Since the time of the Dover trial in 2005, I’ve made a hobby of debating Intelligent Design proponents on the Web, chiefly at the pro-ID website Uncommon Descent. During that time I’ve seen ID proponents make certain mistakes again and again. This is the first of a series of posts in which (as time permits) I’ll point out these common mistakes and the misconceptions that lie behind them.
I encourage IDers to read these posts and, if they disagree, to comment here at TSZ. Unfortunately, dissenters at Uncommon Descent are typically banned or have their comments censored, all for the ‘crime’ of criticizing ID or defending evolution effectively. Most commenters at TSZ, including our blog host Elizabeth Liddle and I, have been banned from UD. Far better to have the discussion here at TSZ where free and open debate is encouraged and comments are not censored.
The first misconception I’ll tackle is a big one: it’s the idea that the evidence for common descent is not a serious threat to ID. As it turns out, ID is not just threatened by the evidence for common descent — it’s literally trillions of times worse than unguided evolution at explaining the evidence. No exaggeration. If you’re skeptical, read on and I’ll explain.
Common Descent and ID
The ‘Big Tent’ of the ID movement shelters two groups. The ‘creationists’ believe that the ‘kinds’ of life were created separately, as the Biblical account suggests, and these folks therefore deny common descent. The ‘common descent IDers’ accept common descent but argue that natural processes, unassisted by intelligence, cannot account for the complexity and diversity of life we see on earth today. They therefore believe that evolution was guided by an Intelligence that either actively intervened at critical moments, or else influenced evolution via information that was ‘front-loaded’ into the genome at an earlier time.
Creationists see common descent as a direct threat. If modern lifeforms descended from a single common ancestor, as evolutionary biologists believe, then creationism is false. Creationists fight back in two ways. Some creationists argue that the evidence for common descent is poor, or that the methods used by evolutionary biologists to reconstruct the tree of life are unreliable. Other creationists concede that the evidence for common descent is solid, but they argue that it can be explained equally well by a hypothesis of common design — the idea that the Creator reused certain design motifs when creating different organisms. Any similarities between created ‘kinds’ are thus explained not by common descent, but by design reuse, or ‘common design’.
The ‘common descent IDers’ do not see common descent as a threat. They accept it, because they see it as being compatible with guided evolution. And while they agree with biologists that unguided evolution can account for small-scale changes in organisms, they deny that it is powerful enough to explain macroevolutionary change, as revealed by the large-scale structure of the tree of life. Thus guided evolution is necessary, in their view. Since common descent IDers accept the reality of common descent, you might be surprised that the evidence for common descent is a problem for them, but it is — and it’s a serious one. Read on for details.
The Problem(s) for ID
I’ve mentioned three groups of IDers so far: 1) creationists who dispute the evidence for common descent; 2) creationists who accept the evidence for common descent, but believe that it can be equally well explained by the hypothesis of common design; and 3) IDers who accept common descent but believe that unguided evolution can’t account for macroevolutionary change. Let’s look at these groups in turn, and at why the the evidence for common descent is a serious problem for each of them.
The creationists who dispute the evidence for common descent face a daunting task, simply because the evidence is so massive and so persuasive. I can do no better than to point readers to Douglas Theobald’s magnificent 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution for a summary of all the distinct lines of evidence that converge in support of the hypothesis of common descent. Because Theobald does such a thorough and convincing job, there’s no need for me to rehash the evidence here. If any IDers wish to challenge the evidence, or the methodologies used to interpret it, I encourage them to leave comments. The good news is that we have Joe Felsenstein as a commenter here at TSZ. Joe literally wrote the book on inferring phylogenies from the data, so if he is willing to respond to objections and questions from IDers, we’re in good shape.
I have yet to encounter a creationist who both understood the evidence and was able to cast serious doubt on common descent. Usually the objections are raised by those who do not fully understand the evidence and the arguments for common descent. For this reason, I emphasize the importance of reading Theobald’s essay. Think of it this way: if you’re a creationist who participates in Internet discussions, the points raised by Theobald are bound to come up in debate. You might as well know your enemy, the better to argue against him or her. And if you’re open-minded, who knows? You might actually find yourself persuaded by the evidence.
The evidence also presents a problem for our second group of creationists, but for a different reason. These are the folks who accept the evidence for common descent, but argue that it supports the hypothesis of common design equally well. In other words, they claim that separate creation by a Creator who reuses designs would produce the same pattern of evidence that we actually see in nature, and that common design is therefore on an equal footing with common descent. This is completely wrong. The options open to a Creator are enormous. Only a minuscule fraction of them give rise to an objective nested hierarchy of the kind that we see in nature. In the face of this fact, the only way for a creationist to argue for common design is to stipulate that the Creator must have chosen one of these scant few possibilities out of the (literally) trillions available. In other words, to make their case, they have to assume that the Creator either chose (or was somehow forced) to make it appear that common descent is true, even though there were trillions of ways to avoid this. Besides being theologically problematic for most creationists (since it implies either deception or impotence on the part of the Creator), this is a completely arbitrary assumption, introduced only to force common design to match the evidence. There’s no independent reason for the assumption. Common descent requires no such arbitrary assumptions. It matches the evidence without them, and is therefore a superior explanation. And because gradual common descent predicts a nested hierarchy of the kind we actually observe in nature, out of the trillions of alternatives available to a ‘common designer’, it is literally not just millions, or billions, but trillions of times better at explaining the evidence.
What about our third subset of IDers — those who accept the truth of common descent but believe that intelligent guidance is necessary to explain macroevolution? The evidence is a problem for them, too, despite the fact that they accept common descent. The following asymmetry explains why: the discovery of an objective nested hierarchy implies common descent, but the converse is not true; common descent does not imply that we will be able to discover an objective nested hierarchy. There are many choices available to a Designer who guides evolution. Only a tiny fraction of them lead to a inferable, objective nested hierarchy. The Designer would have to restrict himself to gradual changes and predominantly vertical inheritance of features in order to leave behind evidence of the kind we see.
In other words, our ‘common descent IDers’ face a dilemma like the one faced by the creationists. They can force guided evolution to match the evidence, but only by making a completely arbitrary assumption about the behavior of the Designer. They must stipulate, for no particular reason, that the Designer restricts himself to a tiny subset of the available options, and that this subset just happens to be the subset that creates a recoverable, objective, nested hierarchy of the kind that is predicted by unguided evolution. Unguided evolution doesn’t require any such arbitrary assumptions. It matches the evidence without them, and is therefore a superior explanation. And because unguided evolution predicts a nested hierarchy of the kind we actually observe in nature, out of the trillions of alternatives available to a Designer who guides evolution, it is literally trillions of times better than ID at explaining the evidence.
One final point. Most IDers concede that if the evidence supports unguided evolution, then there is no scientific reason to invoke a Creator or Designer. (It’s Occam’s Razor — why posit a superfluous Creator/Designer if the evidence can be explained without one?) It is therefore not enough for ID to succeed at explaining the evidence (which it fails to do, for the reasons given above); it’s also essential for unguided evolution to fail at explaining the evidence.
This is a big problem for IDers. They concede that unguided evolution can bring about microevolutionary changes, but they claim that it cannot be responsible for macroevolutionary changes. Yet they give no plausible reasons why microevolutionary changes, accumulating over a long period of time, should fail to produce macroevolutionary changes. All they can assert is that somehow there is a barrier that prevents microevolution from accumulating and turning into macroevolution.
