At last?
Back in 2007, I predicted that the idea of “Intelligent Design” would soon fade into obscurity. I wrote:
My initial assessment of ID in my earliest encounter with an ID proponent* was that ID would be forgotten within five years, and that now looks to me an over-generous estimate.
*August, 2005
I was wrong. Whilst the interest in “Intelligent Design” (ID) as a fruitful line of scientific enquiry has declined from the heady days of 2005 (or perhaps was never really there) there remain diehard enthusiasts who maintain the claim that ID has merit and is simply being held back by the dark forces of scientism. William Dembski; the “high priest” of ID has largely withdrawn from the fray but his ideas have been promoted and developed by Robert Marks and Winston Ewert. In 2017 (with Dembski as a co-author) they published Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, which was heralded as a new development in the ID blogosphere. However, the claim that this represents progress has been met with scepticism.
But the issue of whether ID was ever really scientific has remained as the major complaint of those who dismiss it. Even ID proponents have admitted this to be a problem. Paul Nelson, a prominent (among ID proponents) advocate of ID famously declared in 2004:
Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’ – but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.
Whilst some ID proponents – Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe are perhaps most prominent among them – have tried to develop ID as science, the general scientific community and the wider world have remained unimpressed.
Then a new young vigorous player appears on the field. Step forward, Eric Holloway! Dr Holloway has produced a number of articles published at Mind Matters – a blog sponsored by the Discovery Institute (the paymasters of ID) on artificial and “natural” intelligence. He has also been quite active here and elsewhere defending ID and I have had to admire his persistence in arguing his case for ID, especially as the whole concept is, in my view, indefensible.
But! Do I see cracks appearing? I happened to glance at the blog site formerly run by William Dembski, Uncommon Descent, and noticed an exchange of comments on a thread entitled Once More from the Top on “Mechanism” The post author is Barry Arrington, current owner of UD and a lawyer by trade, usually too busy to produce a thoughtful or incisive piece (and this is no different). However, the comments get interesting when Dr Holloway joins in at comment 48. He writes:
If we can never be sure we account for all chance hypotheses, then how can we be sure we do not err when making the design inference? And even if absolute certainty is not our goal, but only probability, how can we be confident in the probability we derive?
Eric continues with a few more remarks that seem to raise concern among the remaining regulars. ( ” Geeze you are one confused little pup EricMH.” “Has a troll taken over Eric’s account?) and later comments:
But since then, ID has lost its way and become enamored of creationism vs evolution, apologetics and the culture wars, and lost the actual scientific aspect it originally had. So, ID has failed to follow through, and is riding on the cultural momentum of the original claims without making progress.
Dr Holloway continues to deliver home truths:
I would most like to be wrong, and believe that I am, but the ID movement, with one or two notable exceptions, has not generated much positive science. It seems to have turned into an anti-Darwin and culture war/apologetics movement. If that’s what the Discovery Institute wants to be, that is fine, but they should not promote themselves as providing a new scientific paradigm.
I invite those still following the fortunes of ID to read on, though I recommend scrolling past comments by ET and BA77. Has Dr Holloway had a road-to-Damascus moment? Is the jig finally up for ID? I report – you decide!
ETA link
These days Uncommon Descent is all griping about Millennials and what’s wrong with kids these days, promoting a highly dubious dumbed-down version of Thomism, and lamenting the imminent demise of Western civilization now that the Left has won the culture war — plus lots of snark about new scientific discoveries.
I don’t think anyone still believes that intelligent design is a scientific explanation — even the people who think that evolutionary theory is pseudo-scientific nonsense still don’t think that intelligent design is an empirically confirmed alternative.
“ET” has a curiously familiar style …
Holloway has either been sacked from the DiscoTute, or he’s about to be sacked
If ID was in demise would the author of this thread say he and others need not have or comment on this blog which hss included fighting/supporting ID?? NO!!
ID was a great, important, dangerous, revolution and is famous in the circles of thoughtful people who use science to mfigure out about origins. its only small circles on any side of serious intellectual people.
i say iD has never been stronger and is not just more creationism.
its a conclusion introduced that the evidence of nature demands that its complexity is beyond happanchance in anyway.
THATS the hypothesis. NOW the claim that a full biological mechanism for how things happen is not ID. ID means intelligent designER.
it bumps into criticisms of evolutionism a great deal but is not that species. iTS not YEC .
HAS the opponents of ID beaten ID?? NO! Not here. No one says WE WERE BEAT.
In fact the continuing existence of iD/YEC means it has beaten the original resistence. The army is still in the field.
It doesn’t matter if someone from ID says ID has not gone further.
ID was a intellectual observation of complexity demanding intelligent designer and demanding the impossibility of no designer.
the men who became famous in this still say this and the legions who see thier point still agree.
The army is in the field. What next??? Well what can one do??
Just keep debunking the other side until they surrender and likely soon enough. think the demise claim comes from a opponent HOPING thats true .
You can not say a hypothesis is in demise until its been defeated. ID is high in the saddle. It simply is a limited idea about origins. it does morph into pointing out how eVERY claim of evolutionism can’t be true. so thats a lot. Yet thats just disproving the oppositions ideas.
To all TSZ folks DO YOU think ID is in demise/defeated and no reason to think/fight it in society?? saying iD is in demise is like say biblical creationism(yec) is in demise.
Yes. Yes it is.
And, yes it is.
I thought ET was Joe G, but since between those two their collection of internet handles is impressive, I have a hard time telling them apart as well.
That’s cool. Looks like Eric seriously considers counter arguments.
The angry buzzing by ET and BA77 is highly amusing, but makes it hard to detect the worthwhile contributions. That’s a shame.
I think Eric is echoing a concern I’ve seen many times on TSZ , PS, and PT. He points out that ID has two components:
1. The claim that life exhibits design which cannot be explained by MN; for him MN means scientific explanation is limited to stochastic/deterministic processes only. He thinks this design is proved by the mathematical work he and others like Dembski have done. For him, intelligence is something which is not stochastic/deterministic and that therefore can produce such design.
2. The point that ID cannot be a science without specifying the nature of intelligence in a way that there are “specific predictions and insights […] from inferring ID in biology, something on the level of chemistry where we have a very concrete idea of what should be there if the thing is designed” (comment 122)
All he is doing in 2 is recognizing that for a hypothesis to be scientific*, it is necessary that it make testable and falsifiable predictions.
I have seen this point made many times in scientific critiques of ID. Perhaps it is something new in the ID blogosphere.
Regardless of the controversy on 2 in the comments, I don’t think ID will go away as long as there are people like Eric who are convinced that “after my years of personal research, I am confident that the theory of ID and CSI calculations is sound,” (comment 48 liked in OP)
——————————————————–
* I’m ignoring the multiverse issue for this, of course…
BruceS,
Good points. When people say that ID is not science, I usually say that ID consists of two assertions: (1) that there are proofs that some adaptations cannot be the result of ordinary evolutionary forces, and thus must be the result of Something Else, and (2) that there is a positive theory of what Intelligent Design would do.
The second is blatantly not science, especially when you consider the arguments ID advocates make about bad adaptation. If it is the giraffe recurrent laryngeal nerve, they just say that we cannot know what the purposes of the Designer would be. But if it is junk DNA, they say that no Intelligent Designer would do such a thing. They can successfully predict everything we see, but only at the cost of also predicting everything we don’t see.
But the first is certainly science. It’s just that the particular arguments that they have put forward for point (1) have not worked (so far, anyway).
This view also answers the objection of ID advocates that if we say that ID is not science because it is not subject to refutation, how can we also be refuting it. The scientific arguments under heading (1) are being refuted, and the nonscientific arguments under heading (2) are not subject to refutation.
Joe Felsenstein,
Another characteristic of science is that scientists participate in a community which values admitting that one’s position may be in error, and hence fully engaging with criticisms pointing out possible errors.
Do the practices of the ID theorists meet that standard?
In post 48 linked in OP, Eric says:
“after my years of personal research, I am confident that the theory of ID and CSI calculations is sound”
But as you pointed out at PT, Eric asserts this despite that fact the he does not fully engage with criticism you and others have made of his work and his characterizations of Dembski’s and other IDist’s work.
