Testing Intelligent Design

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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.

611 thoughts on “Testing Intelligent Design”

  1. dazz,

    It doesn’t falsify ID as ID is all about the step-by-step process that is required to build the thing from scratch. It is in the OP.

  2. Frankie: I read you diatribe. It didn’t answer the question and no one is doing it.

    Of course it answered your question. Please explain how it didn’t. Let me refresh your memory about what your question was:

    Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes?

    My example would falsify that claim.

  3. Frankie: I have read them and there isn’t anything that supports the natural selection producing something.

    Nylonase.

  5. Acartia,

    You said:

    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.

    That does not answer Behe’s question- Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes?

  6. OK, compared with the falsification criteria of evolutionism which requires demonstrating a negative, ID’s falsification criteria is scientific. And ID has a positive component and that seems to be missing from evolutionism

  8. Frankie:
    Adapa,

    The organisms goals are contingent

    Still waiting for you to tell us what organisms goals are contingent upon.

    Any time this year FrankenJoe.

  9. Frankie:
    Acartia,

    And how did you determine it was natural selection? It seems like a built-in response to an environmental cue

    If that is the case you should be able to find the mechanism in precursors. Why aren’t you researching this instead of posting here? I think we all know why.

  12. Frankie:
    Acartia,

    You said:

    That does not answer Behe’s question- Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes?

    Of course it does. Darwinian processes could not explain the flagellum if my scenario was observed. Therefore, the claim would be falsified. What about “falsified” don’t you understand.

  13. Moved some comments to guano. Please don’t post content-free abuse and please don’t respond to content-free abuse.

  14. stcordova,

    I am so glad I am on Sal’s ignore list. I am now fully in favor of the ignore button. I was going to advocate for a feature where I could force others to put me on their ignore list, so as never to have them respond to my posts.

    It does prove one thing about ID, its not a religious position. I don’t agree with Sal about anything (I suspect Sal doesn’t even agree with Sal about anything, except that he doesn’t even understand his own position because it is so inarticulate and convoluted, and just plain dumb) , including religion, and yet we both seem to believe in ID.

    Now who are the materialists who are ignoring each other?

  15. Frankie:
    Acartia,

    And how did you determine it was natural selection? It seems like a built-in response to an environmental cue

    A built-in response to a completely unnatural environmental cue? Now you are just being silly.

  16. phoodoo: I was going to advocate for a feature where I could force others to put me on their ignore list, so as never to have them respond to my posts.

    LoL. I love it! 😀

  19. Alan Fox:
    Moved some comments to guano. Please don’t post content-free abuse and please don’t respond to content-free abuse.

    Apologies

  20. If one wants to describe GA’s and evolution in terms of goals and searches, a way to do it is to say that the goal of a GA is to find a solution X to satisfy the specification Y.

    Y has to be pre-planned or else the GA will never get anywhere. X is unknown because otherwise there would be no point in running the GA. The GA searches for Y, not for X. When successful it has produced X that allows Y. It gets confusing when people don’t clearly distinguish the two.

    In natural evolution, Y might be the continuous survival of the gene pool, and X would be the reproducing organisms that carry the gene pool.

    fG

  21. faded_Glory: In natural evolution, Y might be the continuous survival of the gene pool, and X would be the reproducing organisms that carry the gene pool.

    I’d say Y is often “a high fitness” without any requirement that the fitness reach the highest value possible in the space of X. And I’d say X is the set of genotypes in the population.

    The distinction you have made is important, and much-ignored by those who question the relevance of genetic simulations to this argument. The same issue is commonly ignored when critics attack the relevance of artificial selection. Y is the higher fitness or the selection criterion, and X the genotypes and phenotypes that achieve it. The way X changes is often surprising; the phenotypes and genotypes that result are not known in advance.

    An interesting example of an evolutionary simulation is Karl Sim’s “evolved virtual creatures” project (here) where his block-organisms interact with a simulated physics and are under selection to move to the right. That defines Y, but the phenotypes and genotypes X that achieve it are unusual and somewhat unpredictable. They move rightwards, but in all sorts of unusual ways. Software for a similar project, breve by Jon Klein is available here.

  22. Joe Felsenstein: I’d say Y is often “a high fitness” without any requirement that the fitness reach the highest value possible in the space of X. And I’d say X is the set of genotypes in the population.

    The distinction you have made is important, and much-ignored by those who question the relevance of genetic simulations to this argument.The same issue is commonly ignored when critics attack the relevance of artificial selection.Y is the higher fitness or the selection criterion, and X the genotypes and phenotypes that achieve it.The way X changes is often surprising; the phenotypes and genotypes that result are not known in advance.

    An interesting example of an evolutionary simulation is Karl Sim’s “evolved virtual creatures” project (here) where his block-organisms interact with a simulated physics and are under selection to move to the right.That defines Y, but the phenotypes and genotypes X that achieve it are unusual and somewhat unpredictable.They move rightwards, but in all sorts of unusual ways. Software for a similar project, breve by Jon Klein is available here.

