Hint: jk_mnop.
Mode_
The missing character is both _ong and _ean. Depending on the writer it _eans to the _eft.
I’m pretty sure that Joe was using “expected” in the sense of “expectation” as a technical term in mathematical probability theory.
Neil Rickert,
Expectation has a special meaning, other than “expectation”?
So he didn’t mean the expected number of offspring, when he said the expected number of offspring, he meant something like the %f^
^ number of offspirng?
Yes. There is what is expected given common sense, and there is what is expected when common sense is abandoned.
Mung,
Its all funny until someone gets hurt by the deranged logic.
I think what we know so far about Joe’s fitness idea is that some individuals are fit because they survived and gave offspring. Other individuals are fit because they were expected to survive and give offspring, based on the fact that after they survive and produce offspring we can predict that they should have survived and produce offspring.
And still others are less fit (but still fit) because they survived and produced offspring, but after they have done so we can predict that they shouldn’t have, based on the model we make after they survived, which predicts if they were going to survive.
phoodoo, Joe F. claims that fitness is Specified according to some scale.
I’m interested in the reasoning.
phoodoo,
There’s a statistical concept (used a lot in finance) called expected value. Why not ask out resident gambling expert, Sal?
A date seems overly involved for answering a question like that.
Glen Davidson
Single point mutation, whole paragraph still viable. 😉
Are you going to match the level of detail of the evolutionary explanation, or just keep dodging?
No. Unless the person is totally unaware of how fitness is determined.
It is expected by how fitness is calculated, by looking at how carriers of certain alleles have fared historically.
Just to be clear, nobody actually reasons like this. It’s funny, but it’s wrong.
Your posts have low fitness, and have had low fitness for a long time. On this basis, we now expect that on average, future posts you make will also have low fitness.
It’s okay that you are not familiar with the technical jargon, we would not hold that against you normally. But you seem to flaunt your ignorance as some kind of point in your favor, where you really shouldn’t.
Yes, that’s exactly what I said. They survived, so you predict they will survive again.
And the unfit ones? They also survived, so they are also fit, but they survived less, so less fit.
Its a pretty funny. Wait to see what survives and then predict it will survive. That which didn’t survive, is less fit to survive. Unless it survived of course.
And you call ID unfalsifiable. Haha.
Rumraket,
I admit it would be tough to weave a story of wild speculation as fantastic as Matzke’s.
I enjoyed this line:
Who knew Matzke was a closet Idist?
You can’t “survive less”. It is a binary proposition. Survive or not.
It’s about reproductive success, not “survival”.
So we have now established that the situation is exactly opposite to what you initially claimed. Rather than the evolutionary explanation having zero level of detail, it is in fact the ID explanation that has zero level of detail.
And given the homologoues that form the basis of the relationships Matzke use to build the model for the flagellum’s evolution, it also actually have evidence for it, unlike the ID explanation, which is entirely ad-hoc and vacuous.
So, you initially set out by declaring the level of detail of evolutionary explanations insufficient to warrant belief. Instead you believe in ID. But we’ve now established that you’re believing in the explanation with the least level of detail and the least amount of evidence for it.
It would now be rational for you to change your mind, reject ID and accept evolution, since it is the much superior explanation with more detail and evidence for it. Will you be rational, phoodoo? Or are your emotional biases and personal pride too tough to overcome?
In probability theory, expectation is defined as an integral over the sample space (or probability space).
There are various scales you can use for specification. We’re talking about Dembski’s 2002 argument in No Free Lunch so let me go there for support (actually the copy I have is the 2007 First Paperback Edition, so the page numbers I give will be from there).
In a crucial passage Dembski considers what to use for the specification. Here is the paragraph, quoted in full. In the edition I have this is in Chapter 3 (“Specified Complexity as Information”) in section 3.7 (“Biological Information”), on pages 148-149:
(There are footnotes 29, 30, and 31 also given in the sentences on Wouters. Behe, and at the end of the passage from Dawkins, giving citations which are at the end of the chapter, on pages 174-175 in my copy.)
So my use of fitness as the scale is in line with these folks, who Dembski cites approvingly as giving examples of what he is talking about.
Note that Dembski is talking about scales like viability (itself a component of fitness — in simple discrete-generations diploid models fitness is 1/2 the product of viability and fertility). However one can also talk about a single gene producing a single enzyme, and discuss a scale such as reaction speed. This is what is done by Hazen, Griffin, Carothers, and Szostak in their 2007 paper on “Functional Information” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which has often been cited by Dembski as defining a concept equivalent to Orgel’s Specified Information.
Rumraket,
Details are different from fairy tales. I didn’t know you wanted me to write a fairy tale.
OK, the falsification criteria for ID is equal to the falsification criteria for evolutionism. The positive case for ID, namely the ordering of separate components to achieve an identifiable function that depends sharply on the components., is something that evolutionism doesn’t have.
Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes?
All evos have failed to answer that question. And that is proof there isn’t a positive case for evolutiopnism
No. We’re talking about simple models of population genetics here. There are genotypes and they have fitnesses. In a simple model with discrete generations and diploid organisms the fitnesses are half the expectations of the product of viability and fertility, so half the expected number of offspring.
And yes, as various people saw, I am using “expectation” in the mathematical sense, of the expectation of a random variable. Not the hopes and dreams of the researcher.
The whole issue of how you measure fitness in practice for real organisms is irrelevant here. It is just like a model in physics where each object has a mass, whether or not we can measure the mass in practice.
Rumraket,
That isn’t science- That is nothing more than imagination. It needs to be tested in order to have any scientific merit
CSI and SC pertain to INDIVIDUALS and not to populations. That means population genetics is useless wrt CSI and SC.
Why don’t evos do the research that will/ can support their claims?
That is incorrect as IC is not as you say. And you still don’t have a mechanism that can account for it
Thank your for making your decision so clear. I now understand that you would rather be irrational. Good luck with your life 🙂
Read NFL, Sal. Dembski makes it clear that SC and CSI pertain to origins. You have serious issues, dude.
No Free lunch pages 148-49
How many times does the word “origin” appear and what is the context?
The very next section, section 3.8 is titled “The Origin of Complex Specified Information”
Let the hand waving begin
By the way, I have JoeG/Frankie on ignore. I have never seen him contribute anything meaningful to any discussion. Even though we disagree on a lot, it is still clearly possible to debate stuff with Mung and others. Frankie though, not so much.
So that link I posted about a paper that showed a bacteria flagellum without the flagellum after a gene knockout, evolve it back by repurposing a different gene is not a clear enough mechanism?
There’s direct observation for you, that a subsystem of an “IC” system can evolve by pure random mutation into an IC system. Right in your face.
So you have two options:
1. Admit that IC and is debunked
2. Admit that IC systems can arise naturally
But we all know what you’ll do. Same old creationist crap: you’ll move the goalposts
Well Mung, read No Free Lunch- I quoted the part that says CSI pertains to origins.
And there you go, moving the goalposts. Wasn’t this about IC?
Can’t you think critically for once and evaluate what means for IC to have a BF devoid of one part, evolve it on it’s own?
If IC is a positive argument and falsifiable, what would it predict would happen after the knockout?
AGAIN, from No Free Lunch:
LoL! I am not moving any goalposts. Just because you are ignorant of the argument doesn’t mean I moved the goalposts. And you didn’t even respond to what I posted
After the knockout I would expect the system to cease functioning and it did. However Behe said, in my OP, what it takes to falsify IC. Read it and grow up already
Fine, it did lose it’s function. So you go with the tautological definition of IC that can’t poke a dent in evolution. This experiment proves that IC, defined as such, can evolve.
So what do you do next? You demand evidence that the mutation wasn’t produced by some supernatural force… and that’s game over for you. Of course there’s plenty evidence that mutations are random, your demanding unscientific, unfalsifiable even in principle things like “how do you know gawd doesn’t tinker with genes” is the last nail in the IC coffin.
No science, no positive argument, no IC, no ID. Game set and match.
Deal with it
dazz,
Don’t cry just because you have been refuted.
LoL! ID doesn’t require the supernatural. ID says that organisms were designed to evolve. That means they control their fate.
No, there isn ‘t.
Look, don’t get all upset because you don’t understand science and cannot produce any science to support the claims of your position.
Frankie, Frankie, Frankie. You are cornered and you know it.
First you invoke directed evolution. When I point out that’s unfalsifiable, you change your mind and now apparently “ID says that organisms were designed to evolve”.
How come you missed that crucial part of your “theory”? What an unfortunate overlook. And how can that be tested anyway? If it’s your claim, you have to support it. It’s science baby! But you know you can’t because your spooky designer is nowhere to be seen.
There you go! FrankenJoe’s first cowardly evasion of 2016! Didn’t take long.
Why did you tell us the Designer has no pre-planned goals if now you’re going to deny it?
Easy, because “undirected” is not a thing if “directed” is not defined.
Because “directed” has again zero level of detail, hence has no explanatory power, hence it’s unfalsifiable
Because the principle of parsimony says that if assuming something that add nothing to explain the process any better, then it’s superfluous.
Because there’s tons of evidence suggesting mutations are random and evolution is not teleological
Is there a theory of undirected gravity? or undirected electromagnetics? What about unfarted evolution? Can you prove evolution is unfarted and mutations are not triggered by some interdimensional flatulent squirrels?
You have nothing, you know nothing about science. It’s pathetic
So yeah, you keep kicking and moaning all you want. The fact is that IC and ID have failed the scientific test. The sooner you assume it the better