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 William Dembski; the “high priest” of ID has largely withdrawn from the fray but his ideas have been promoted and developed by Robert Marks and Winston Ewert.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
keiths,
Repeating nonsense does not stop it from being nonsense. Universal common descent is a claim that reproduction and variation from that reproduction is responsible for the diversity of life.
Reproduction is a mechanism that causes a population to increase given it is greater than the death rate.
Adapa,
A honest person supports his claims. I made a very simple request. Show me where Paul said Weiss did not support evolution. I must assume that he did not and you are blatantly misrepresenting Paul. Who really has the ideological agenda here?
LOL! Bill destroys every Irony-meter in the hemisphere again. 😀
What does the reproduction with variation part do Bill? What causes the variation? How do some variants come to outnumber others?
An honest person did. A dishonest Creationist knee-jerk defends another dishonest Creationist quote-miner without bothering to read the thread or watch the video in question.
Show me where I claimed Paul said Weiss did not support evolution. I didn’t say that at all and you’re making up a lie to support your fellow Creationist. Here is what I actually said and what I supported:
“You dishonestly quote-mined Weiss to paint a false picture of Weiss having serious doubts about evolution when the exact opposite is true.”
Shame on you for lying Bill.
colewd,
Write that on the ceiling above your bed.
No. Universal common descent is the claim that all of life descended from a single common ancestor (aka LUCA).
And none of that contradicts what I wrote about gene gain and loss:
Adapa,
So you accused him of quote mining. Share the quote and show what he left out.
I already did Bill. Get your head out of your ass and read the frickkin’ thread.
keiths,
I am surprised you re worded the content of what I said and called it different. No biggie let’s use the words all life shares a common ancestor. How are ancestors created. What is the MECHANISM?
It’s biological reproduction. The common descent claim is all about a MECHANISM called reproduction. The claim is that we can account from all life being reproduced from a single cell through cell division and eventually sexual reproduction.
This charade is caused because the public and many in the scientific community have lost confidence that natural selection can account for complex adaptions.
Can we try to hold back on the accusations?
It is getting disruptive enough that I might have to start guanoing. But it would be better if you would all just hold back.
Adapa,
You are being evasive. Why are you afraid to make this argument. There is no quote mine Tim. This is figment of your imagination.
You are not being honest. That’s why you are too afraid to read the thread and watch the video. Nelson presented just a “framing” paragraph and left out the later explanations given by Weiss. That’s out-of-context quote-mining Bill and is quite dishonest. I documented two separate examples of it. I can’t do anything about your lack of honesty in refusing to look at the evidence already presented.
To the surprise of absolutely no one Bill “accidentally” deletes the part about reproduction with variation and of course omits all mention of the effects of natural selection on the variants.
You really should see a psychiatrist about that severe mental block you have Bill.
Well, Mods? Is this a form of atheist/agnostic/skeptic down-talking kindness the world needs more of?
Then what would you call Bill’s absolute refusal for years to consider the effects of selection feedback in evolutionary processes in all these many ID/Evolution discussions if not a mental block? Are you suggesting it’s deliberate dishonesty?
Let him without sin cast the first stone.
Paul Nelson emailed me his exercises. They are his copyright so I won’t quote them here, but I can describe what they are like. They present a tree and a the characters at some of the tips, and then ask the students to use the power of the idea of common descent to predict the characters at some other tips, without using books or Google, or discussing among each other. The “characters” are molecular structures, or presence of members of a gene family, or distribution of trace elements, or developmental features such as spiral cleavage. The trees are quite deep in time. He invited me to do the exercises and then he would reveal to me the answers.
Thanks Paul, but no, I won’t do that. It would be too easy for you to pick and choose among cases and present me only with ones where there were surprising differences. Similarly, on a smaller scale, I could present you with sites in a stretch of DNA where humans had “A”, and ask you to guess the base in the Chimpanzee. And it would always not be “A”, if I chose the right sites.
Of course if I chose the sites more representatively, “A” would be more common than “C” or “G” or “T”. Have your students tried cases like that? Have they also tried to see whether the trees inferred from one protein locus are very similar to the trees inferred from others? I know a data set with about 14,000 protein loci, each of which is aligned across 116 mammalian species, and which has trees automatically inferred for each locus. Your students might look at those trees to see whether, say, apes and humans form a clade on them. Or whether they are all wildly different.
And thanks for saying that you’d have liked to invite me to talk at that summer “seminar” except you couldn’t because the students would be too nervous that their identities might leak out. Actually my distrust of the Discovery Institute is so great that I would not have come anyway, so they need not fear.
FWIW, I looked up the Weiss quote and compared it between the video and the original. It does appear to be a quote mine.
Paul even adds a throw-away line that is effectively a quote mine in itself. Paul says that Weiss “speculates maybe it [an orphan gene] came from space.”
In reality, Weiss is adamant that they don’t come from outer space. He writes:
Paul leaves that part out.
ETA: Exact wording of quote.