I suspect Eric would disagree with my characterization of his engagement.
We’d have to go through Eric’s participation here and at PS to adjudicate that possibility.
I’ve always thought Dembski, Holloway, Ewert etc made a legitimate attempt to find a method to ‘prove’ ID. The problem is they’ve been very slow to recognize that this method can’t work. At best you can assign probabilities to a ‘design vs non-design’ question and only in cases that deal with completely defined abstract universes such as a pair of dice or a deck of cards. We have no hope of doing this with biological entities.
The closest they’ve come to legitimate science is Behe, who uses real data to claim that the probabilities for generating complexity are too low.
Nowadays ID is mostly Axe telling the rubes that their intuition that Goddidit is worth more than all the work of scientists and Meyer with his very polished, engaging presentations based on his books. The thing is this is working. When Yale computer scientist Gelernter, or British jounalist M Phillips talk about ID and evolution you can tell they got all their ideas from Meyer
Yes, I think ID positive science is lacking (as many IDist besides myself believe including Nelson and Ewert), but No, I don’t think this is an inherent problem. If you read all my comments in the thread, instead of cherry picking the ones that fit your preconceptions, you’ll see that I believe there are positive contributions. Additionally, if you read my other writings here, Mind Matters, UD and Eidos, you’ll see I constantly argue for positive conceptions of intelligent design. And, you’ll also note that I believe much of ID theory predates ID theorists in the writings of Soviet mathematicians Kolmogorov and Levin, although they are not able to explicitly spell out the implications due to the thought policing of their atheist comrades.
In my opinion the problem is not the intrinsic limitations of the theory, but that the ‘harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few.’ Also, we tend to get distracted by arguing with the critics’ purposeful misinterpretations of the theory.
And, at any rate, the current ID arguments successfully defeat philosophical naturalism, even though there is not yet a well developed alternative to methodological naturalism (there is a partially developed one, though).
I know what I am saying is confusing to both sides, since both have settled into their corners and have trouble recognizing anything in the middle.
Ideas go through cycles, and can even appear moribund during their “down” phases. Evolutionary theory, for instance, was pronounced in 1922 by no less an authority than William Bateson (1861-1926) to be a matter of total uncertainty. “When students of other sciences,” he wrote, “ask us what is now currently believed about the origin of species we have no clear answer to give. Faith has given place to agnosticism” (W. Bateson, “Evolutionary Faith and Modern Doubts,” Science, January 20, 1922, p. 57). But, as Joe Felsenstein will tell you, in 1922, the foundational works of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, and on their heels, Dobzhansky, Mayr, and many others, lay just around the corner. An up cycle was about to commence; Bateson however died before he could witness it.
ID took a major, and well-deserved, body blow from the Dover trial in 2005. The “movement,” so to speak, had got well out over its skis between 1991 (and the publication of Phil Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, which arguably jump-started things) and 2005. Google Trends, using “intelligent design,” as the search term, shows the consequences of Dover:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=intelligent%20design
Moreover, some leading ID theoreticians, such as Bill Dembski, tired of the personal abuse they were receiving, and left the scene to make money or pursue other interests. And (again) after Dover, many anti-ID activists, such as Nick Matzke or Wesley Elsberry, largely lost interest in going after ID, as they saw the “movement” as little more than an ill-concealed strategy to smuggle creationism into public schools. As Judge Jones had blocked that road decisively, ID could be left at the side of the pavement where the Dover decision had shoved it. The site Panda’s Thumb simmered down to mostly the occasional posts of Matt Young, and photo contests. The opposite of love, to quote Eli Wiesel, is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference.
We shouldn’t be naïve, however. Design as an idea is as old as Plato, and no more likely to leave humanity than other such basic notions. What ID theorists are now learning, rather painfully, I’d say, is that “boo undirected evolution” is no more a scientific theory than “boo phlogiston,” “boo the ether,” “boo the four humors.” A large group of us are trying to formulate design as if Charles Darwin had never lived, or, to put the same point another way, to subtract the polemics (i.e., the loud boo) from ID to see what remains. This outstanding meeting, earlier this month in Jerusalem, provided a wonderful sample of what remains:
And new ideas come from entirely unexpected directions. Check out this paper, from Sara Walker and colleagues:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.04649
ID ain’t dying any time soon. Don’t dust off your black suit, and no need to call the florist for a funeral bouquet.
Joe Felsenstein,
While these claims may represent Demski’s work they do not represent the work of Gpuccio, Behe and Durston. Meyer is now moving to the Behe camp and is no longer trying to prove a negative.
Intelligent design can be falsified if evolutionary theory can find a mechanism that can generate enough functional information to account for complex adaptions.
Intelligent design can serve as a negative control for evolutionary theory and allow its claims to move away from ideology and back to science.
EricMH,
And these misrepresentations are making it into respected scientific journals. Science maybe self correcting but it sure takes a long time in certain cases.
Well, first get it correctly, the way most non-IDists understand it. You’re looking for “positive conceptions of Intelligent Design” not of ‘intelligent design,’ since the latter is already taken & well-expressed by non-IDists. It must be really hard to admit that fact, EricMH, since you haven’t made the effort to do so yet.
What you are saying sounds like it’s coming from someone not trained in the right fields to have a decent conversation. It sounds like you are confused to yourself, & rather full of denial based on defensiveness having been trained at the DI’s summer program. It sounds like you’ve been brainwashed & are still enjoying it.
What you don’t & seemingly won’t allow yourself the freedom of thought to consider, is that design theory, design thinking & design thinkers are doing just fine nowadays. It’s instead specifically IDists who are maligned & marginalized & IDism that is wisely pushed aside, not just by atheists & agnostics, but also by Abrahamic monotheists. IDism as an ideology is something they deny they even hold, yet that is quite obviously what dictates how they communicate in most of their ‘movement’ efforts.
These comments by EricMH are a refreshing reminder that IDists themselves can something re-think the premises upon which they are foisting their ideology on themselves first, and then others.
No, this is wishful thinking based on having used IDism on gullible, under-educated people, and almost entirely non-mainstream evangelical Protestants. When you try pushing IDism in a room full of highly educated scholars from multiple fields, without an invitation from a missionary organization or protestant college (cf. the DI’s international outreach strategy), then you’ll see the problem more clearly. The intellectual harvest from IDism is, if taken based on their own words when humble & not boisterous, actually quite minimal, weak and highly presumptive. There’s actually very little ‘there’ there behind the ‘strictly scientific theory’. It is largely based on ideological probabilism & hyper-anti-Darwinism. Instead, there are laborers ready to do good works, just not double-talking IDism.
No, they don’t; they simply move the goalposts. There already is “a well developed alternative to methodological naturalism.” That EricMH doesn’t know this is typical of the IDM. Phillip Johnson was claiming ‘death of naturalism’ already long ago & now most IDists don’t quote him because he’s too focussed on apologetics.
Imagining that IDism or ‘ID theory’ even comes close to presenting a mature, valid or coherent alternative to naturalism (MN or MN or PN or DN, etc.) is almost as presumptuous as Swamidass suggesting that he came up with genealogical Adam & Eve. Sorry, but it’s bad form to be speaking that way.
BruceS,
I believe I have seen Eric admit to errors and I know Durston has admitted to an error at PS. What is more telling is the constant use of logic fallacies against ID among scientists. The fallacies include labeling, straw-man arguments, question begging among others.
colewd,
Do you believe opposition to ideological IDism is valid? Or do you reject the notion that there is such a thing as ideological IDism? Answering this helps to see how circumspect people are if they can’t or won’t even recognize that IDT has been, at least on occasion, grossly exaggerated.
Can or will colewd give an example of this? Or is this yet another case when ‘nobody here but innocent IDists’ isn’t to be trusted?
Did you mean circumspect people or Circumspect People?
Gregory,
I think it is valid but only if you balance it with opposition to ideological Darwinism. Scientists tend to migrate to the ideological institutions like discovery or NCSE because it can produce funding. Ideology sells 🙂
All this being said the political system in this country is very messy as is ideological design/darwin. What should be done to clean this up?
