If Uncommon Descent (UD) is not suffering from our departure, then why has the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture stooped to lame promotion of the site? I’m referring to an ID the Future podcast, “Eric Anderson: Probability & Design.” It begins with Casey Luskin singing the praises of UD.
[Eric Anderson…] for the past year has been a contributing author about intelligent design at the great intelligent design blog, UncommonDescent.com. So, quick plug for Uncommon Descent. If you’re an “ID the Future” listener and you’ve never checked it out, go to UncommonDescent.com. And it’s a great ID blog, kind of like EvolutionNews.org. It has many participants, and many contributors, of which Eric is one of the main authors there.
And it ends with Casey Luskin steering listeners to UD.
And I would encourage our listeners to go check out the blog Uncommon Descent. That’s Uncommon, and the last word is spelled D-E-S-C-E-N-T, dot com. So “descent” like you’re going down into something. So UncommonDescent.com.
Well, it doesn’t quite end there. Anderson, whose “main focus is analyzing the logical and rhetorical bases of arguments to help people understand the strengths, weaknesses, and underlying assumptions used in the debate over evolution and intelligent design,” closes by tacitly characterizing us as illogical fools:
Well, I’ll just add that when we look into some of these arguments — this is just one example of an argument, that we’ve analyzed today — but when we have critics put forward arguments against intelligent design, what I’ve typically noticed, and found upon closer scrutiny, is that when you parse through it, you find that it actually underscores the whole validity of the approach that’s been taken by the major proponents of intelligent design, in formulating a careful approach to design detection.
Anderson lives up to Jeff Shallit’s characterization of him, revealing that he is laughably far behind the curve. He’s not worth my time. And there’s something wrong if you think that he’s worth yours. Then again, he was about the best choice Luskin had for the interview.
UD degenerated into a madhouse long ago. Barry Arrington has done everyone a favor, having finally gone too far, and given us a clear reason to do what we should have done already. I know that some of you are itching for him to post something that permits you to rationalize a return to UD. Please work to kick your UD habit for good.
I offer as “methadone” the Discovery Institute releases on ID, including the news feed Evolution News and Views, the podcast series ID the Future, and the YouTube channel DiscoveryScienceNews. There’s also the DI’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, with prime pickings for the philosophically inclined. Now, I know that you get no rush at the thought of this. None of the big fish would argue (and argue about arguments, and argue about arguments about arguments) with you. But you would get a rise out of the UD minnows — a fix, though not what fully feeds your habit. For a change, they’d be responding to you, rather than you to them. Wouldn’t that be an improvement?
To close on a positive note, I want to emphasize how amazing it is to see the travesty of discussion at UD shut down. To be honest, I didn’t think you could do it. You have my sincere thanks for exercising the discipline that you have.
CharlieM,
If the speedboats reproduced, and their relative performance enabled the faster to leave more offspring, then you would be describing Natural Selection, not Design (ignoring the source of the variation in your scenario). They are easily confused. Do sharks reproduce?
Then please put those skills to use now for me.
HIV is an intricate virus. Presumably it was intelligently designed?
The Parasitoid wasp has a intricate mechanism to enslave other organisms, that is essential to it’s lifecycle. Was it intelligently designed?
Malaria – looks to be complex to me. Was it intelligently designed?
Elizabeth,
I think that Murray wants to use “materialism” to mean a metaphysical position, and specifically the Epicurean metaphysics aggressively promoted in the early Enlightenment by Locke, Hooke, Boyle, Diderot, d’Alembert, and others in order to legitimize their anti-clericalism. In those terms, Murray is right to say that “materialism” has been overturned by 19th- and 20th-century physics, chemistry, and biology. (Interestingly, the development of thermodynamics played a huge role in the 19th-century overcoming of “materialism.”)
Since he wants to use “materialism” in that sense, I worry that it will be a bar to further communication for any of us to use “materialism” to mean an epistemological position that would be better called empiricism or (as I prefer) epistemological verificationism.