As did I. I even posted a link to the entire original article somewhere upthread and posted excerpts which directly contradict what Nelson claimed about Weiss’ position. But don’t tell Bill, he’ll have a conniption fit.
As I noted earlier, the term “Liar For Jesus” was coined for a reason.
[bump] Trying to get back on topic. Some questions have been asked in the thread. I am curious for the answers.
1) How does that apply to biological processes? An example would be nice.
2) In what way does demonstrating non-stochastic processes constitute positive proof for ID? Are you talking about libertarian free will?
Corneel,
I presume you are using ‘non-stochastic’ in the way EricMH uses the term?
I think we should desist from adopting this heterodox usage of the word. When I, and most scientists, read ‘non-stochastic’ we understand ‘deterministic’. This is not what EricMH means.
Following his convention, we could say that ‘dead’ is a form of ‘alive’. After all, ‘alive’ means having a range of bodily functions with certain values. In some cases those values might be zero for all of them, but under this peculiar usage they would still be considered ‘alive’. Clearly this is not a helpful way of talking about things outside of mathematics.
It’s not really heterodox, because it is an accepted use of the term in mathematics. As I remarked before, I was familiar with this use of the term, because I saw it used that way before at the Sandwalk blog (not by ID creationists).
Apart from that, I usually indulge these peculiarities, because they help me getting in the same frame of mind as my discussion partner. Consider the logic: A deterministic process is simply a stochastic process for which one outcome has probability one, and all other outcomes probability zero. Eric envisions some process for which those probabilities are not set at all (?). What does that mean? I think that helps tremendously in viewing things from his perspective.
But I don’t care either way. If Eric agrees we can use the terms in their familiar connotation, as long as we are all clear on what we are talking about.
Corneel,
Well, let’s agree at least that we first need to see a worakble definition of ‘non-stochastic’ in the EricMH sense of the term before we can even use it in our discussions here.
And like you, I am puzzled by the ‘convergence’ comment. What do natural processes converge on?
Who would have guessed?
keiths,
And it may not be a quote mine depending on the message that Paul was trying to convey.
Adapta can take things out of context. My response to you was simply to show that that universal common descent was a mechanistic claim.
Pauls main subject is not about what Weiss thinks about orphan genes it is to show that they are noise to the common descent claim. Adapta, Tim or what ever his real name is, is taking this out of context.
Whether Weiss thinks these came from outer space or some other speculation is a trivial point. The point is common descent does not predict their origin.
More interesting: Every set of observations has some distribution. How can you tell they don’t correspond to some predetermined distribution?
Exciting stuff this Methodological Supernaturalism 😉
Rumraket,
Are you claiming general relativity is not a theory? Where does it tell us how matter acts on space time?
You accuse me of blathering well I think you may be projecting here.
T_aquaticus,
A perfectly formed phylogenetic nested hierarchy does not exist. If It did the discussion would be over. The noise in the data is evidence of this.
Did you listen to what he said in the video? Did you hear the bit where he said Weiss was having to “grapple with what’s there with respect to a theory he thinks is true”?
Thinking something is true does not suggest doubt.
I have no idea what you’re suddenly blathering about here and by this stage I’m sure it doesn’t even matter. I’ve stopped caring about your endless incoherent pretense of having something to say. You don’t, you never had. You understand next to nothing, and what little you understand you can barely articulate. This is the conclusion I’ve come to after having interacted with you now for about 6 years on this website.
That’s right, it doesn’t. Nobody says it does. Common descent does not predict they should exist, and it does not predict that they should not exist. It simply makes no prediction about how genes come into existence.
It only predicts that within a certain time-frame that depends on the rate character state change, it should be possible to detect nesting hierarchical structure in the data. That’s basically it.
Common descent is a theory about relationships, not the mechanisms by which species (or their genes) evolve. If you want to look at theories that deal with the coming into existence of novel genes, you need to look at theories that deal with the processes and mechanisms of molecular evolution. That means biochemistry and molecular biology.
Actually a “perfectly formed nested hierarchy “ could be argued as as evidence for design. Nature is messy.
A perfectly formed nested hierarchy would be incompatible with how we know characters change. It would imply that homoplasies are impossible. But we know that they aren’t. So we expect a non-perfect hierarchy.
As usual all your objections are frankly quite idiotic. What you are saying is essentially that because measurements are never known to an infinite accuracy, any theory that attempts to explain the measurements is in trouble. That’s just plain stupid.
The fact that I can’t measure the temperature in my room to an accuracy of fourty quintillion decimal places is not somehow evidence against a particular theory that attempts to explain whatever temperature I happen to measure. Noise, merely by it’s existence, is not evidence against a theory.
faded_Glory, to Corneel:;
Their mean. Eric sees every process as a mathematical process producing a series of values, the mean of which converges to the true mean (per the Law of Large Numbers).
As you point out, that makes little sense when talking about processes such as plate tectonics.
Supernatural or intelligent or both.
Any stochastic/deterministic processes can be simulated on TM but human intelligence cannot according to Eric. Hence intelligence could produce non-stochastic processes, according to Eric.
colewd,
Paul is painting Weiss as so “flustered” by orphan genes that he desperately suggests that they come from outer space. That is not an accurate portrayal, to say the least.