Gregory,
The examples of exaggerated ID is the one protein knockout punch. The claim the FI is so high this disproves evolution. At the end of the day the propensity of evidence supports the claim but that is harder to present than the single protein knock out punch.
If you thought that ID would fade away once it was demonstrated to be non-scientific, then you could be excused for thinking that it wouldn’t be as popular as it is today. What we have found is that creationists aren’t looking for something scientific, just sciency enough to convince the choir. ID is a dogma looking for a justification.
The first step is promoting good science instead of tilting at ideological windmills.
T_aquaticus,
What is “good science”? What are “ideological windmills”?
Paul Nelson,
Yes, the 2005 blow to the IDM was well-deserved. I agree with you. Notably, however, I haven’t seen many IDists, if any, openly acknowledge this. So, it’s nice you’re willing to do so here. Credibility.
Well, someone is being naive the way they are using it, as if most people easily confuse ‘design’ with ‘Design’ and ‘intelligence’ with ‘Intelligence’. Perhaps Thaxton Bradley, Olsen & Johnson, among others, simply weren’t as clever as they thought choosing that engineering metaphor? It does not appear they were prepared to study ‘designing processes’ only to make an ontological claim: there *is* Design. Ok, yes, say almost all of the world’s monotheists, but please don’t drag us down into this polemical USAmerican approach to origins & demand we stay there defending IDism.
It’s rather a interesting fact, don’t you think Paul, that the term ‘design’ is not used a single time in the King James version of the Bible? Not once. Were you aware of that? https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=design&qs_version=KJV
Sorry, but after giving the DI a serious try, I just don’t find the people the IDM is targeting to be leading scholars or in the proper fields for what the DI is trying to effect. It is largely only ideologues who ‘fall into’ the IDM nowadays, usually still, it appears, via evangelical Protestantism. Most Catholics & Orthodox aren’t fooled by IDism.
IDism has been rejected by the vast majority of leading religious scientists and scholars for good reasons. That’s good enough for now. Your time, energy & money is the only thing that keeps it going, Paul. This has become the definitive ‘fight’ of your lifetimes and you are invested in it ‘not going away.’ The rest of us, the non-atheists & non-agnostics who the IDM so loves to oppose, can only sigh at the largely wasted time that has gone into IDism over 25 years.
As long as the DI stands behind ID as a ‘strictly scientific’ theory, it’s a non-starter. As long as the DI continues to actively avoid publicly acknowledging the existence of real design theory, design thinking & design thinkers, it’s a non-starter. Are you suggesting either of those might change anytime soon among the DI’s/IDM’s leaders, Paul? Frankly, as much as I’d like to believe that after 25 years they could get it figured out & humble themselves to the damage they have done, I really doubt that will happen.
colewd,
Good. Then we agree on that. I oppose ideological IDism whenever it arises.
In terms of walking the talk, could you please point me to where you’ve done this?
Well, I’m not stuck on ‘Darwinism’ & find other alternatives a better ‘balance’. The leaders of the DI disagree, but that’s nothing new.
Yes, agreed. That’s exaggeration of ID into a kind of informationism. Ideological informationism is a key part of IDism.
Ideological designism & Darwinism. To clean things up in the USA, assuming that you don’t get out of there often enough? Simple: move or get educated abroad.
Look for an alternative way than IDism, because it’s simply not credible among thoughtful, sincere, devout, caring, sensitive & disciplined religious theists. It is the wrong ‘proposed solution’ to a problem IDist leaders misunderstood. You folks are staining the conversation for all of the rest of us with your IDist nonsense facing into a cul-de-sac of your own making. Turn away, there are better directions than that sanitized Seattle sorcery.
Gregory,
Do you oppose darwinism, or only Darwinism? I think both are bad theories, but darwinism is worse.
I oppose informationism, because I usually don’t like words with more than two “i’s but I Support Informationism because It seems like a formidable team.
But if they could do this successfully for simple models of evolving populations, then even though those are not fully realistic, they would be worrisome. If evolutionary biology is in trouble in those models, it may be in trouble in a wider (and more realistic) set of cases too.
Well for the first part seems right.ID is saying its impossible for mutations to have created complexity at entry level. indeed a general observation that mutations could not be the origin of complex biology.
the second part seems wrong. it is sCIENCE to make predictions from a hypothesis.
After concluded a intelligent designer must of created the complexity then the designer would do it this or that way. one would expect biology to be after a model.
iD thinkers mean to be scientific, they come from science, and they are scientific.
the conclusions of a thinking intelligence does not make it NOT SCIENCE.
that would mean science could never come to a accurate conclusion IF the conclusion was a thinking being did the cool stuff of creation.
The option for truth from a creator , as shown in nature, must be allowed or science in origin subjects has different rules then everywhere else. It does not!
It is a huge problem for anyone (such as Gelernter) who talks as if there is a theory that is an alternative to standard evolutionary biology, called Intelligent Design. He makes it sound as if it has an alternative explanation. But even if correct, all the major ID theorists have done is argue that evolutionary processes can’t account for what we see — they do not provide any scientific alternative.
Thanks for the kind consideration. I read all I can, and hope that I can understand the main arguments. I would not dream of expecting that anyone would read everything I ever wrote.
You quite understandably wish for them, and rather bravely argue for them in unpromising environments such as UD, that’s for sure.
I am astonished that you think that this is why they did not develop ID. Levin emigrated in 1978 and studied at MIT and is lately at Boston University, out of the reach of his “comrades”. Kolmogorov had to be circumspect, not because he wanted to disprove evolutionary biology, but because he was actually intrigued by population genetics theory. When he developed diffusion equations in the early 1930s, they were soon applied to verifying the equilibrium distributions that Sewall Wright had discovered (by other methods) in 1931. But Kolmogorov had to avoid that area. When he translated William Feller’s landmark probability text, he left out the genetics examples, supposedly because they were of lesser interest. When, in later years, he spoke at a conference in Germany, he called Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection “das wundervolle Buch von R.A. Fisher”. I have never heard of any hint of either Levin or Kolmogorov regarding their algorithmic information theory as disproving natural selection. If you think they did, check with Levin and see whether he can confirm your intuitions.
Yeah, we benighted critics are too myopic and obsessed with fooling people. We are too busy showing that Dembski’s Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information does not put any constraint on natural selection. We are too busy showing clearly that Dembski’s 2005 revision of his CSI criterion makes it into a useless after-the-fact add-on to some other, unknown, disproof of the effectiveness of natural selection. We are too busy arguing cogently that the Dembski/Marks argument about Active Information just shows that smoothish fitness surfaces are needed, ones that ordinary physics in fact predicts. We are too busy showing for the Dembski/Ewert/Marks argument about “evolutionary searches” being no better than choosing a random outcome, that this argument does not work as soon as we make the minimal requirement that the organisms have phenotypes and fitnesses. Apparently these are all “misrepresentations”. Who’da guessed?
Not sure where this “successful defeat is”. I just have trouble recognizing one thing, namely any successful refutation by anyone of the four arguments I mentioned above.
Oh yes, and does Algorithmic Specified Complexity pull the chestnuts out of the fire? I hope to publish at Panda’s Thumb soon an expansion on my usual conclusion — that ASC is simply totally irrelevant to arguments about adaptation in evolution, however conserved it might or might not be.
Joe Felsenstein,
An even bigger problem is evolutionary biologists who talk as if there is a theory of evolution.
That’s a real whopper to sell.
As a summary of their arguments this is quite odd and confusing. Durston is using Functional Information, a “kissing cousin” of Dem[b]ski’s original CSI. Gpuccio is using some rather unclear version of FI, exactly the same as Durston (and Hazen/Szostak) but then actually not exactly the same. Behe is not using FI or CSI but Irreducible Complexity.
Glad to hear that, since in Signature in the Cell and in Darwin’s Doubt proving a negative was all of what he was trying to do. Glad to hear that he has given up that. Perhaps in his forthcoming The Return of the God Hypothesis he’ll tell us what that predicts. Or more precisely, what it doesn’t predict. And not just say that one can show that evolutionary processes can be proven not to be able to do the job.