Having invented a barrier, they must invent a Designer to surmount it. And having invented a Designer, they must arbitrarily constrain his behavior (as explained above) to match the data. Three wild, unsupported assumptions: 1) that a barrier exists; 2) that a Designer exists; and 3) that the Designer always acts in ways that mimic evolution. (We often hear that evolution is a designer mimic, so it’s amusing to ponder a Designer who is an evolution mimic.) Unguided evolution requires no such wild assumptions in order to explain the data. Since it doesn’t require these arbitrary assumptions, it is superior to ID as an explanation.
Here’s an analogy that may help. Imagine you live during the time of Newton. You hear that he’s got this crazy idea that gravity, the force that makes things fall on earth, is also responsible for the orbits of the moon around the earth and of the earth and the other planets around the sun. You scoff, because you’re convinced that there is an invisible, undetected barrier around the earth, outside of which gravity cannot operate. Because of this barrier, you are convinced of the need for angels to explain why the moon and the planets follow the paths they do. If they weren’t pushed by angels, they would go in straight lines. And because the moon and planets follow the paths they do, which are the same paths predicted by Newton on the basis of gravity, you assume that the angels always choose those paths, even though there are trillions of other paths available to them.
Instead of extrapolating from earthly gravity to cosmic gravity, you assume there is a mysterious barrier. Because of the barrier, you invent angels. And once you invent angels, you have to restrict their behavior so that planetary paths match what would have been produced by gravity. Your angels end up being gravity mimics. Laughable, isn’t it?
Yet the ‘logic’ of ID is exactly the same. Instead of extrapolating from microevolution to macroevolution, IDers assume that there is a mysterious barrier that prevents unguided macroevolution from happening. Then they invent a Designer to leap across the barrier. Then they restrict the Designer’s behavior to match the evidence, which just happens to be what we would expect to see if unguided macroevolution were operating. The Designer ends up being an unguided evolution mimic.
The problem is stark. ID is trillions of times worse than unguided evolution at explaining the evidence, and the only way to achieve parity is to tack wild and unsupported assumptions onto it.
If you are still an IDer after reading, understanding, and digesting all of this, then it is safe to say that you are an IDer despite the evidence, not because of it. Your position is a matter of faith and is therefore a religious stance, not a scientific one.
If I am not mistaken, centuries of musings have produced thousands of notions about the properties of deities. There are thousands of warring sects and denominations within just the Christian religion alone. Then there are all the splinter sects within other religions as well.
So just whose “musings on the subject” of deities are we to believe? Are we to accept the “musings” of a relatively narrow set of sectarian proclamations and discard all of science and all other sectarian musings of all other religions?
I would think that the more rational approach would be to put more stock in the musings of a discipline that converges to common consensus from multiple lines of evidence. And this convergence is the result of the efforts of thousands of individuals coming from multiple cultural, religious, ethnic, national, and political backgrounds.
If sectarians of a particularly narrow set of beliefs proclaim themselves to be the only legitimate arbiters of the properties of a deity and what that deity can or cannot do, how do you explain the splintering, blood wars, and divergences among sectarians?
If your sectarian views demand “rationality,” why do you accept a narrow set of sectarian beliefs out of thousands of such sets and then turn right around and reject the conclusions of science? In fact, why do you choose to invent a pseudoscience rather than learn the real science?
Doesn’t sound very rational to me.
The “explanatory theory” came first, probably younger than the ability to even pronounce “evidence”, much less understand what it is. By now, as you imply, “induction” is a rationalization which is phrased to look rational, but which in fact can be more accurately phrased as “whatever ratifies my a priori convictions is evidence, even if it must be misconstrued or outright fabricated. Otherwise it IS NOT EVIDENCE.”
And by this means, sure enough, everything “relevant” supports the theory (a word they substitute for “unsupportable belief”).
Every “irreducibly complex” structure Behe could name, was trivially demolished so clearly any fool could see it. But does such logic influence Behe? I note he keeps writing books saying the same thing over and over, KNOWING it holds no water. Lobotomy, not logical argument, is the only “cure” for creationism.
dr. who:
Are you contradicting yourself by testing “Darwinism” against observations (“…look at genomes, when you simply observe nature…..”)?
If you remember, I said that I was answering without having read through this thread. So I was working ouside of a context.
So, …….
If we ask the question: does the theory of Darwinian/neo-Darwinian evolution make predictions? The answer is “Yes.”
But if you ask,’ is unguided evolutionis testable ?’ then the answer is “no.” Why? Because Darwinian theory is wrong, and if you mean by that “unguided evolution” then you will find that it has very little to do with reality. There’s nothing in the lab to ‘measure’ since Darwinism itself cannot be found there. Nor is it measurable out in nature. Adaption: ‘yes’, speciation/significant divergence: ‘no.’
[Remember that what Darwin presented in the Origins was not very new. Others had already proposed years before many of the things Darwin presented. Everyone knew that organisms adapted to their environment. So, adaptation was nothing new. If you follow the history of Darwinism you’ll find that the major claim Darwin made (and he made it only upon receiving Alfred Wallace’s thesis on the very same topic) was his Law of Divergence. This Law said, basically, that there was no ‘reversion’, that varieties could, under the right condition, lead to the extermination of the parent species. Do we see this happening? To my knowledge this has never been demonstrated.]
dr. who:
But my point was that you are attempting to falsify unguided evolution as an explanation of the biosphere, while at the same time claiming that it is unfalsifiable (a theory that makes no testable predictions – look what you claimed above – would inevitably be unfalsifiable).
Fair enough. However, Darwinism is ‘hypothetically’ capable of being falsified—and it has been over and over. But, from an ideological point of view, it is near impossible to falsify it since its adherents refuse to accept evidence for its falsification.
Just one clear, simple, straightforward example: polymorphisms.
Motoo Kimura invented his “Neutral Theory” precisely because neo-Darwinian expectations were found to be completely wrong. He was one of the premier neo-Darwinists in the 60’s when they first started doing gel electrophoresis on isolated animal proteins. The neo-Darwinian expectation was that there would be very few polymorphisms since each SNP was thought to be under ‘selection’. Because of what is known as “genetic load”, there was only a certain amount of ‘selection’ that could take place in any population before the entire population would die out. The number of SNP that showed up was vastly more than Kimura’s expectations. So, basically, he abandoned neo-Darwinism in favor of his Neutral Theory.
What about the Cambrian Explosion? Completely opposed to Darwin’s every expectation. This whole discussion about “nested hierarchies” revolves around this huge problem for Darwinism. The Cambrian Explosion, by itself, is enough—or, rather, should be enough—to convince every thinking person that Darwinism is wrong.
So, “does it produce testable hypotheses and testable predictions” in the real world? No. Because it has very little to do with the real world as I said above.
Does the THEORY provide testable hyptheses and testable predictions? Yes. But they’re simply ‘theoretical’; no more.
dr. who:
None of those are predictions of the hypothesis. I’d like you to describe something that is necessary to the hypothesis. Something that, if it were shown to be wrong, would falsify the hypothesis. Concentrate on the word necessary.
Predictions of a scientific theory have to do with logical “expectations”. When you speak of something being “necessary”, then you’re talking about what’s called “entailment” (see Wikipedia). They’re not the same thing.
And the ‘predictions’ I gave above are ‘logical expectations’ flowing from the theory that biological complexity can only be understood by invoking some kind of intelligent agency.
And the predictions proved true. Unlike Darwinism.
dr. who: How does that falsify “guided evolution” and “front-loading”?
It falsifies “front-loading” since, presumably, we would find incremental growth in complexity–i.e., ‘growth’, not the immediate presence of the complexity (even if it lays unexpressed).
As to “guided evolution”, it does not so much render that ‘false’ as ‘unnecessary’. (To anticipate your jumping all over this last statement, let me address it in advance: it is ‘unnecessary’ because ‘chance’ processes have the possibility of spanning the small differences existing between the intermediate forms, unlike the giant gaps that we know about—not to mention the Cambrian Explosion again which is the poster child for lack of intermediate forms.)
dr. who:
From your continued misunderstanding of what prediction means in relation to scientific hypotheses, apparently not. And remember, I was replying to someone who had declared that the (unguided) theory of evolution makes no testable predictions, while at the same time attempting to test that same theory against observations, and attempting to falsify it.
Perhaps you’re having the difficulty with what a prediction consists of. As I mentioned above, ‘logical expectation’ is not the same as a ‘logical necessity’.
Should I point out, BTW, that the Ptolemaic theory makes very good predictions regarding the movements of the inner planets. But we know it to be completely wrong. Likewise, Darwinism makes its own predictions—which all turn out to be wrong in one form or another—and you insist that it is right. Meanwhile, molecular biologists keep making discoveries that are fully consistent with the ‘expectations’ of ID, and, in your view, ID is wrong. How is it that those who invoke a theory that is wrong at most every turn are entitled to denounce as ‘unscientific’ a theory whose ‘expectations’ are confirmed? How does that happen?
dr. who:
I could hardly be expected to treat someone who doesn’t see the inherent contradictions in that as the new Einstein, could I?
So you thought you were smarter than me and decided to look down your nose at me.
BTW, the comment at UD was directed to Joe, not you. I just couldn’t resist the rhyme. And, of course, “who” is not your real name. But it was unnecessary.
The term we can use to describe such an argument is “parochial.”
parochial |pəˈrōkēəl|
adjective
of or relating to a church parish: the parochial church council.
• having a limited or narrow outlook or scope: this worldview seems incredibly naive and parochial.
While originally referring to religious beliefs, the term can be applied to any argument that is narrow in scope.
Here’s a quote from a TED Talk by David Deutsch
“This easy variability is the sign of a bad explanation, because, without a functional reason to prefer one of countless variants, advocating one of them, in preference to the others, is irrational. So, for the essence of what makes the difference to enable progress, seek good explanations, the ones that can’t be easily varied, while still explaining the phenomena.”
Deutsch’s criteria of “hard to vary” explanations complements and builds on Popper’s epistemology.
To clarify, from another UD comment…
———
The contents of a theory we conjecture is not constrained by observations, but constrained by whether it’s contents are thought to solve a [specific] problem.
An example of this is electrons.
We conjectured electrons as the contents of a theory not because we had “observed” them doing things that “resembled” the phenomena in question (or had observed them doing anything at all, for that matter) but because they represented a conjectured solution to the problem at hand.
Nor would we have known were to look for “traces” that electrons supposedly left unless we first conjectured the theory of electrons in the first place. So, how would we induced the theory of electrons from the traces we assume they leave?
IOW, to do so would confuse subjective feelings about induction, with logical questions and criticism.
Parochial is fine; but ID/creationism’s history, ever since Morris and Gish founded the Institute for Creation Research in 1970, has been to find “rational, scientific” justifications for a narrow set of sectarian beliefs.
ID/creationism has always had a socio/political agenda, not a scientific one. They want their beliefs to be justified by superior “reasoning” and “science.” They want these sectarian beliefs to be court proof in order to inject them into public education; hence the morph from “scientific creationism” to “intelligent design” in 1987. They want that history erased and forgotten; it’s not going to happen.
They have had to build a convoluted pseudoscience in order to accomplish their socio/political agenda. Now they have a well-document mess on their hands that they can no longer distance themselves from, so they keep trying to morph and rationalize it. That is what UD is all about.
Erk is right. (Was running out of time when we posted. Had a heck of time with the formatting. It kept putting smiley faces in the text.)
{1, {2}, {3,4} {5, 6, {7, 8}}}
Note the correction above. In any case, anyone can examine the sequences and see that some share traits that others don’t. Sorry, don’t know what else to do to help you.
We have. You might start by simply trying to find similarities. Which of these sequences have something in common?
4 ) , , , , , , , R, , I, , , , ,
5 ) , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , G
6 ) , , , , , O, , , , , , , , , G
Nested hierarchies are made up of sets. If you can’t form even simple sets, then you can’t form a nested hierarchy. In this case, we are forming sets based on the observed characteristics of the sequences. Which two do you think group best?
4 ) , , , , , , , R, , I, , , , ,
5 ) , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , G
6 ) , , , , , O, , , , , , , , , G
Mung writes:
If the Designer’s intent is to “make the patterns we observe resistant to evolutionary (non-design) explanations”, then why does he fail so miserably? The patterns we observe fit unguided evolution trillions of times better than they do common design.
Is ReMine’s Designer incompetent at designing? Does he lack the power to implement his designs? Or is he having a laugh at ReMine’s expense?
Maybe there is no Designer, and the reason that the evidence points so unmistakably to unguided evolution is because unguided evolution created the evidence.
P.S. Mung, how about answering my questions? Can you defend ID, or is all your macho posturing just empty bluster?
I responded to ReMine when he posted at UD:
I read ReMine differently.
1) Survival. Essentially, survival is what selection selects for. The measure of survival isn’t individual deaths or extinctions, but rather the creativity and vitality of the entire biosphere. If you were the Designer, could you possibly do better than a continually self-optimizing feedback process?
2) The evidence of a single Designer shouldn’t be much open to question – otherwise, we wouldn’t see common ancestry and a LUCA. Multiple designers would at least probably not all have chosen the same chirality, for example
3) “Origins” is a slippery term. Origin of species works the same for all species, hence a common Designer. Origin of life itself HAS resisted explanation so far, and I suspect it always will. We might find ONE explanation, but can never know if it is THE explanation.
So ReMine can be interpreted as saying that the Designer wisely chose evolution as Its mechanism. Not that this interpretation will please the poofers.
I have gained a somewhat greater respect for what cats can do and for what they might be “thinking.” They definitely have clear preferences that differ from cat to cat; and they also seem to have some objective agreements about other things.
For example, both of my current cats like classical music and will curl up in front of the stereo speakers when it is being played. Among their preferences is classical guitar; but they don’t hang around if other genres of music are playing.
One of my cats in particular is clearly a performance critic of my own guitar playing. Whenever I am working on a piece and it is still rough, she stays out of the room. As I start getting the piece to flow, she starts hanging around. When I get it down pat and smooth, she curls up at my foot stool and stays the whole time. The cat is a severe critic because I have to really have it down pat, smooth, and expressive. What is more, the cat is in agreement with my wife who was a piano teacher for many years. When the cat likes it, my wife also approves.
I am currently working on one of the studies by Fernando Sor; Opus 6, No. 11 (No. 17 in Segovia’s Twenty Studies for the Guitar). When I first started on it, the cat would leave the room. Now she curls up next to my foot stool as I am starting to get the piece to flow smoothly. The other cat is starting to hang around if there isn’t something else going on in the house.
When I was a kid growing up on a farm, my father discovered that the cows settled down sooner during milking time and gave more milk when music was playing in the barn. And wouldn’t you know, they preferred country music. 🙂
No disrespect for the intelligence or musical tastes of cows, but as my son says, grass doesn’t run very fast.
PaV:
Again, you’re contradicting yourself, which was all I wanted to point out in the first place, although we now have a definite point of agreement in that modern evolutionary theory certainly makes predictions.
The contradiction is not in your view that naturalistic, non-telic, unguided evolution is wrong, and has “very little to do with reality”. Of course that’s the I.D. PoV. Predictions of theories are what the theory says we should expect of reality. So, the way in which we attempt to falsify them is by observing reality, and comparing it to the theory. Therefore, any hypothesis that makes definite predictions about observable reality is considered testable.
An example of an I.D. theory that makes predictions and is therefore testable against observations is the YEC creationist model. It makes definite claims about reality, and therefore can be tested and can (and has) been falsified. Unless or until an hypothesis is falsified, falsification is always a hypothetical. So, surely you can think of hypotheticals that would falsify evolutionary theory. Think what would happen if your 520 million year old fossil had been a whale, for example. I’d be the first to agree that some form of intelligent design would appear to be the best explanation of that!
So, the main point is that the theory of evolution does actually make very definite predictions that can be tested against observations. There are millions of things we can think of, like Cambrian whales, that we shouldn’t see, and many things that should necessarily exist, or should have existed in the past.
While we can make up other hypotheses which are compatible with the reality we observe, it is only non-telic evolutionary theory that has real predictive power precisely because there are very tight constraints on what can and cannot be. Which brings us round to the point that Keiths is making in his O.P.
Evolutionary theory predicts a very specific type of biosphere, and it seems extremely unlikely that intelligent designers would create such a biosphere by coincidence given the enormous field of possibilities. Purely naturalistic designers like ourselves, entirely constrained to design within the physical laws, would break the rules of non-telic evolution easily (we already have).
Have you tried to answer Keiths’ questions? I think he’s looking for consistency in I.D. advocates, not contradictions. 😉
PaV
Therefore front loading? Could you explain to me how you know it was front loading and not simply the fact that hox must have come from somewhere? I mean, if we see X doing X1 and later see X doing X2 we know that X2 must have built (for tis how it all works) on what came before. So it’s not surprising at all that we see genes doing X1 and later X2. How could it possibly be otherwise? No. What you have to do to show front loading is something quite different. You need to show code that is never used, preserved perfectly and then activated somehow. To claim that “hox genes” found in things without limbs supports ID is like saying that gravity supports ID because it “front loaded” organisms with the ability not to float into space. 0/10.
KING CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
HAMLET: At supper.
KING CLAUDIUS: At supper! where?
HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table:that’s the end.
KING CLAUDIUS: Alas, alas!
HAMLET: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
KING CLAUDIUS: What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
PaV:
Again, you’re contradicting yourself, which was all I wanted to point out in the first place, although we now have a definite point of agreement in that modern evolutionary theory certainly makes predictions.
The contradiction is not in your view that naturalistic, non-telic, unguided evolution is wrong, and has “very little to do with reality”. Of course that’s the I.D. PoV. Predictions of theories are what the theory says we should expect of reality. So, the way in which we attempt to falsify them is by observing reality, and comparing it to the theory. Therefore, any hypothesis that makes definite predictions about observable reality is considered testable.
An example of an I.D. theory that makes predictions and is therefore testable against observations is the YEC creationist model. It makes definite claims about reality, and therefore can be tested and can (and has) been falsified. Unless or until an hypothesis is falsified, falsification is always a hypothetical. So, surely you can think of hypotheticals that would falsify evolutionary theory. Think what would happen if your 520 million year old fossil had been a whale, for example. I’d be the first to agree that some form of intelligent design would appear to be the best explanation of that!
So, the main point is that the theory of evolution does actually make very definite predictions that can be tested against observations. There are millions of things we can think of, like Cambrian whales, that we shouldn’t see, and many things that should necessarily exist, or should have existed in the past.
While we can make up other hypotheses which are compatible with the reality we observe, it is only non-telic evolutionary theory that has real predictive power precisely because there are very tight constraints on what can and cannot be. Which brings us round to the point that Keiths is making in his O.P.
Evolutionary theory predicts a very specific type of biosphere, and it seems extremely unlikely that intelligent designers would create such a biosphere by coincidence given the enormous field of possibilities. Purely naturalistic designers like ourselves, entirely constrained to design within the physical laws, would break the rules of non-telic evolution easily (we already have).
Have you tried to answer Keiths’ questions? I think he’s looking for consistency in I.D. advocates, not contradictions.
A question for all UDists! 🙂
Here is a “mechanism”: “AREA = Len*Width”.
Here it is in use: “AREA = A * B” and “AREA = C * D”.
1) Which of terms “A,B,C,D” are “natural” and which are “artificial”?
2) From the point of view of the “mechanism”, did it matter?
Joe has stumbled upon the same silliness that pervades gpuccio’s hypothesis: that a designer would focus exclusively on maximizing some single parameter of function, such as catalysis, ignoring the hundreds or thousands of interrelated parameters that can be seen by natural selection.
Stumbled?
He has sought out and embraced it with the passion of a Parisian seeking romance in the spring! 🙂
(My apologies for the awkward visuals of Joe this must have triggered.)
This is why Judge Jones had it so easy determining that ID is not science.
IDists constantly “misuse and extend” metaphors in a way that real scientists don’t.
Another reason why Judge Jones had it easy.
Why don’t IDists like kairosfocus submit their theory to the same level of testing they do for the competition?
For instance, if the designer can’t see the future environment, how does he know what his new designs should look like?
ID doesn’t have an answer.
The best way to see if a claimed prediction really is a prediction of a hypothesis is to put the hypothesis into a deductive syllogism, with or without other premises, making sure that the syllogism is valid, and that it would be sound if the hypotheis is correct. PaV’s problem is that he’s adding other premises to his hypothesis that aren’t demonstrably true, so the end result is a mess.
Here’s an I.D. example.
P1 (hypothesis). Life on earth is intelligently designed.
P2. The Intelligent designers would not put non-coding DNA in genomes unless some of it was functional.
C. (“Prediction”) Some non-coding DNA in genomes will be functional.
The problem is that we’ve no idea whether or not P2 is true, so the conclusion, like P2, has to be assumed. P2 is actually another hypothesis in itself, rather than a statement of fact.
Example 2:
P1 (hypothesis) Whales descended from land mammals over the last 50 million years.
P2 The Cambrian period ended 488 million years ago.
C. (prediction) We won’t find whales in the Cambrian (alongside the rabbits;))
Here, P2 is a fact by definition, so we can safely include it.
What’s interesting (and hilarious) at the moment here on TSZ and at U.D. is that some I.D.ists are suggesting constraints on the designer(s). So much for omnipotence.
Either constraints or a specific design scenario (like YEC) are necessary to generate predictions. So we have to discuss the mysterious designers, and what they could and couldn’t do, or would and wouldn’t do. Which means making stuff up.
Traditionally, the university department that specializes in making stuff up about an intelligent designer is the theology department, not the science department.
Maybe they can help the I.D.ists.
More chance of having 6000 words being posted here:
http://www.universalrejection.org/
Wow, that is both fantastic and fair! 🙂
Joe G appears to have adopted and nurtured every possible characteristic that makes a person loathsome to other people. Apparently he is UD’s new mooning mascot.
Petrushka,
The term “learning” could apply to knowledge that already existed. This isn’t necessarily the case with Darwinism, because it implies that knowledge is genuinely created, rather than having existed at some point at the outset. In the case of eyes, Darwinism arrived at the sort of knowledge but implemented it different ways.
In other words, Darwinism represents a sort of epistemology, which falls under Popper’s evolutionary theory of the growth of knowledge.
However, if one holds an authoritative, justificationist conception of human knowledge, it would be in direct conflict with Darwinism. This would include a conception that some supernatural being dictated or embedded the knowledge of cosmology, biological complexity and moral behavior in some pre-existing form from the outset.
Some biological process could have “learned” about this pre-existing knowledge, rather than having actually genuinely created it. So, I think the term “learning” would be too ambiguous as it doesn’t reflect this important distinction between the two.
Even if we went back and time and fast forward though the evolution of the biosphere, one could always retreat to the idea that this knowledge was somehow embedded in some form at the outset. We already see this to some extent now.
IOW, they can aways continue to push the problem into some unexplainable realm when any evidence or explanation is provided.
Note how a authoritative, justifications conception of human knowledge corresponds with the idea that Darwinism represents one astronomically unlikely accident after the other, which just so happened to have landed on pre-existing knowledge of how to build human beings, along with the rest of the biosphere.
However, when Darwinism genuinely creates this knowledge incrementally, the idea that everything is an astronomical accident becomes a strawman of Darwinism.
The very specific world it describes.
Certainly.
Hypothesis:
Non-telic processes are exclusively responsible for the existence of life and the evolutionary processes that led to the origin of the species we see in the world today.
Example of one of the many predictions:
Bacteria (and their flagella) were not intelligently designed.
Example of one of the many potential falsifications:
Scientists establish beyond all reasonable doubt that bacterial flagella were intelligently designed.
Now, young Joseph, do you understand why I suggested that you write to Dr. Behe and give him your opinion that non-telic naturalism in general and the non-telic evolutionary theory in particular cannot be tested against observations?
Actually, I quite like him….especially when he inadvertantly contradicts his fellow I.D.ists, and no-one at U.D. says anything to him. Most of them probably don’t notice.
To clarify, there is always a good explanation behind useful information, including your cat’s preferences. It’s a “problem” we can identify and try to solve.
As people, we can intentionally conjecture an explanatory theory about your cat’s preferences. We can also criticize that theory by checking it for internal consistency and devising experiments specifically for the purpose of falsifying one or more explanatory theories via empirical observations. Your cats cannot.
As such, people can create explanatory knowledge. Cat’s can only create non-explanatory knowledge in the form of useful rules of thumb.
My favorite color is blue. There is a good explanation for my preference, in reality.
While I do not possess this explanatory knowledge, people are universal explainers. We are capable of conjecturing and conceiving of this explanation. They will always contain errors to some degree and will always be incomplete, but not to the extent that it would prevent us from using it to solve problems, and therefore making progress.
Joe on why dice can be fair:
What’s that Joe? the “manufacturing process”? What do you know about that for any given die? You’ve no idea how it was made. And in any case, nothing at all rules out an advanced alien species controlling outcome of a roll of dice via an internal algorithm. You look, you see a die. If you could really see you’d see a N dimensional hypercube programmed to act as normal dice would. Most of the time…..Except for when the “internal algorithm” says otherwise
Perhaps the UD people want to convert him.
As an insult comedian, however, he doesn’t cut it. Don Rickles is much funnier.
JoeG
It’s a statement, a proposition, and if presented as a hypothesis, it’s a hypothesis. Like “all swans are white” or “life on earth was intelligently designed” or “all life comes from life”.
No. It’s logically necessary to the hypothesis, therefore a prediction of it.
Therefore, according to you, all non-telic hypotheses relating to bacterial flagella must be testable against observations and falsifiable.
Why do you like contradicting yourself on the internet? What’s to be gained from it?
Why don’t you ask your fellow I.D.ists if they agree with the following statement:
The I.D. position is that the naturalistic non-telic modern theory of evolution that biologists use makes no testable predictions and does not generate testable hypotheses.
Ask Kairosfocus. If he agrees with you on this statement, he could make a U.D. post about it.
I ask Joe what he can possibly know about the manufacturing process of any given die:
No Joe. That’s the end result. The manufacturing process is the bit before that.
Yet nobody, never mind people decades ago, can properly design such an experiment except Joe. And you say that “physics” rules out an advanced alien species controlling the outcome of a dice game? Are you claiming that you know everything there is to know about “physics”? Otherwise how can you say it’s not physically possible for what I describe to be the case? You can’t, just as nobody can rule out a “designer” controlling mutations or programming responses for later use as you say. The mere fact something can’t be ruled out is apparently enough for ID to claim a foothold and a victory. And a way to dispute every experimental outcome that they don’t like. Pathetic.
dr. who:
Again, you’re contradicting yourself, which was all I wanted to point out in the first place, although we now have a definite point of agreement in that modern evolutionary theory certainly makes predictions.
It is not a contradiction. It is a ‘distinction.’
E.g., if your ‘theory’ to explain how gifts get below Christmas trees all over the United States on Christmas Eve is that Santa Claus comes down from the North Pole to deliver them, then this makes a very clear prediction: if you wait underneath a Christmas tree long enough on Christmas Eve, you will encounter Santa Claus. So, its testable and falsifiable.
OTOH, if you ask me is it possible to ever catch Santa Claus coming in from the North Pole on his sleigh full of Christmas presents, then the answer is “no”.
Do you see the distinction?
Or will you instead maintain that it is “possible” for Santa Claus to be caught in action?
So, as I say, it’s a ‘distinction’, and not a ‘contradiction’; and flows from the fact that evolution, like Santa Claus, is not true.
IOW, you’re using the word ‘testable’ to mean that something can be ‘put to the test’. I’m using the word ‘testable’ to mean ‘there exists something out there in reality somewhere which we can encounter and measure using certain types of “tests” or experiments’.
dr. who:
Evolutionary theory predicts a very specific type of biosphere, and it seems extremely unlikely that intelligent designers would create such a biosphere by coincidence given the enormous field of possibilities.
We’re talking here about “nested hierarchies”, something that we’ve inherited from Carol Linneus. Any ‘theory of evolution’ must conform to this reality, and the reality of the temporal distribution of fossils, or it would be a non-starter. So to say that “evolutionary theory PREDICTS a very specific biosphere” overstates things badly. It’s a requirement, not a prediction.
dr. who:
Purely naturalistic designers like ourselves, entirely constrained to design within the physical laws, would break the rules of non-telic evolution easily (we already have).
And ID would point out that there is every evidence that natural beings, organisms, have a telic (i.e., non-telic rules don’t apply) signature.
If by what you say you mean that we ‘natural designers’ wouldn’t have “designed” things the way that it appears to be “designed” (IOW, slowly introducing new, more complicated forms), then maybe all this means is that the Designer had more than one telios in mind when designing things.
As to keith’s ‘questions’, I live under my own set of time ‘constraints’. We’ll see.
P.S. Intellectual rigor requires that I point out two things: (1) you’ve backed off your requirement that predictions be ‘necessarily’ contained in the theory (rather than just logical expectations), and (2) that you’ve decided not to comment on the predictions that ID theory makes, nor on the falsifications of Darwinian theory I provided.
As to keiths’ questions:
1.) Bob’s friend has the better answer, as in 2.) and 3.) as well.
However, lastly:
4.) Bob is hanging out at the office of a friend who is an evolutionary biologist. The biologist shows Bob how the morphological and molecular data establish the phylogenetic tree of the 30 major taxa of life to an amazing accuracy of 38 decimal places. “There couldn’t be a better confirmation of unguided evolution,” the biologist says. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Bob replies. “All of those lifeforms were clearly designed. It’s just that the Designer chose to imitate unguided evolution, instead of picking one of the trillions of other options available to him.”
First: “The biologist shows Bob how the morphological and molecular data establish the phylogenetic tree of the 30 major taxa of life to an amazing accuracy of 38 decimal places.”
This is purely fictional. Here’s why. 1.) The “phylogenetic tree” is a misnomer. It is more like a ‘bush’ with one ‘wild shoot’ on it off to the one side. 2.) There is nothing known to science more accurately measured than the corrected ground state energy of the hydrogen atom, and that is about 12 orders of magnitude, not 38. 3.) If you read Micheal Denton’s book, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”, you’ll see how the supposed “molecular data” become problematic, with molecular “distances” between taxa conflicting with one another. To this day, as far as I know, no one has overcome these problems. Hence the terms “fast evolution” and “slow evolution” that are used in the literature.
Second: “There couldn’t be a better confirmation of unguided evolution,” the biologist says.”
How does any of this “confirm” ‘unguided evolution’? Per Darwinian theory, the 30 major taxa you speak of should have arisen only after very long periods of time. And they haven’t. The evidence perhaps ‘confirms’ certain genetic and phylogenetic relationships among extant species, but it says nothing about any putative theory of ‘unguided evolution.’
[BTW, if you probed Darwinian theory with the same analytic rigor that you are demanding of ID, then you should have already abandoned Darwinian theory. Here’s what I mean.
Darwin says that ‘varieties give rise to species, which give rise to genera, which give rise to families, which give rise to orders, and orders give rise to classes.’ (A paraphrase, of course; and, Darwin hesitated a bit about the last step)
Well the ‘major taxa’ you’re talking about here are “phyla.” So, if a major taxa/body type is ALREADY established, what does it become: a “kingdom” or a “class”. I think the answer is obvious. And so the major taxa’s ‘offshoots’ represent a “class” (let’s not get obscured by the fact that all we know are species, for this is true of any classification scheme you can devise). Well, what does this “class”‘s offshoot represent? “Orders”, etc, etc. You see, unfortunately, that this “nested hierarchy” is ‘temporally’ backwards to Darwin’s scheme enunciated above.
As I stated in another post, the Cambrian Explosion “falsifies” Darwinism. But this theory needs a ‘stake run through the heart’ before it will go away.]
OTOH, “Don’t be ridiculous,” Bob replies. “All of those lifeforms were clearly designed. It’s just that the Designer chose to imitate unguided evolution, instead of picking one of the trillions of other options available to him,” is a completely silly statement that has nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed ‘data’ that evolutionary biologist says exists.
So, both Bob and the evolutionary biologist have made foolish statements.
However, let me note this. ID does not make the statement you’re attributing to “Bob”; the argument is much more precise and substantive than what “Bob” says. Once again, a ‘strawman argument’. Alas.
Finally:
It’s just that the Designer chose to imitate unguided evolution, instead of picking one of the trillions of other options available to him.”
The Designer, in fact, has much more than 3 trillion choices from which to choose; He has an INFINITE number.
Assume that a chromosome is 10 million bases long. Then the fact that this particular chromosome exists means that of the hypothetically 410^7 possible strings of bases, ONE is chosen.
What is the difference between 410^7 choices and an infinite number.
This is what makes “life” so remarkable. Don’t you agree?
Furthermore, what would be the necessary consequences of actually applying that knowledge of the future, in practice, should the designer have actually possesed it?
If organisms were pre-programmed to adapt in a specific environment they too would need to possess knowledge related to the future. Specifically, the knowledge of all environments they should adapt in, the knowledge of which improvements are appropriate for that environment and the knowledge of how to actually make those improvements. And this knowledge would need to be encoded into the organism’s DNA, so it would be passed on to offspring.
In addition, if adaptations truly are actually based on pre-programming, each cell could not create new knowledge of how to make improvements using conjectures. Otherwise, It is unclear what is meant by “pre-programming”. So organisms would have been pre-programmed with non-explanatory knowledge, that has limited reach. This would represent useful rules of thumb knowledge of how to make improvements in specific environments.
To make improvements beyond the limited reach of its pre-programming (to gain further reach), the genome would need to contain explanatory knowledge. However, any such cell could not actually use it because individual cells cannot conceive of explanations or problems in the sense that we do, as they are not people.
So, If there was some universal ancestor that was front loaded, it must have contained all of the necessary rules of thumb for each and every future species as it would be specific to each one. This is because individual cells are not people. Where is this all of this knowledge stored? How is it encoded?
Otherwise, cells would need to genuinely and incrementally create the knowledge of how to make those improvements. But that is what Darwinism describes!
IOW, I get the feeling some ID proponents may share the same mistaken idea as GAI (General Artificial Intelligence) proponents. Namely, if you merely “program” a computer with enough non-explanatory knowledge it will start creating genuinely new knowledge via some form of induction. But no one has formatted a “principle of induction” that actually works in practice. So, how could we program one? We do not have GAI because we do not yet know how to program computers that can genuinely conjecture explanations. What we need is a breakthrough in philosophy, not faster computers with more memory. See…
Creative Blocks – The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What’s holding us up?
So, it’s unclear exactly what ID proponents mean when they say “front loading”. Did it occur during the creation of some universal common ancestor at beginning or is each organism programmed with it’s own set of knowledge? Were they programmed with non-explanatory (limited reach) or explanatory (greater reach) knowledge? How is it encoded in the genome? Where is it located?
For example, KF seems to be leaning towards the former (some common ancestor) as he wrote…
Verification: The “hox genes” for “limb development” is found in the sea anemone.
So, apparently, KF thinks the sea anemone contains not only rules of thumb that would be useful for sea anemones, but also rules of thumb for all mammals as well, including human beings – which sea anemones may or may not need themselves. Again, this would be include the knowledge of all environments they it should adapt in, the knowledge of which improvements are appropriate for those environments and the knowledge of how to actually make those specific improvements – for every species!
Is this really what KF thinks?
Otherwise, out of all the rules of thumb that are useful for human beings, why would a sea anemone contain only those particular rules of thumb, rather than others? How would that be a verification?
And then we get to your question: how did the designer create the knowledge of which environments an organism should adapt in, the knowledge of which improvements are appropriate for those environments and the knowledge of how to actually make those specific improvements?
Some designer that, “just was”, complete with the above knowledge, already present, serves no explanatory purposes. This is because one could more economically state that organisms, “just appeared”, complete with the above knowledge, already present.
Neither explain the origin of this knowledge. Adding a designer merely pushes the problem into some unexplainable realm.
Front loading is kinda cool actually. It means that the front loader encoded not only all the adaptations ever to be needed, but all the exotic rules of engagement between host and parasite.