Rumraket,
I will be blunt. Your understanding of science is too narrow to have any credibility critiquing design theory. Guys like Behe can show analogies between design theory and general relativity. They have a reasonable general scientific education. Your straw man of what design should be is nonsense.
Bill,
Let’s just say that when you try to condescend to Rumraket, you aren’t very convincing.
Rumraket,
I have discovered like Harshman your thinking is too narrow to really understand whats going around you. What I am saying is what the mechanism of common descent predicts. The noise in the data is unpredictable. You again will accuse me of blathering but is just possible you have a comprehension problem? Instead of accusing me of blathering why don’t you ask for clarification?
keiths,
I think Rum is ok. He just does not understand the limits of his knowledge.
How much do you understand about general relativity? The things Rum claims is beyond juvenile in certain cases.
keiths,
I listened to the part about Weiss this am. There maybe some subtile spin in his comment. Is there anyone here who has not used some spin in their arguments.
Eric’s proposal does not make sense to me.
First, math issues: AFAIK, the weak and strong laws of large numbers are about the convergence of the sequence of overall means of iid random variables. The theorems are not about whole distributions.
There are theorems about convergence of distributions, such as the Central Limit Theorem and its generalizations.
But even supposing Eric has something like this in mind, I don’t understand what he is trying to convey.
Convergence refers to a sequence of mathematical objects. How does it apply to a process? Is he assuming some sequence of probability distributions associated with the process? If so, wouldn’t such an assumption mean he had already assumed stochasticity (but not stationarity).
And what does mathematical convergence have to do with science? I can speculate, but I won’t, other than it seems to be another example of Eric privileging armchair mathematics over observation and building models to fit the world, not the math.
Sure Bill, that’s what’s going on here. lol
No, that’s me explaining that to you. Not the other way around.
Yes, obviously. Noise always is.
Among the two of us, on this topic, no.
I don’t need clarification from you. There’s nothing there to get clarified. It is obvious when you are blathering and when you are not. It is my experience now, after six years of having argued with you, that when you blather it’s because you just don’t have anything meaningful to say and you just want to keep up the pretense of having something to say. But you don’t have. All previous attempts to get you to clarify your blather just ended up with more blather.
Rumraket,
Arrogance is a very limiting quality.
I made a comment showing how your claim about ID was not consistent with accepted scientific theory like General Relativity or Newtons theory or gravity. Your comment was to accuse me of blethering. This is a weak attempt to attack me when you don’t have an argument or don’t have the knowledge to defend your claim. This is not being a stand up guy.
BruceS,
Let’s look at a process of manufacturing a nail that is 100 mm with a specification of plus or minus 1 millimeter. Depending on the control of the process I would expect a mean length around 100 mm with a distribution around 99 and 101 mm. The shape of this bell curve will fill out over time as my numbers go up. I would also expect outliers to be rejected outside the spec. as numbers go up. The filling out of the bell curve is convergence if I understand it correctly.
But that’s just the point. QED.
It should not be possible for me to pick surprising cases, if UCD, when that historical geometry is coupled with its multiple auxiliary theories, were truly predictive, in the sense of excluding possible states of affairs.
Analogy: we place a lump of iron ore in a sealed box fed only with pure oxygen, and isolate the box and its oxygen supply and unidirectional outflow in a lab where no monkey business is possible. On returning to the box a year later, we expect to see a well-defined set of chemical outcomes — and do not expect the very much larger set of outcomes excluded by the same chemical (and underlying atomic) theory. For instance, there will be no gold in the box, or uranium, or platinum.
But evolutionary theory, right from the start, comes with an unconstrained “contingencies occur” clause attached. Any damn thing can happen. I could have made the phylogenetic exercises thought experiment hundreds of pages long, with examples even more counterintuitive, or “surprising,” to use your appropriate adjective, only most students get the point right away. As you did.
Signal + noise = all the observations. If UCD, or even the CD of particular clades, predicts signal (congruence) and noise (incongruence), it predicts everything, and the evidence of nature cannot possibly talk back to the theory, or tell us when or if UCD or CD might be wrong.
That’s a problem.
T. aqua, you say that UCD is tested statistically. Can you give an example?
Memo to the Quote-Mining Thought Police:
Which of these statements (from Weiss 2012) is true?
A couple of years ago there was a discussion on cone snails. I added this comment and the discussion continued. I linked to an article on the findings that a specific cone snail venom peptide had been found in the wings of a butterfly. this peptide was 63 amino acids long. This is an incongruency which is difficult to explain.
After searching the ‘net for information on cone snails, I became much more fascinated by these creatures themselves, than I was by the above incongruency. Here are some very interesting videos by Baldomero “Toto” Olivera
This gives me the urge to start up a new endeavour. I think I’ll call it the “Ingenious Design Movement” 🙂
Paul Nelson,
I am curious. Do you agree the nested hierarchy of species exists?
I would not call that “convergence”. Your expression “filling out” works better.