Well, we do a lot of thrashing around, but don’t get anywhere near as successful as the theory of Design Intervention, which predicts that elephants will be large, gray, and lumber about the savannah eating trees and bushes. And also that they will be small, pink, and flit from flower to flower in the arctic, pollinating them. And anything else.
Joe Felsenstein,
That’s because there is no theory. But if there was I am sure there is nothing it wouldn’t predict: slow evolution, fast evolution, perfect evolution, imperfect evolution, one time evolution, convergent evolution, junk dna, no junk dna, random, not random…
phoodoo,
Read my previous comment again …
phoodoo,
You’ve forgotten about the niche again, haven’t you, phoodoo?
EricMH,
I posted because I was impressed by your independent thinking, Eric. And I linked to the source. Seems a bit unfair to suggest I’m cherry-picking.
Paul Nelson,
Thanks for the link, Paul. From the abstract, I couldn’t spot the connection with a theory of ID.
It is nice to see some soul searching and a desire for a more positive, less ‘but evolution can’t do this!’ approach by the ID’ers. Please keep us informed here about the progress you make. I for one would be interested.
As a suggestion, you may want to consider dropping the moniker ‘Intelligent Design’ for the ideas you are investigating. The concept of ID is tainted beyond rescue, and if you really want to focus on scientific hypotheses, models and research you would be better off to cut yourselves loose from the rabid pseudo-sciency anti-Darwin crowd, especially from the YEC’s who obviously have the scientific credibility of flat earthers. Associating with them will only maintain the S/N levels at the current level, and you would have a lot more time for research if you didn’t have to wade into these endless quasi-religious debates all the time. Go and buy a smaller tent, I’d say.
Moreover, finding a better description for your ideas than ‘Intelligent Design’ has the added advantage of removing much of Gregory’s motivation to post here 😉
More tainted than Darwinism, ha!
The atheist have tried that trick with Darwinism, changing the name and all. There is only one problem, they can’t think of a new name, or even a theory. Well, that won’t stop them!
ID, at least at UD, does itself a disservice by allowing people like Bornagain77, KairosFocus and ET (aka Joe, Virgil Cain, Frankie and a cast of thousands) spew their self-righteous, pompous, incoherent nonsense on their blog.
ID’s biggest weakness (amongst many other weaknesses) is that they refuse to propose any mechanisms by which these designs become realized.
No. As usual you are blathering incoherent nonsense.
An intelligent design theory, should such a thing ever be formulated, would be a theory of how some entity X was intelligently designed. A model that accounts for the coming into existence and the attributes of X. X has these properties because it came into existence through this ID mechanism. That would be, in essential form, a theory of ID.
Such a theory does not make predictions about whether evolution could (or could not) also produce X.
Intelligent Design needs to make predictions that detail what would have to be true if X was produced by ID, and then those predictions would need to be compared to observations, and if those observations disagree with the predictions of the ID theory, the theory is wrong. That’s how to falsify ID. Not by showing that evolution can account for X. After all, it is possible that BOTH ID and evolution could account for X, but that X nevertheless was designed. In such a case it would be idiotic to consider ID falsified just because X could, in theory, also be evolved.
It is not a prediction of any theory of Intelligent Design that “the evolutionary process cannot generate functional information to account for complex adaptations”.
That makes no logical sense.
If ID is to make an inference to the best explanation, that is also not something that predicts the putative lack of any evolutionary process. In that case, it would need to be shown that the proposed theory of ID really is the better explanation for X, than some evolutionary model is. Scientists already have established frameworks for comparing different models (explanations). One commonly used metric for how good a model is, is parsimony and goodness of fit(aka explanatory power).
For a putative theory of ID to be a better explanation, a better model, than evolution, it would have to be fleshed out as a model that has actual model parameters that can be evaluated in terms of parsimony (how many parameters do the model have) and goodness of fit(how much of the data does it explain, and how accurately?). No such model of ID currently exists, for anything, anywhere. Ever.
[quote from abstract]
“We have developed the concept of pathway assembly to explore the amount of extrinsic information required to build an object. To quantify this information in an agnostic way, we present a method to determine the amount of pathway assembly information contained within such an object by deconstructing the object into its irreducible parts, and then evaluating the minimum number of steps to reconstruct the object along any pathway.”
[end of quote]
The paper is primarily mathematical and its merits would be best evaluated by an interested mathematician, perhaps Jeff S. But regardless of the intentions of the authors, the above paragraph sure sounds like the sort of thing that would excite people interested in biology-free mathematics to use to quantify and bound the information that evolution could add, at least by their lights.
I’ve only skimmed it; the paper does mention biology and evolution in passing and mentions the environment (the niche!) as a source of information.
Look who’s drooling again.
What exactly are each of those?
I want to comment on this as well. It is illogical nonsense.
You don’t falsify a theory by having a competing theory that also explains the observations. All you end up with is having two theories.
If the only thing that stops ID from being invalid is that evolutionary theory has gaps, ID is precisely what so many have said so often: a god-of-the-gaps argument.
The closest I’ve seen them come to doing that is when Sternberg claims to refute whale evolution using population genetic “models” From what I saw of his presentation he merely invokes population genetics without producing any numbers or equations. He also implied that all the transitional whale fossils must be the direct antecedents of each other, which no one actually believes.
What would count to you as a model worthy of being “worrisome”
I know what you mean by this- that ID doesnt merely refute evolution- but when I try to define it I cant. Are most theories “positive”? Does positive mean anything besides the absence of a negation of another theory? When we think of alternate theories in any science do they each contain refutations of the competing theory? I dont think so . I seems to me that each stands alone as a way to explain some phenomena
Could you or Paul summarize what a positive argument for ID would look like?
What, like:
“If you use ID theory you are supposed to find nothing.”
Dembski, Marks and Ewert have done the most in this regard. Dembski proposed the information tracking methodology, which they then used in the recent Evolutionary Informatics book. This tracking methodology is clearly an alternative to methodological naturalism. It is a neutral methodology that is more modest and does not make any a priori absolute claims about causes, but instead tracks the information through a process to see where it terminates. They used it on evolutionary algorithms and demonstrated the information generated from the algorithms could be traced back to the programmer. None of it came from the algorithms themselves. *Side note:* even though the method is used on evolutionary algorithms, the method has nothing intrinsically to do with refuting Darwinism, and stands on its own. Thus it is a positive methodology that is distinct from the “Darwin boo” approach mentioned by Nelson.
Dr. Montañez has done some very interesting work on the sparsity of fitness functions that optimize for some given domain. Like the information tracking method, while it can be applied to the showing the shortcoming of evolution, the theory itself is independent of evolution, and applies to all optimization problems. In addition, his recent paper on the unified model for specified complexity pulls together many different ways of detecting and measuring information.
Dr. Ewert has also recently proposed the dependency graph of life, which fits the genetic data extraordinarily better than the simple tree model.
Finally, there is the question, if stochastic processes cannot create information, what can? Jonathan Bartlett has done some good work here proposing halting oracles as an example of something that can create information.
As a corollary to positive ID science, there is also positive ID tech. A contribution in this regard is Bartlett’s concept of generalized information, which allows one to judge whether a machine learning model is overfitting the data. It is based on Dembski’s active information.
So, the science is in the beginning stages, but the above are all definite examples of what positive ID science looks like.
There seem to be a couple basic facets emerging:
1. methodologies that are based on informational metrics
2. extrapolating human design characteristics into other areas
3. enumerating non-stochastic causes
4. general and mathematical in nature, independent of particular scientific disciplines
All of these facets tie together, because the fundamental thing that is being detected and measured is the intrusion of a non-stochastic cause into a stochastic process. Currently, the going assumption in science is that everything is stochastic since the laws of physics are stochastic and scientists assume everything reduces to physics due to the presumption of materialism. But, this is merely a hypothesis and can be tested with the informational metrics ID has proposed.
Ironically, modern science is doing exactly what they accuse biblical fundamentalists of doing, which is fitting the data to the assumptions. In fact, it is only the ID movement that is being truly scientific with regard to the core assumption of universal stochasticity that currently governs all of science. Even Kolmogorov, the inventor of modern axiomatic probability, did not believe that everything must be stochastic but said such an idea is a hypothesis to be tested with his formulation of probability theory.