    May I please ask if you’re aware of any advances in Gould’s “replaying the tape of life” area Prof. Felsenstein?

    I’ve dome some reading, like Lobkovsky & Koonin’s paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509945/
    Just curious

  24. sez Frankie, who is not at all the same person as that obnoxious, arrogant, ignorant demagogue-wannabe JoeG:

    … there isn’t anything that supports the natural selection producing something.

    Well, of course not. Natural selection doesn’t produce variants, it eliminates them. If you’re interested in looking into how variants are produced, random mutation is one process which does that, and there’s a couple others as well.

  25. Acartia: A built-in response to a completely unnatural environmental cue? Now you are just being silly.

    How is it unnatural seeing that it exists in nature? The carbon it contains is definitely natural.

  26. Acartia,

    Darwinian evolution cannot explain any bacterial flagellum. That is the problem. And you have proven that it can’t even make a positive case

  27. faded_Glory,

    GAs are goal-oriented and natural selection is not. GAs actively search for the solution to the problem and natural selection does not.

    Even a first grader can see that GAs do not model natural selection. Perhaps they were based on someone’s strawman version of NS but that is about it.

  29. Richardthughes: If that is the case you should be able to find the mechanism in precursors. Why aren’t you researching this instead of posting here? I think we all know why.

    Why aren’t evolutionary biologists able to answer the simple questions wrt evolution and biology? Why aren’t they doing the necessary research? I think we all know why…

  30. Frankie,

    It only includes random mutations when they need it to. But if you claim NS is random, then then get all upset and whine, because then their theory looks impossible, so they try to weasel out of it, but saying the other part of NS, the part which is not random mutations (which is nothing) is not random.

    Their not random part is death, which is of course also pretty much random.

  31. Frankie:
    Acartia,

    Darwinian evolution cannot explain any bacterial flagellum. That is the problem. And you have proven that it can’t even make a positive case

    That wasn’t the question. You have now moved the goal posts right out of the arena.

  32. Frankie:

    The organisms goals are contingent

    Still waiting for FrankenJoe to tell us what the organisms goals are contingent upon.

    Why does FJ always disappear after making silly claims like this? I know why. 🙂

  33. Frankie: How is it unnatural seeing that it exists in nature? The carbon it contains is definitely natural.

    Front loading again Joe. I thought that you said it wasn’t front loaded.

  34. Acartia: Front loading again Joe. I thought that you said it wasn’t front loaded.

    That was yesterday when FrankenJoe told us that organisms have no pre-planned goals loaded into them. This is today.

    You don’t expect FJ to remember the BS he made up a whole 24 hours ago do you? 😀

  35. Acartia,

    You have failed to answer:
    Let’s turn the tables and ask, how could one falsify the claim that, say, the bacterial flagellum was produced by Darwinian processes?

  36. Acartia,

    Don’t think as I never said that. Obviously if organisms were designed to evolve they were front-loaded with that ability.

  39. OP title is testing Intelligent Design. Arguments or assertions against evolution are not testing ID.

  40. Frankie:
    Adapa,

    The environment and their needs- that should have been obvious.

    So organisms have no pre-planned goals, how they change and where they end up is all based on the environment.

    Exactly like unguided evolution.

  41. Alan Fox:
    OP title is testing Intelligent Design. Arguments or assertions against evolution are not testing ID.

    Alan, I have explained why arguments against evolutionism is testing ID.

  42. Adapa,

    So organisms have no pre-planned goals, how they change and where they end up is all based on the environment.

    Wrong- organisms direct the change as they need.

  43. And Alan, I have also shown that the way to test ID is more scientific than the way to test evolutionism.

  44. Frankie:
    Adapa,

    Wrong- organisms direct the change as they need.

    How do organisms direct the whole environment FrankenJoe? As best they may affect a tiny local piece of it.

    Did the mammals that lived 66 MYA direct the Chicxulub impactor to hit and wipe out the dinosaurs so the mammals could expand and diversify?

    Now you’re back to telling us organisms have pre-planned goals and know what they need to get there. You can’t keep your story straight for a single day.

  45. Adapa,

    How do organisms direct the whole environment FrankenJoe?

    I never said they do. They direct the changes within themselves so they can actively adapt.

  46. Frankie:
    Adapa,

    I never said they do. They direct the changes within themselves so they can actively adapt.

    You are simply making things up. Point to the internal mechanism that does this, or retract.

  47. Frankie:
    Adapa,

    I never said they do. They direct the changes within themselves so they can actively adapt.

    You said organisms don’t have pre-planned goals stored. Now you say they do have pre-planned goals stored so they know how to direct changes.

    You can’t go two posts in a row without directly contradicting yourself. 😀

  49. Frankie:
    And Alan, I have also shown that the way to test ID is more scientific than the way to test evolutionism.

    Citation needed.

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