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 William Dembski; the “high priest” of ID has largely withdrawn from the fray but his ideas have been promoted and developed by Robert Marks and Winston Ewert.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
It’s in the third paragraph:
Thus, if we know the program size and memory, then we can infer from the output whether there is some external source of information feeding the program, because the output will violate the convergence limit imposed by size and memory.
First, I am not primarily concerned with evolutionary theory, as I think I’ve stated many times on this forum. Perhaps the theories I develop can be applied, as I attempted in the population genetic example (and I thought I replied to all criticisms).
The primary focus is characterizing the sort of thing that can ‘create information,’ and I have at least two mathematical examples.
My work builds on the science because, as I’ve also stated a couple times, all physical laws are stochastic, computable processes (as far as we know). Thus, the math I develop applies to all physical laws. In a sense, I am going even more general than Einstein and Bell, while staying rooted in the science.
So, by your criteria, I don’t think it is fair to say my work is merely living in some otherworldly math realm that has no bearing on the empirical sciences. On the other hand, it certainly has a ways to go.
I do have a couple empirical predictions. One of which I published with Jon Bartlett in “Naturalism and Its Alternatives”. Tom English has an unpublished article criticizing it, I believe.
Another I presented as a poster at the HCOMP 16 conference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.00904
Thus, this armchair theorizing of mine is not entirely without empirical fruit.
That being said, of course there is much more work to do.
Another is intrinsic teleology. We could mathematically characterize this as a process that is best explained by its future than its past.
Life is yet another. A process that reduces entropy instead of increasing entropy.
I believe both these are mathematically defined yet fall outside of stochastic processes.
Yes, I got that part. But I don’t know what further conclusions you are wanting to draw.
If you conclude there is an external source of information, wouldn’t you be attempting to identify that external source?
But it does not reduce entropy. It redistributes entropy, so that there is less within the living system and more outside.
By the way, refrigerator does that, too.
When will you be a stand up guy, look yourself in the mirror and apologize for the lie you told about my comment on Nelson’s video?
When will you be a stand up guy, look yourself in the mirror and admit you were wrong about Ewert’s claims?
Pot kettle black Bill. Big time.
Life is an endothermic chemical process which locally reduces entropy by utilizing external energy, energy which can ultimately be traced back to the sun. The overall entropy of the sun-Earth-life system will still increase.
You mean you’re going to break BIO-Complexity’s streak of zero papers in 2019? That will put them half way to 2018’s two papers published.
It’s hard to keep up with all the scientific work ID is churning out. 🙂
No, everything you say is nonsense.
I am. I’ve been trying to explain these things to you now for over 6 years. It’s time for you to face reality and look at the data objectively. But you just don’t seem able to do that.
I know. And yet you’re deeply infatuated with it. You have no skepticism towards it. When you first saw it you latched on to it immediately, and ever since then you’ve been advertising it as some Next Big Thing.
And yet you keep bringing it up as if it has already stood the test of time. You just can’t help referring to it every opportunity.
But then why haven’t you?
You think you are an objective thinker. You are not. You are emotionally tied to materialism.
That was a beautiful and succinct example of projection Bill, thank you for that.
It doesn’t.
Adapa,
I apologize for doubting your position on Nelson. We will see on Ewert but it does look like the claim is suspect at this point.
Rumraket,
Your posts today really showed your lack of objectivity which I expect from partisan hacks like Adapta and Dazz but not from you.
Come on Eric, you haven’t developed any math that applies to any physical laws. To say that you are more general than Einstein or Bell is quite delusional. You don’t even have a good handle on Shannon’s Theory of Information.
Please Eric take a course in thermodynamic to learn about entropy. Study your refrigerator which lowers entropy inside but raises it more outside. Once you understand thermodynamic entropy, you might be ready to tackle entropy in information theory as described by Shannon. Then and only then can you come to the key insight of Shannon – thermodynamic entropy in joules/K and information entropy in bits are the same thing just with different units.
Patrick Trischitta,
Where is the experimental evidence that supports Boltzman’s equation?
I do it each morning when I put cold milk into my hot tea and stir.
Patrick Trischitta,
That’s the point of the non-stochastic process idea.
Say we showed this convergence rate disruption occurred every time we observed humans. That would tell us humans have some non physical source of information hooked up to their bodies.
Say we also noted there was a hierarchy, such that non-living matter never violated the convergence bound, and lower life forms violated it to a lesser degree and different manner than higher life forms, and the human mind produced the greatest bound violation. Then we can see an overall pattern to non-stochastic causes, and categorize them at different levels.