KN,
Overturned in favour of what? What is not the product of material interactions?
My point was that the interconvertability of energy and matter, the deep ontological reality of fields in quantum field theory, and the promising suggestions of quantum entanglement — as well as new developments in dynamical systems theory, complexity theory, and autopoeisis theory — are all incompatible with the specific kind of mechanistic, reductionist atomism promoted by the materialists of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In other words, materialism has been overturned given Murray’s very narrow conception of materialism. But if one wants to retain the word “materialism” and expand it beyond that narrow conception, well, that’s a strategy one could pursue.
Right. But then by that definition, firstly, no-one other than the odd crank is a “materialist”, and secondly, there is no reason to regard it as a cultural threat.
KN,
OK, thanks, makes sense.
Granted. But I also think that epistemological verificationism (that our reasons to affirm or deny a claim ought to be proportional to the evidence for or against that claim) is a cultural threat to any reactionary politics that attempts to justify some policy on the grounds that it is a matter of “tradition,” of “family values”, of “religious liberty,” or even merely a matter of “teaching the controversy”.
It would take an utterly confused mind to take the fact that 21st century science (including contemporary evolutionary theory) has given us plenty of evidence for rejecting 17th-century Epicurean metaphysics as a reason for rejecting epistemological verificationism in matters of public policy. Yet the intelligent design movement, as part of the epistemological side of the reactionary side of the culture war, relies on this confusion (or something like it).
Robert Byers,
Most of the observations here are about how UD is becoming more of an echo chamber because of Barry Arrington’s gross lack of intellectual integrity. UD is dying, but it won’t disappear as long as Kairosfocus can keep replacing his spittle-flecked keyboards and bornagain has links to copy and paste.
ID, on the other hand, is dead (stillborn) as a scientific concept. Unfortunately it is all too alive as a political ploy to get around separation of church and state. We need to kill it there, too.
Patrick, separation of church and state is a two-edged sword. For every benefit you’re getting by not having the state interfere in some segment of your beliefs, there’s a religious wacko using it to gain a special privilege, and it’s often one that is dangerous to everybody else–see the Vermont thread.
Even libertarians like you should understand that there’s nothing special about religious beliefs: generally, they’re just the craziest ones. But if that’s true, there’s nothing special about “Church.”
That is an interesting article. First I would say that they begin by making the standard assumption that changes in the genome are the cause of changes in the form of an organism. I don’t make the same assumption. I assume that the genome is the means by which the physical substance necessary for the formation of the organism is achieved, but it is not the cause.
Previously, by using form and structure to build a tree researchers reckoned that adhesive toe pads evolved on 2 separate occasions at most. The genetic data tell a different story. The authors compared genetic information in multiple species of gecko and built an evolutionary tree based on this comparison. They postulate that adhesive toepads evolved 11 times and were lost 9 times, the leaf-toed morphology evolved in parallel 13–15 times and paraphalanges evolved nine times independently. They have to assume this in order for tree to fit the data. I would say that individual species of gecko are physical expressions of an archetypal form, they display this form in their own limited way.
The authors write:
They now have a clearer understanding of how geckos achieve adhesion but they can only guess how this system evolved.
Whereas you, of course, know how it was designed.
Care to share?
Did you miss this? 🙂
Behe answered that, didn’t he?
So the Designer took a photosynthetic single-celled design, and redesigned it to parasitize animals, so that eventually children could die of it. But it wasn’t enough to just kill off humans, or to kill off P. falciparum, the Designer has given humans defenses so that only some will die, yet continued to improve P. falciparum, so that there will be an unending cycle of misery, death, and still some success for both parasite and hosts.
Very design-like, you know. Humans do the same thing, I mean, other than the fact that they don’t (computer viruses are made, but hardly kill off computers). Well, ok, it’s what you’d expect of evolution, this opportunism, but Designers are inscrutable and anyway it’s all too complex to have evolved, because IDists say so.
Glen Davidson
Memo for Liz:
A sock-puppet is not a second account created to circumvent a ban.