Apparently, Joe thinks that the biosphere was created in such a way that makes an explanation for the concrete biological complexity we observe impossible. The best we can do is throw up our hands and say, “That’s just what some designer must have wanted.”
But this would be like claiming atoms were created in a way that makes atomic theory impossible or that objects were created in such a way that makes GR impossible.
How does Joe know that angels are not pushing on objects according to their mass? “That’s just what angels must have wanted.”?
From UD…
Joe: How can we test the claim that any bacterial flagellum evolved via accumulations of random mutations?
Here Joe is being unnecessarily vague.
Does he mean positively prove? I suspect he does. However, given that this happened in the distant past, we could not do this. Even if we did have a time machine. Joe could always retreat and claim this knowledge was already present in some other form at the outset, such as being designed into the laws of physics.
But even if we could prove it, exactly what problem would this solve – how to reproduce the evolution of the bacterial flagellum? No one actually wants to do this. Furthermore, the knowledge of how to build a bacterial flagellum is already present in its genome.
What we want is an explanatory theory for the specific, concrete biological complexity we observe. Why this feature, rather than some other feature?
So, Joe demands proof to a problem we do not want to solve, while calming we cannot make progress on a problem that we do actually want to solve.
Joe confuses making progress with finding some sort of absolute truth. But all theories contain errors to some degree and are incomplete. This does not prevent us from making progress towards truth.
The thing is, we keep making progress, despite claims that we have not and cannot.
The field of Biology is busy making progress by discarding errors in our theory about how Darwinism works, in detail, while ID proponents are denying it could have even started making progress in the first place. This is like standing on a railway platform and denying the train has already left the station, let alone contains x number of passengers or is traveling at z kpm.
IOW, the best sort of refutation is the progress we’ve already made, which is supposedly impossible. Yet, we’ve made it anyway.
Do I think we could we be wrong about a train having left the a station? Sure, we could.
Perhaps some highly advanced technology has been employed to make it appear *as if* the train has left the station, but has not.
First, would this not in itself be progress?
Second, how does that technology work? Is it some kind of device that reflects images of the train’s environment? Does it it phase shift the train into some alternate dimension? Does it reach into our brain and remove the train from our minds or replace reality with a version with the train is absent?
IOW, we could conjecture theories about how this technology might work, then test them using observations. If it is merely reflecting light, then we should still be able to feel and hear the train. If just the train has been shifted to some other another dimension, then what is the train resting on if not the rails, the platform, the earth? What air the passengers breathing, etc.? We can still devise criticisms and tests that allow us to make progress.
So, regardless of the scenario we can make progress by conjecturing theories that exclude one or more theories and devising tests that would falsify at least one of them. The idea that we cannot make progress about “the designer” or the “appearance of design” is to deny that we can and have made progress by deduction.
On a practical note, PaV, Keiths and others are liable to miss your reply to his questions on this sub-thread, so I’ll copy it (faithfully!) into a new post which will appear at the end of the thread. It’s a problem with this system knowing who has replied to what and where.
On predictions and testability. I still see you as contradicting yourself from an I.D. point of view. You declare Darwinian evolution to be “wrong”, “not true” and to have little relationship to reality. In order to make those judgements, you must have tested its predictions against observations of reality. I think your mistake might lie in thinking that, if a theory is not true, it’s therefore not testable. But that’s not what testable means. It means that a hypothesis makes definite statements (the predictions) that can be matched against observable reality in order to determine whether it’s a good hypothesis, or untrue (falsified).
As for predictions, they should be the logical consequences of the hypothesis, which is the same as saying that they should necessarily follow from it, or, as you say, they are the logical expectations, but that does mean <i>logical</i>; they can be deduced logically from the proposition.
The best way to see if a claimed prediction really is a prediction of a hypothesis is to put the hypothesis into a deductive syllogism, with or without other premises, making sure that the syllogism is valid, and that it would be sound if the hypotheis is correct. Your problem with your I.D. predictions is that you are adding other premises to your hypothesis that aren’t demonstrably true, so the end result is a mess.
Here’s an I.D. example.
P1 (hypothesis). Life on earth is intelligently designed.
P2. The Intelligent designers would not put non-coding DNA in genomes unless some of it was functional.
C. (“Prediction”) Some non-coding DNA in genomes will be functional.
The problem is that we’ve no idea whether or not P2 is true, so the conclusion, like P2, has to be assumed. P2 is actually another hypothesis in itself, rather than a statement of fact. So this is not logical, and “C” is not a prediction of the hypothesis.
Example 2:
P1 (hypothesis) Whales descended from land mammals over the last 50 million years.
P2 The Cambrian period ended 488 million years ago.
C. (prediction) We won’t find whales in the Cambrian.
Here, P2 is a fact by definition, so we can safely include it. The syllogism is valid, and would be sound if the hypothesis is correct, therefore we’ve established one of the predictions of the hypothesis.
Note that it’s a bold hypothesis that makes a definite statement about reality. Any whale or other cetacean fossil more than 50 million years old would falsify it and so could other lines of evidence.
I hope that helps you realise that your I.D. “predictions” were not predictions in the sense of the word used in scientific hypothesis testing. They were more like inductive hypotheses themselves, like P2 in my first example.
[I.D. poster PaV put these answers to keiths’ questions on a subthread reply to me after I’d asked him for them. I thought keiths might miss them there, hence the copy and paste. So, a warm thankyou to PaV for responding, and I’ll leave it to keiths and others for the moment.
PaV responds:
As to keiths’ questions:
1.) Bob’s friend has the better answer, as in 2.) and 3.) as well.
However, lastly:
4.) Bob is hanging out at the office of a friend who is an evolutionary biologist. The biologist shows Bob how the morphological and molecular data establish the phylogenetic tree of the 30 major taxa of life to an amazing accuracy of 38 decimal places. “There couldn’t be a better confirmation of unguided evolution,” the biologist says. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Bob replies. “All of those lifeforms were clearly designed. It’s just that the Designer chose to imitate unguided evolution, instead of picking one of the trillions of other options available to him.”
First: “The biologist shows Bob how the morphological and molecular data establish the phylogenetic tree of the 30 major taxa of life to an amazing accuracy of 38 decimal places.”
This is purely fictional. Here’s why. 1.) The “phylogenetic tree” is a misnomer. It is more like a ‘bush’ with one ‘wild shoot’ on it off to the one side. 2.) There is nothing known to science more accurately measured than the corrected ground state energy of the hydrogen atom, and that is about 12 orders of magnitude, not 38. 3.) If you read Micheal Denton’s book, “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”, you’ll see how the supposed “molecular data” become problematic, with molecular “distances” between taxa conflicting with one another. To this day, as far as I know, no one has overcome these problems. Hence the terms “fast evolution” and “slow evolution” that are used in the literature.
Second: ”There couldn’t be a better confirmation of unguided evolution,” the biologist says.”
How does any of this “confirm” ‘unguided evolution’? Per Darwinian theory, the 30 major taxa you speak of should have arisen only after very long periods of time. And they haven’t. The evidence perhaps ‘confirms’ certain genetic and phylogenetic relationships among extant species, but it says nothing about any putative theory of ‘unguided evolution.’
[BTW, if you probed Darwinian theory with the same analytic rigor that you are demanding of ID, then you should have already abandoned Darwinian theory. Here’s what I mean.
Darwin says that ‘varieties give rise to species, which give rise to genera, which give rise to families, which give rise to orders, and orders give rise to classes.’ (A paraphrase, of course; and, Darwin hesitated a bit about the last step)
Well the ‘major taxa’ you’re talking about here are “phyla.” So, if a major taxa/body type is ALREADY established, what does it become: a “kingdom” or a “class”. I think the answer is obvious. And so the major taxa’s ‘offshoots’ represent a “class” (let’s not get obscured by the fact that all we know are species, for this is true of any classification scheme you can devise). Well, what does this “class”‘s offshoot represent? “Orders”, etc, etc. You see, unfortunately, that this “nested hierarchy” is ‘temporally’ backwards to Darwin’s scheme enunciated above.
As I stated in another post, the Cambrian Explosion “falsifies” Darwinism. But this theory needs a ‘stake run through the heart’ before it will go away.]
OTOH, “Don’t be ridiculous,” Bob replies. “All of those lifeforms were clearly designed. It’s just that the Designer chose to imitate unguided evolution, instead of picking one of the trillions of other options available to him,” is a completely silly statement that has nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed ‘data’ that evolutionary biologist says exists.
So, both Bob and the evolutionary biologist have made foolish statements.
However, let me note this. ID does not make the statement you’re attributing to “Bob”; the argument is much more precise and substantive than what “Bob” says. Once again, a ‘strawman argument’. Alas.
Finally:
It’s just that the Designer chose to imitate unguided evolution, instead of picking one of the trillions of other options available to him.”
The Designer, in fact, has much more than 3 trillion choices from which to choose; He has an INFINITE number.
Assume that a chromosome is 10 million bases long. Then the fact that this particular chromosome exists means that of the hypothetically 410^7 possible strings of bases, ONE is chosen.
What is the difference between 410^7 choices and an infinite number.
This is what makes “life” so remarkable. Don’t you agree?
dr who,
Thanks for reposting PaV’s reply. Your hunch was correct — I missed it because it was so far upthread.
PaV,
Thanks for the response. I’m glad to see that we agree on the answers to the first three questions.
Regarding your objections to the fourth question:
You object that “phylogenetic tree” is a misnomer. Joe Felsenstein addressed that issue in his very first comment in this thread:
The fact that parts of the “tree” diverge from the tree pattern does not negate the fact that the tree pattern predominates and can be objectively identified. This is not a subjective judgment; it is backed up by statistical analyses.
Furthermore, horizontal gene transfer, symbiosis, hybridization, etc., can be taken into account when making phylogenetic inferences, as Theobald does in his 2010 Nature article:
You are skeptical that the consensus phylogeny of the 30 major taxa is really known to a precision of 38 decimal places. This claim is justified in Prediction 1.3: Consilience of independent phylogenies in Theobald’s “29 Evidences for Macroevolution” essay. Take a look. If you still disagree after reading that section, please explain why you think Theobald is mistaken.
That’s all I have time for tonight. More tomorrow, most likely later in the day.
(Of course, anyone else on “my side” is welcome to jump in and address PaV’s concerns in the meantime.)
OMTWO:
Keep up with the literature.
A recent study showed that when examining the sea anemone one finds a cluster of genes associated with the Hox genes that are, for a better word, unexpressed.
The way the authors presented this was by saying that the Hox gene in fact is present but is simply not being utilized. We know that later on they will be expressed and utilized. This is what I would call “tentative” evidence for “front-loading”. ID does not hinge on “front-loading”, but it is something that ‘might be expected.’ Should this all be confirmed, then “front-loading” as a general phenomena might just turn out to be correct—and, of course, a “falsification” of Darwinian theory.
dr. who:
Here’s an I.D. example.
P1 (hypothesis). Life on earth is intelligently designed.
P2. The Intelligent designers would not put non-coding DNA in genomes unless some of it was functional.
C. (“Prediction”) Some non-coding DNA in genomes will be functional.
P2 is not properly formulated.
You’ve used a definite article before “intelligent designer(s)”. Why?
P2 should read: “Intelligent designers strive for efficient designs. Hence, in the case of the genome, an intelligent Designer would not include large amounts of non-functional DNA in the genome.
IOW, P2 flows from the premise that ‘intelligent designs’ strive for efficiency. Do you want to claim that this in not true?
Would you have a counter-example demonstrating this?
dr. who:
What’s interesting (and hilarious) at the moment here on TSZ and at U.D. is that some I.D.ists are suggesting constraints on the designer(s). So much for omnipotence.
If a cell had no outer membrane, would it be a cell? Do you see where you’re going wrong here in your thinking? In the created universe, nothing can exist unless it is ‘delimited’; IOW, unless ‘constraints’ are imposed.
It’s simply the Law of Non-Contradiction: something can’t “be” and “not-be” at the same time and place.
Put another way, Aristotle posits “prime matter”, which under the influence of a “form” becomes the “substance” of whatever an object may be. Without a “form”–i.e., a “constraint”—then you have simply “prime matter”; and nothing of “substance.”
dr. who:
I agree with you that “replies” are hard to keep track of over here. It requires quite a bit of time searching at times.
As to the contradiction, again, it’s not a contradiction. What I pointed out was that “testable” is equivocal. It can be used in two different ways. Again, when Joe asked the questions, my first response was to say I hadn’t read through the thread to know for sure what was being discussed. So I answered with a particular understanding of “testable”.
Does Darwinian theory make predictions that can be falsified? Yes. And Darwin himself had to deal with some of those predictions when he wrote “Origins,” and he does so in the chapter on “Difficulties on the Theory”, or something like that title.
The “difficulties” haven’t cleared up. They’ve become worse. And, yet, Darwinists cling to the theory. Why?
As to this:
Example 2:
P1 (hypothesis) Whales descended from land mammals over the last 50 million years.
P2 The Cambrian period ended 488 million years ago.
C. (prediction) We won’t find whales in the Cambrian.
“C” is not a “prediction.” Or, rather, if we consider “C” to be a prediction, then it is not Darwinian theory that “predicts” that we won’t find Whales in the Cambrian, but, rather, the Law of Non-Contradiction.
I think my point here is quite clear. But maybe you think that P1 derives from “evolutionary theory”; but this is simple a “fact” isn’t it? IOW, this is known by ‘observation.’
I’d further clarify…
Yes, there are cases where the tree isn’t always tree-like. But, for the vast majority of cases, we have good explanations for those exceptions, such as hybridization or HGT.
IOW, when we have identified good explanations for those exceptions, those particular explanations do not conflict with the underlying premise of Darwinism.
However, in cases were we have yet to identify a good explanation, these observations are neutral to Darwinism. They tell us nothing either way. We cannot extrapolate observations without first putting them into an explanatory framework.
A textbook example of this is results of the OPERA experiment on the speed of neutrinos. Until we had a better explanation for those specific observations, they were neutral to Einstein’s theory. And which such an explanation did arrive, it consisted of merely the appearance of neutrinos traveling faster than light due to a loosely connected ethernet cable and a clock set to the wrong speed – neither of which conflicted with Einstein’s theory.
Furthermore, ID does not explain why a designer would necessarily choose one particular concrete adaptation over another. This is because ID’s designer is abstract and has no defined limitations. “That’s just what a designer must have wanted” is a bad explanation because it is shallow and easily varied. Adding it to the mix serves no explanatory purpose in this respect.