Like I said, harvest is plentiful but laborers are few 🙂
That is speculation and would have to be measured. That’s the great big point behind everything I’m say. Let’s test these ideas instead of just assuming! As I see it, methodological naturalism just wants to assume everything is stochastic and not test the idea.
That’s why I say that from my perspective ID is the most scientifically objective paradigm. At least they are testing the fundamental assumption behind MN. MN is no better than the bible fundamentalists they like to bash.
Btw, the ignore button on this forum is great.
More likely, someone will point to serious flaws in the statistical model you are using.
Patrick Trischitta,
Right answer wrong equation. Your coffee is validated by Clausius equation when you have an atom counter on your lips you have a chance to measure Bolzman’s equation. 🙂
How are you Patrick I miss our exchanges.
There seems to be no shortage of scientifically illiterate ID-Creationism supporters though.
Maybe you should test them and publish the results before crowing like a cock-of-the-walk. Just sayin’.
LOL! Bill you’ve been making a right fool of yourself over scientific topics you don’t understand for years now. You latch on to any self-published non-scientific codswallop from woo-merchants like Ewert and gpuccio and cling to it desperately like it’s your only security blanket. Then when people take the time to explain your misunderstanding you go into “Dory” mode and come back the next day making the same discredited claims.
If you started with equations of scientifically-validated models and then derived empirical consequences mathematically, then I would agree (example: no cloning from QM theory). But lacking the scientific connections, it is just math. I agree math is more general than science in the sense that it explores all possible consequences of axioms; but its conclusions have no bearing on the world until validated by science. That is my concern with applying your work to biology.
I am not familiar with all of your work, so it was unfair of me to characterize it without qualification. I was specifically thinking of work that is used to make claims about observed biological genetic variation and history and whether existing mechanisms of evolution can explain them. For example, ID claims that observations can only be explained via mechanisms which involve a designer or mechanisms which violate fundamental physics, such as reverse time causation (Aristotelian teleology).
I am following your exchanges on entropy and with Neil but will withhold comments beyond saying a I agree with concerns others have raised. Small exception: the relation of Shannon’s work to macroscopic TD entropy and the work of Boltzmann and Gibbs is not nearly as simple or well-established as your posts imply. Here is Frigg with a summary of the work addressing the issues:
http://www.romanfrigg.org/writings/SM_Fieldguide.pdf
I am not sure which work of Boltzmann you are referring to. But his work in statistical mechanics was intended to try to explain observed macroscopic TD in terms of idealized versions of microstate physics.
So it differs from some ID work because it was constrained by existing physics, both microscopic and macrostate, and because Boltzmann understood that his mathematical claims had to start from scientifically-validated math models and produce results which could be compared to and were consistent with existing empirical observations.
I don’t think he was trying to make new empirical predictions.
Interesting factoid
“The celebrated formula S=k logW, expressing a relation between entropy S and probability W, has been engraved on his tombstone (even though he never actually wrote this formula down)”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/statphys-Boltzmann/
Such concern for evidence. If only you were even handed in your demand for such.
If only it worked for OPs!
gpuccio’s reasons for avoiding publication are as laughable as his claims.
J-Mac seems to have got the message 😛
EricMH,
I think you would find it much easier to convince people if you could provide some clear examples of actual natural processes that are ‘stochastic’ in your terminology, and that converge on something.
I have mentioned a few, such as plate tectonics and rainfall, and you keep studiously avoiding engaging with these. I honestly do not see how and why such processes would necessarily ‘converge’ on anything. Take average rainfall at a location X – this average will depend to a very large extent on the time frame over which it is measured. Depending if you measure over hours, days, years, decades, millenia or millions of years you will get very different results. Where is the convergence?
Neil Rickert, Adapa, Rumraket, Patrick Trischitta
Who’d have thought it! A bit of common ground between those who lean towards the spiritualistic/religious and those who lean towards the physicalistic/secular.
Both the Greek and the Hebraic creation myths begin with the formless.
In the beginning was Chaos, a formless void. Out of Chaos the beginnings of physical, earthly substance condensed forming a duality of Gaia (earth) and Uranus (the heavens). With this beginning, time begins. Time is an aspect of Cronus, the being that eats his own children. And the ever expanding spacial dimension in and through which all physical forms are born, this the ancient Greeks termed Zeus.
