I guess many folks here are familiar with Dr (of philosophy) Vincent Torley as a contributor of many posts at Uncommon Descent now operated by one Barry Arrington.
Vincent strikes me as a genuinely nice guy whose views are very different from mine on many issues. Possibly one of his most remarked-upon idiosyncracies is his tendency to publish exceedingly long posts at Uncommon Descent but (leaving Joseph of Cupertino in the air for a moment) lately Vincent has become a little more reflective on the merits of “Intelligent Design” as some sort of alternative or rival to mainstream biology. His latest post at Uncommon Descent came to my attention after it mysteriously (in the sense of so far without explanation) disappeared from the blog. Hat-tips to Seversky and REC at AtBC for spotting it before it disappeared. I then happened to see Vincent’s response to a question, providing a link to his Angelfire site and his article, before that comment too disappeared.
Vincent’s post, entitled Undeniable packs a powerful punch, but doesn’t land a knockout is a review of Douglas Axe’s book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed published earlier this year. I have to say, I missed the event and have only just read the excerpt provided by Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. The snippet did not enthuse me to buy the book, so I can’t say if Vincent’s review is a fair one. It is certainly comprehensive (OK it’s long!).
He starts with fulsome praise:
When I first read Undeniable, I was greatly impressed by its limpid prose, the clarity of its exposition, and the passion with which the author makes his case. Seldom have I seen such an elegantly written book, which people from all walks of life can appreciate. I have no doubt that it will sell well for many years to come, and I have to say that it makes the best case for Intelligent Design at the popular level of any book I’ve ever seen.
But then has some forthright criticism to make:
Nevertheless – and I have to say this – the book contains numerous mathematical, scientific and philosophical blunders, which a sharp-eyed critic could easily spot.
then proceeds to specific points in some detail.
I find it refreshing and a little surprising that Vincent was so forthright in his public criticism and I find it not at all surprising that Barry Arrington has deleted the article at UD and all references to the original that appeared subsequently. There are two related issues here; Axe’s book, Undeniable – its merits and Vincent’s review – and the suppression of Vincent’s article by Barry Arrington but perhaps this thread will suffice to accommodate discussion on both. I’ll email Vincent to let him know about this thread as he may like to join in.
[This post was a bit rushed as I was short of time. Please point out errors and ommissions as needed]
Hi Glen Davidson,
I’m terribly sorry about getting your name mixed up with that of Glenn Williamson’s. My sincere apologies.
Re the argument that known intelligence can’t make life, so intelligence must be responsible for life: I agree it does sound rather odd when you put it like that. But try this: no known process can make life, but life displays a very high degree of property X, and intelligence is the only thing know to generate large amounts of X, even if the intelligences we know still fall woefully short of making life. Also, there’s no known theoretical limit on how much X an intelligence can produce (in principle). The conclusion that a super-intelligence is responsible for the X-ness in life doesn’t seem so ridiculous now.
Re the rest of your reply: I think I understand you much better now. Your points about what rational minds can do are well taken, and I would agree with what you’ve written.
Hi petrushka, Sal, Alan Miller, OMagain, ACartia and any others I might have missed,
Thanks very much for answering my question on beneficial mutations.
Hi Glen,
I haven’t had time to have a look at the papers you linked to on evolutionary algorithms, but I’ll try to do that over the next couple of days (I’m in the middle of moving house right now). Thanks for those.
X is no doubt the vital principle.
No one but a designer stacks X that way.
That’s why I wrote that it wasn’t such a bad argument when Paley made it.
But when unintelligent evolution appears capable of Y, which is something like X but with different patterns and some marked deviations from what would be expected from X, and Y is in fact what we find in life instead of X, I’m inclined to think that unintelligent evolution is responsible for Y.
Glen Davidson
What’s this “X” we’re talking about?
It refers back to this post.
Glen Davidson
Thanks Glenn, the question is what is “X”
Apparently information. IC, CSI, SDI, fishing reels, or whatever other version one wishes to use to claim that only intelligence produces it (yes, I know what SDI is–joking).
Glen Davidson
Oh my, in that case I might be just about to pull a FFM and ask once again how those things could have come about considering that Vince accepts common descent
One mutation at a time doesn’t count, because it’s a tiny fraction of the genome. So tiny, it’s effectively zero, and any number times zero is still zero.
Macroevolution is impossible. QED.
vjtorley,
Elizabeth’s answer, which I like, is that natural selection has all the appearances of intelligence. There’s nothing like failing to survive or breed for making it look like the remainder knew what they were doing, or someone else did.
Hi Vincent
Your book review is very thought provoking and I hope that Douglas Axe, if he has read it, finds the time to respond to it. Do you know if there is any chance of that happening? Your review is a lesson in the effectiveness of polite criticism and disagreement over the all too often ad homs and vitriolic remarks that come with this subject. I have ordered the book and I look forward to reading it (hopefully in a more objective way than would have been the case if I had not read your review).
My answer is that the evolution of life is an evolution of consciousness. The products of intelligence are all around us. Bird nests, termite mounds, silk, shark skin; these all point to intelligent sources. To see the sophisticated coordination within every living cell I would advise anyone who hasn’t already done so to watch the James Tour video that Vincent linked to in his review.
And the evolution of consciousness is actually a process of concentration of consciousness into individuals. We don’t consider individual bacteria or individual ants to be consciously intelligent, but we do see intelligence in the groups. But in higher animals and humans there is the beginnings of individual conscious intelligence. We can gauge an individual animal or human’s intelligence by the amount that they are able to learn. Innate abilities come from group consciousness, individual learned abilities come from our intelligence as individuals.
At the present stage of evolution our innate and built in bodily intelligence far outstrips our individual intelligence. Likewise normal human learning ability far outstrips that of any other individual animal.
CharlieM,
There is far, far more to the living world than consciousness. It occurs in a very tiny twig in a very tiny corner of the tree/shrubbery of life. A very self-centred twig to be sure. But it seems ludicrous to me to make evolution about that.
How do you know this? How do you know that galaxies are not part of conscious beings? We cannot directly perceive consciousness so how would you know? You judge that consciousness only occurs in our “very tiny corner of the tree/shrubbery of life”. With the puny human consciousness that you have in common with the rest of us, are you competent to make that judgement?
This panpsychism bullshit makes no sense. Yes, I’m competent enought to make that judgement.
Rather than claim to know with certainty that galaxies aren’t conscious, we can simply go by the simple observation that they don’t appear to be, and in general, only living organisms exhibit behaviors we correlate with behaviors we ourselves exhibit which we associate with a conscious state.
This isn’t a deductive proof that consciousness only exists in living organisms, it’s an inference. A reasonable one.
You can built a lot of evidentially based inferences in support of the conclusion, such as there having to be some sort of systematic information processing that “makes sense” of external stimuli, which implies there must be some kinds of senses that takes in that information and so on.
What sensory organs do galaxies have? None. Is there any sort of information processing technology or structures present, like brains or electronic circuits? No.
What could they then be conscious of? If you think spiral arms of dust and gas are somehow functioning as sensory organs and information processing units, one wonders why anything would even need actual sensory organs and brains in the first place if a chaotic mix of absurdly dilute gases can serve the same purpose.
The time to believe galaxies are conscious is when they exhibit conscious behavior, as in complex behavior that betrays some sort of information processing of sensory input is taking place. Galaxies don’t, so they very very very probably aren’t the least bit conscious.
Here’s a rather simple piece of evidence that all matter isn’t conscious: You can literally lose consciousness, yet the matter you are made of does not go out of existence just because there being “a conscios state” does. Yes, that’s still not deductive PROOF that the matter isn’t still somehow conscious, but it’s evidence you now have to account for in some way, and you shouldn’t believe the account you give unless that itself has evidence for it.
well, if you mean im a bit incredulous that….’that deaf, dumb and blind kid sure can play mean pinball”….sure, who the fuck wouldn’t be.
all this false bravado about science having even a rudimentary intuition about the transition from simple to complex vis some deaf, dumb, and blind trial and error process is just blue cheese chased with skinky tofu.
ive yet to see a pinball wizard that could play through a transitional game without unwittingly stumbling over design and intelligence.
Step right up folks. Here’s you chance at fame.
What’s the reason to deem animals and humans in particular “higher” beings? That’s just a tiny fraction of the tree of life. Without bacteria, animals would not survive for too long, but if all animals went extinct, bacteria would hardly notice. Is this some sort of variation of the “humans are the most evolved” tripe?
That isn’t correct, and it reveals the problem with the entire ID movement.
The correct line of reasoning is:
1. All living things display a minimal X amount of Y. (Many living things have more than X, but no living thing has less than X.)
2. We know that human intelligence can create things with Y, but always with Z amount of Y, where Z is less than X.
3. As far as we know, non-intelligent processes can only create things with either Q amount of Y, where Q is less than Z, or with no Y at all.
On the basis of these premises, what logically follows is
4. Therefore, it is reasonable to explore the hypothesis that there exists some non-human intelligence that is causally responsible for living things having X amount of Y.
This is quite different from it’s being reasonable to accept that same hypothesis.
We can put this in terms of what Peirce called “abduction”.
1. We observe some phenomenon P.
2. P is surprising, given background beliefs at the time.
3. But if Q were the case, then P would be a matter of course.
But there’s a crucial difference between simply making the abductive leap (as Peirce called it) — just invoking the posited entity in order to generate an explanation of the observed phenomenon — and confirming the explanation.
Confirmation and testing of proposed hypothesis requires both inferring, with as much precision and rigor as we can, possible measurements that are strictly entailed by the proposed hypothesis and conducting actual measurements that approximate, with as much precision and rigor as we can, the measurements entailed by the hypothesis.
The more we can get strictly entailed possible measurements, and the more we can confirm those with approximations from actual measurements, the more confirmed the hypothesis.
And of course the situation become more complicated when we have to compare competing hypotheses, especially if those hypotheses are embedded in strictly speaking incommensurable theories.
Science is hard.
The great failing of ID is that it stops at the very first step. All it does is perform the abductive leap. There’s no attempt to derive the entailed possible measurements or to conduct actual measurements which can be shown to approximate the entailed possible measurements. But that’s where the hard work of science lies. Inventing conjectures is the easy part; testing them is hard.
ID is to science as theft is to work.
is the only thing know to generate large amounts of X, even if the intelligences we know still fall woefully short of making life. Also, there’s no known theoretical limit on how much X an intelligence can produce (in principle). The conclusion that a super-intelligence is responsible for the X-ness i
(Have been away on vacation earlier this week).
In regard to the rate of beneficial mutations: usually low, very hard to measure. Especially since you would need to distinguish between neutral and beneficial mutations, which would require you to detect extremely small selection coefficients.
In model organisms such as yeast or E. coli when they are placed in new environments, such as culture in chemostats, beneficial mutations are soon seen. An example is mutations that enable the microbe to stick to the walls of the chemostat. These are disadvantageous in normal liquid culture but advantageous in a chemostat.
Am I misunderstanding or is the argument back to the old one that natural selection is generally ineffective? Or the old one that advantageous mutations are impossible in principle for some reason involving the concept of information?
Or is the possible effectiveness of natural selection being admitted (by Axe and by Torley) and it is admitted that it can produce new adaptations but just not really really new adaptations?
If I understand from Torley’s description of Axe’s book, Axe rules out natural selection because he is talking only about the origin of life, where natural selection does not exist. Then later he is saying that the origin of other forms requires lots of new complicated stuff so that is like the origin of life. That although natural selection then does exist, it can’t do the job Because Islands In Sequence Space. And that when someone says, do you mean the White-Throated Sparrow, the Golden-Crowned Sparrow, and the White-Crowned Sparrow are on different islands, the argument than is that although those may not be on different islands, we’re talking here only about really really different new forms.
Haven’t we heard these arguments before?
Kantian Naturalist,
Great post as always.
Makes me wonder, what if one day we learned to design and produce life? what if we discovered aliens capable of it? The thing is that wouldn’t, on it’s own, tell us anything about how life originated on earth. If we were able to design AND PRODUCE life that doesn’t look anything like the life we see, but that exhibits lots of X, Torley’s inference would be falsified, but other IDists would claim that supports their design inference, even though we would still be in the dark about the origin of biological life for reasons that should be obvious.
If OTOH, we were able to create life replicating the specific conditions of the earth at the time it’s thought to have originated, and the resulting living forms looked a lot like the life we know, in a controlled experiment, that would count as evidence for abiogenesis.
It seems rather obvious to me that Torley’s inference is still based on the same old argument from ignorance:
and still lacks the explanatory power to be useful: no connection between “design” and real world data
Steve,
Evolutionists can’t even SPEAK about change without invoking purpose and design-but then after they are finished with their speeches, they just ask you to remove the parts that mentioned purpose and design, and replace it with something that is accidental but isn’t accidental.
They refuse to do this word substitution themselves of course, because they know how stupid it sounds, so they just borrow ID words, then ask you to edit later.
The implication of evolutionary theory is that we can explain purposes without positing design as the explanation of those purposes. The supposed conceptual link between purpose and design is severed.
There’s some debate among evolutionary theorists about whether purposes are real. I’m of the view that evolutionary theorists can and should be realists about teleology. It’s just that teleogical realism doesn’t entail realism about design nor is design the best explanation of teleology.
Intelligent design creationists have yet to provide a rigorous definition of X that meets the criteria of only being generated by intelligence (whatever that means) or any way to calculate it.
Agree.
VJ Torley,
This is from the world expert himself:
And I agree.
There are many reasons for this, and I’ll give one. Suppose one individual is fast and the other is smart. The slow smart guy gets killed because the lion eat him instead of the fast dumb guy. When there is strong selection for one trait, it can drown out the beneficialness of other traits.
Allan Miller’s view that just because it has a positive selection coefficient implies it will fix into a population. Kimura realized even if something has a positive selection coefficient, it may not lead to fixation in a population.
FWIW, does any one believe there are any recently emerged traits that that will fix into the human population? What beneficial mutation exists today that will unequivocally fix into the human population? Rather than ask how many, how about we ask for a specific list of what traits present in less than 50% of the population that they expect to get fixed eventually. If you get a lot of vague non-responses, that should answer your question.
Extend the question then to any vertebrate on invertebrate animal. See what I’m saying?
Human populations are a bit skewed in modern times due to technology and medical science.
But off the top of my heasd some beneficial mutations that have contributed to recent human evolution and into the onset of civilization, which I would guess will still have an effect, are:
A) High copynumbers of salivary amylase will probably keep rising in frequency.
B) Lactose tolerance, particularly in asia will probably also rise.
C) Alcohol tolerance.
I think all three are pleiotropic, meaning multiple beneficial mutations contribute to the phenotype.
No, because you never actually say what it is you’re saying. You misuse a quote from Joe Felsenstein that’s very close to saying just the opposite of what you suppose. You present an artificial and farfetched hypothetical example. Then you launch into innuendo about what others might say. But you never actually take a position or answer any questions.
Recent beneficial mutation? https://www.sciencenews.org/article/tasmanian-devils-evolve-resistance-contagious-cancer
The question About X makes me wonder what he book review was about. I thought it was about the futility of criticising evolution based on probabilities and isolated islands.
If the land of ID resides at the origin of life, then ID is arguing about an unobservrd event in distant history. What is the point of calculating odds if you don’t know what happened?
We can rule out saltation events in the origin, but both sides agree on that.
If you want a stepwise history — a possible history — you have to get down in the dirt with folks like Szostak, and try stuff. Philosophy cannot give you the answers to problems in chemistry.
Richardthughes,
“…The resistance variants aren’t new mutations; there hasn’t been enough time for a helpful mutation to arise and spread across the island. Instead, the variants were probably already present in a small number of animals in the population and natural selection (via the tumor) weeded out the individuals that didn’t carry them.”
I wonder if Vincent argues that his inference is a scientific one and not a philosophical argument. Perhaps he might want to clarify. I see no useful explanatory power in his inference to help reconcile the known facts, the raw data, with an abstract and vague concept like “super-intelligent design” so I see nothing scientific there
But we’ve been focusing on what we disagree about as of late, so Vincent, I’ll take the opportunity to commend once again your intellectual honesty, both in your review of Undeniable and your will to present a candidate for a designer (God), something that many IDists refuse to do.
Thanks for the link. I mentioned the Taz in my first response regarding frequency of beneficial mutations. I also said that if populations needed a new specific mutation to survive a challenge, they are most likely doomed. In the case of Taz, the necessary immunity seems to have been already present in the population.
Somewhere in the deep dark recesses of reporting on ecology, I’m sure there is some mention of the need for genetic diversity for populations to survive.
I keep wondering how ID advocates reconcile genetic diversity with isolated islands of function.
If you can infer the existence and behavior of every possible polymer, there would be little need for experiment.
Last time I looked, metallurgists were still inventing new and useful metal alloys by making them and testing them. I seriously doubt that inference is a useful tool for elucidating the origin of life. Inference plus experiment, iterated, perhaps.
Talk is cheap.
(The cost per Axe-word is an exception to the rule. Torley seems to have realized that the ID movement values his work little.)
But haven’t you already inferred that life’s origin is likely to be mundane and chemical, rather than extra-worldly and intellectual? To be sure, I think that’s a good and useful inference, yet it’s still an inference from the fact that answers have thus far only come from what is around us and investigable.
Of course one could actually propose that we investigate the worldly and chemical because that’s all that we can actually investigate (the chemical, physical, etc.), not having access to the mind of God or the minds of aliens, whatever. Still, I think most of us tend to infer more from the history of science, that indeed the answers are (probably, at least) available through those means–at least in principle.
Glen Davidson
Kantian Naturalist,
Oh please, you now want to allow teleology, but still try to hide an intelligence behind it? Nature just does it, poof! ?
Teleology IS intelligence, for pete’s sake.
Rumraket,
So you believe people who have a tolerance to alcohol, have outbred those that don’t have such a tolerance, so natural selection has favored them? Is that it?
And the lactose intolerant, oh how they struggle to find a mating partner?
The difference between a scientific inference and a theological inference is that science tries to make testable inferences, and [Christians] are explicitly forbidden from putting god to the test.
That nature is regular and not capricious or demon ridden is the fundamental assumption of science. It is not a conclusion, but a starting point for theorizing.
Over the centuries people may have concluded that it’s regularity all the way down, but that is still a working hypothesis, constantly being probed and tested.
Artificial, hypothetical examples are the backbone of evolution. How dare you!
petrushka,
And to ignore considering WHY nature has such intelligent aspects to it, is just silly in my opinion.
Joe Felsenstein,
Can these three types of Sparrow’s interbreed?
Who has said that you can’t consider it? Fill your boots. But if the inferences are not testable, then what is the point?
Acartia,
Scientists love to talk about testability. Except when they have scientific theories that are un-testable.
stcordova,
So beneficial mutations are applicable to the specific environment where the specie is located? Malaria resistance is an example Behe used.
I would think the most straightforward test of ID would be to demonstrate that useful sequences can be designed without trial and error. Useful as in having some benefit to a population.
I have often asked ID advocates to demonstrate that this is possible.
If it can’t be done, there’s really no point in advocating design.
yeah, its not like you can put some E Coli in a petri dish and uh oh nevermind.
petrushka,
Can you demonstrate a protein sequence being developed with trial and error?
The current process is to use living biology as a blueprint or starting point.
Did you bother to Google? I usually succeed when I attempt to answer questions for myself. And even when I fail, I learn answers to questions I never thought to ask.
Tom English,
I did, and it looks likely, but did not get a definitive answer.