A sock-puppet is a second account created to facilitate having two voices in a single conversation.
OK, either way, Aurelio Smith wasn’t one, as far as I know. Alan participated in the conversation as Aurelio Smith, having submitted his invited OP under that pseudonym.
Right, which is why it’s wrong to defend UD on the idea that it’s (hypothetically) okay to ban and destroy sock-puppets. Because even if that was their stated or unstated policy, that’s not what BA did: he didn’t destroy a sockpuppet by any definition. BA destroyed an invited guest.
And then some people wonder why Elizabeth might no longer wish to be a “guest” at UD.
And then the designer designed sickle cell anemia as a defence against the malaria that he designed.
There is no single “cause” of “changes in the form” of an organism. Actually I think you mean changes in the forms taken by members of a population of organisms over time, but again, the same applies. Identical genomes do not produce identical individuals, and in any case, a single DNA strand is not sufficient to make anything happen, let alone an organism appear.
So the authors do not make the assumption that you think they make. If they did, they’d be wrong. But your assumption: “I assume that the genome is the means by which the physical substance necessary for the formation of the organism is achieved, but it is not the cause” doesn’t even make any sense, at least on my reading. What does it mean for “physical substance” to be “achieved”? This is why I advocate E-prime! Translating your sentence into E-prime reveals the problem:
“I assume that the genome enables the physical substance that an organism requires to [emerge? create itself ex nihilo?] but does not cause it”/
What exactly is it that you think a “genome” does?
Rather than answer that question, perhaps read a textbook on developmental biology! Where you will learn that the development of multicellular organisms like geckos is an interactive feedback process by which cells that start of “totipotent” have their genes switched on and off by chemical signals in a process that causes cells to divide and specialise, and create proteins as required in a pattern that gradually builds a gecko, and continues to do so throughout the gecko’s life, otherwise the gecko would not function.
And how the gecko turns out will depend on both internal and external chemical signals, many triggered by signals that arrive at the sensory organs of the gecko, including those that frighten it into dropping its tail, then growing a new one.
All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot
Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings
All things sick and cancerous
All evil great and small
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all
Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spiky urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did
All things scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all, Amen
© 1980 Monty Python
— peas be upon them, Amen.
On my comment on the intelligent design of shark skin, gecko’s feet and eagle’s wings:
Because they are all mechanisms which any engineer would admire and any human designer would love to have invented.
Exactly. And which evolutionary processes are really excellent at producing, which is why, increasingly that’s what human designers do – harness evolutionary processes to come up with novel solutions. I notice that that is what seems to have been done in this example, although “news” at UD has managed to miss the point 🙂
Would human designers have obeyed the (vertebrate) hereditary limits of biologic evolution?
Glen Davidson
Yes they are all great features, but I wanted to focus in on specific systems, to see what our present technology has found out about them and to understand how they utilise natural forces to great effect. And they were the first examples that came into my head.
So you don’t even see any of them as nature’s design?
No, I don’t see them as design at all. I see them as adaptations. Adaptation and design are not the same thing.
Hello CharlieM,
Before I respond to your previous response to me, can I ask a basic question? Can you give an example of something that is *not* ‘designed,’ in your opinion?
I ask because you seem to have fallen into the bottomless-pit that both the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM) and Adrian Bejan inhabit on both theist and atheist sides re: “design in nature”. To the IDM, that “Design” is intended by an unnameable Creator/Designer (thus the implicationist apologetics that disgust both theists and atheists about IDism). Bejan, otoh, abuses English language (from his native Romanian) by claiming even the possibility of ‘design without a designer’.
From a theological key of music, the ‘design argument’ has of course existed for many centuries. So to claim that nothing is not ‘Designed’ is understandable, according to (Abrahamic) theology. But what makes the IDist claim specific (and potentially impinging) is that “Intelligent Design” is a ‘strictly scientific’ theory.
Can you thus please clarify in which key you are singing (or trying to sing) – theology or science or both – because it is not clear to me from what I’ve heard so far.
Also, when you use the verb form in English, indeed, the agent-like sounding ‘nature’s design’ (with ‘nature’ not capitalised, not personified, as for example, some physicists do), one might wish to compare that with ‘nature’s selection’, don’t you think?
Forget about where or how it originated, would you say that a surface that allowed movement through a medium with less resistance than any other known surface was well designed? If not why are human designers so keen to copy it?
Of course they were intelligently designed.
The archetypal gecko incorporates all the features that have ever been expressed in physical geckos. It was designed in accordance with that archetype.
By whom?
Don’t you mean “she designed”?
Oh ferchrissake.
Go fap in the other thread if you really want to discuss god and “She”.
How do you know?
Sorry, but no woman I know would design a parasite that causes intense suffering, only to be followed by a cure that also causes intense suffering. Only a man would be so cruel, and so stupid.
CharlieM, I suspect that we may be drawing a false conclusion about your arguments from the limitations inherent in comments on a blog. I suggest that you take Elizabeth up on her offer to post an OP. in that way you can draft your ideas in a way that is not possible in a comment.
The archetypal unicorn incorporates all the features that have ever been expressed in physical unicorns. It was designed in accordance with that archetype.
It’s a serious point. The logical answer, to me, is multiple designers, warring against each other. It sort of makes sense.
Casey Luskin: … like you’re going down into something
Down the drain, I suppose.
Red queens all the way down.
“Sort of”, nothing—the notion of Multiple Designers absolutely does make sense! Under an evolutionary paradigm, a scenario such as the cheetah-vs-gazelle “arms race” which has spurred both animals on to monotonically-increasing ground speed is merely an expected outcome of natural selection working on two animals independently. Under the standard ID paradigm, however, a paradigm which assumes—sometimes even explicitly!—one and only one Designer, it’s puzzling to think that cheetahs and gazelles are both the product of ID’s single Designer. After all, why would this Designer work at cross-purposes to Itself?
One clear solution to this seeming conundrum is the notion of more than one Designer. Under a Multiple Designers paradigm, it is clear that the Designer of cheetahs must be a separate entity from the Designer of gazelles. Similarly, either the Designer of the bacterial flagellum, which has raise the virulence level of so many pathogenic organisms, is a separate entity from the Designer(s) of all those creatures which have been tormented by flagellum-equipped bacterial pathogens, or else the Designer of those pathogenic organisms stole the flagellum Design from the entity Who Designed it.
Thats why there is trouble. Your not being nice.
All the thread makers on UD are excellent. They expect to persuade by intellectual argument and welcome opposition. They have had planet loads of opposite opinions. Any banning is based on real or perceived malice toward the bosses or other posters or general moral conclusions as they see it.
Then everybody gets mad and very mad. Like everybody else.
ID and TEC are the modern revolution and this and UD forums are evidence of this stirring.
We are doing gangbusters and plan to bust all the gangs.
Its all a reflection of historic mankinds conclusion the universe was created by invisable beings of great abilities. Christianity includes revealed information putting in boundaries on man and earth history and so process mechanisms.
I think in watching or particapating in UD and TSZ one is involved with intellectual and conclusions history in mankind.
Yes, mea culpa; I am definitely guilty of perceived malice. I was rightfully punished because I had sinned. I hereby make my confession:
I questioned the infallible wisdom of Big Brother Barry, I jeered at the science-reporting skills of Denyse Ol’ News, and I did not gratefully manifest my appreciation of the amazing research provided by bornagain(-and-again-and-again)77.
I defied kairosfocus the Incredible, and I did not prostrate myself before his mighty FIASCO when told to. I am also possibly guilty of criminal complicity in enabling the online and on-the-ground stalking of said kairosfocus by the worldwide conspiracy of godless Darwinists.
Last but not least, I did protest, like a snivelling simpering materialist coward, when the UD bosses had justly banned other unpersons, and by doing so I revealed my detestable moral blindness.
Thank you, Robert, for pointing it all out to me.
KN said:
But that’s not what it’s called, KN. It’s called “methodological materialism” now. The metaphysical assumption is blatantly, officially attached. I gave examples in that other thread how lack of a metaphysically-acceptable naturalist-narrative theory trumped empirical verification time and time again and impeded the progress of science.
It’s also a threat to any politics, reactionary or not, that attempts to justify some policy on the grounds that it is a matter of “diversity”, of “social justice”, of “liberty from religion”, or even a matter of teaching “well established scientific facts”. You wrote that as if a scientific policy of verificationism and pragmatism can only possibly cut one way.
I could as easily say that the Darwinism side of the culture war relies on this confusion, where materialist-constrained narratives are inserted into theoretical statements and papers couched in speculative phrasings. If 17th century Epicurean metaphysics has been rejected, why the recent attachment of a term that indicates that very thing? What else is the term “materialism”, in the phrase “methodological materialism”, supposed to mean? If it’s supposed to mean “verificationism”, why don’t they use that term? If, as many in that original thread agreed, science really does progress by pragmatism, why not use that term?
There’s a reason “materialism” is used. As you and I agree, materialism is dead. So, what do you think people who use that term and defend it are really arguing about? Why do you think that term was specifically and officially endorsed?
KN said
Not with the fine-tuning evidence and what we’ve found at the heart of life – an irreducibly complex code-translation system, and certainly not with the growing fields of research and evidence supporting theistic-friendly themes, such as the consciousness-centric evidence revealed by various QM research.
As I said, anti-theism is winning the culture war. Theism wasn’t nearly so “watered down” in the past – however, this can be a good thing. I think a more classical, stripped-down theism is a good basis for a long-lasting society.
I think Cornelius Hunter has made a long-running, excellent case that the epistemology of modern evolutionary theory is indeed driven by anti-theistic metaphysics. They can deny it all they want, but for example, the “vestigial organ” and “Junk DNA” narratives.
I have no idea, William. The people I see using the term are either ID proponents (or anti-atheists anyway), who seem to mean all manner of pejorative things, or people using it in the sense I mean by it, which is the sense that KN gave, and which he prefers to call epistemological verificationism, and which I would call something like “the methods by which we empirically confirm the predictive power of our models”, and which I would more generally call the scientific method.
I don’t mind what we call it as long as we all know what meaning the user intends.
But it does seems weird to me that anyone could think that “materialism” could exclude a) forces and b) intention.
Both are clearly observable phenomena.
His “case” is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.
And your last sentence isn’t one.
Could you link? It’s hard to follow a conversation across multiple threads without links.
Except that there are serious problems with all of those claims.
We don’t actually know that Solar System is fine-tuned for life, because we don’t know how prevalent life is in the universe. We don’t actually know that the laws of physics are fine-tuned for life because we don’t know what other kinds of life would be possible if the laws of physics were different.
We don’t actually know that “the heart of life” involves “an irreducibly complex code-translation system”, because the code metaphor is actually quite contested among biologists and philosophers of biology — see the dynamical systems theory developed by Susan Oyama (The Ontogeny of Information, Lenny Moss (What Genes Can’t Do), or for that matter, the teleological, organism-centered philosophy of biology popularized by Stephen Talbott — certainly a critic of both Epicureanized Darwinism and intelligent design!
Finally, “the consciousness-centric evidence revealed by various QM research” is also highly controversial, since it depends on a metaphysically problematic interpretation of the measurement problem, which in turn only arises in the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Measurement is not central to any of the alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation, and all of these interpretations are (so far as I know) empirically indistinguishable. There’s the GRW interpretation, Bohmian mechanics, and of course we have no idea whether there even will be a measurement problem in any successor theory to quantum mechanics.
In short, the empirical sciences do not unambigously point towards theism; on the contrary, one would already need to accept theism in order to prefer theistic-friendly interpretations of the empirical sciences over alternative interpretations.
LOL!, Right WJM. Corny’s latest rant “miracles are a huge problem for evolution” sure showed off his scientific understanding. 😀