This is strikingly similar to the modern understanding of the birth and subsequent evolution of the universe. Living systems progress by maintaining a balance between Cosmos and Chaos, between order and disorder. They maintain themselves through the local reduction of entropy.
Crackpot Index
5 points for each mention of “Einstien”, “Hawkins” or “Feynmann”.
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein
🙂
I perhaps lean secular. Please remember, though, that “secular” does not mean “atheist”. “Secular” just means that you should keep your god ideas out of the public sphere.
I don’t lean physicalistic. I lean curious. I’m always curious to find out more. But I don’t impose any a priori restrictions on what I might find out.
I sometimes take a different interpretation of this. So I see “chaos” as standing for the tabula rasa. A child is born into a world of chaos. But as the child learns, it begins to find its own way of ordering the world. So that ordering (imposed by the child) is seen to emerge from the chaos.
I would think that reverse time causation would only violate fundamental physics if thermodynamics is a theory of fundamental physics, since quantum mechanics is time-symmetrical and in general relativity there is no “arrow” of time at all (block universe).
However, reverse time causation is not Aristotelian teleology.
Correct. There are millions of people of faith who want to live in a secular society — usually because they belong to religious minorities and do not want the religion of the majority imposed upon them. (This is the long-standing position of Reform Judaism, for example.)
Mostly agree but (1) the newborn has its own endogenous constraints on sense-making, some of which take shape in utero and (2) the play of energies across the newborn’s sensory receptors is not entirely unstructured or unpatterned. So sense-making is better understood as unfolding from the coordination of worldly patterns (many of which are the behaviors of people and animals, after all!) and cognitive structures under construction, rather than the imposition of order on chaos.
That is an incorrect understanding of methodological naturalism.
I know that you want to begin with this flawed understanding of methodological naturalism, because that’s how Dembski defines “design”: as the complement of chance and necessity. That’s how the explanatory filter is supposed to work: since everything is either design or chance or necessity, then if both chance and necessity are highly improbable explanations, then design is the most likely explanation.
So while it makes sense to question “methodological naturalism” assuming intelligent design, it is not the case that intelligent design is itself more objective or impartial than alternatives. Rather, one has already adopted a prejudice against “methodological naturalism” by accepting Demsbki’s initial set-up.
Thank you for your thoughts.
I wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of thinking that these designations are categories that each of us must fit into. After all, as you have just shown, we are all individuals with complex stets of beliefs and world views..
Well I would say that a child’s understanding of the world goes from chaotic to ordered as it develops. But development also consists of multiple physical processes involving substances being built up in an orderly fashion and being broken down towards chaos.
The interplay of order and chaos appear at all levels in the known universe. And the order has to be accounted for if we want to satisfy our curiosity.
Good points. Additionally I’ve often suspected that intelligent design is just another particular instantiation of some combination of chance and necessity. I’m not convinced the categories are mutually exclusive.
Adapa,
This is all possible. It’s also possible that you have an agenda you are driving and taking naive children like Rum down with you. I have learned, to people like you, truth does not matter its ideology first. This is my last message to you and I wish the best for you.
Both right. Thanks.
OMagain,
The problem is O once you get locked into an ideology it’s hard to see evidence that contradicts it. This is true for all of us.
That’s something you tell yourself when what you claim as evidence is unpersuasive.
It’s especially true for you however with regard to certain concepts. Things have demonstrably been explained to you over and over again and the next time you simply repeat the trope regardless.
Atoms are designed, that’s the truth already determined by you. Evidence comes later, apparently. So pot, kettle?
OMagain,
There is not doubt this has been true but also…
Is it just possible that sometimes the concept is wrong and I have rejected it. Evolutionary theory is built on circular reasoning around its grand claims and devoid of experimental verification to move it out of assumption into empirical support.
OMagain,
Do you have an argument that they are not designed?
Designed by whom?
Specifically, which grand claims and what circular reasoning?
Compared to ID, less or more experimental verification?
LOL! Bill every day you set a new world record for projection. You’ve ignored enough scientific evidence to fill a small museum due to your extremely narrow-minded religious ideology. You also showed you’re not above outright lying when it comes to supporting your anti-science religious beliefs. So cry us a river about how everyone in the scientific community you interact with is out to get you and you’re the only one interested in “DA TRUTH” 😀
What’s that make, about the tenth time you’ve made the same proclamation? 🙂
Eric’s views on retrocausality are even weirder than you might think. Here’s an exchange I had with him on the topic:
Eric:
keiths:
petrushka, playing devil’s advocate:
keiths:
Eric:
keiths: