(Sorry this is so long – I am in a hurry)
Gpuccio challenged myself and others to come up with examples of dFSCI which were not designed. Not surprisingly the result was that I thought I had produced examples and he thought I hadn’t. At the risk of seeming obsessed with dFSCI I want assess what I (and hopefully others) learned from this exercise.
Lesson 1) dFSCI is not precisely defined.
This is for several reasons. Gpuccio defines dFSCI as:
“Any material object whose arrangement is such that a string of digital values can be read in it according to some code, and for which string of values a conscious observer can objectively define a function, objectively specifying a method to evaluate its presence or absence in any digital string of information, is said to be functionally specified (for that explaicit function).
The complexity (in bits) of the target space (the set of digital strings of the same or similar length that can effectively convey that function according to the definition), divided by the complexity in bits of the search space (the total nuber of strings of that length) is said to be the functional complexity of that string for that function.
Any string that exhibits functional complexity higher than some conventional threshold, that can be defined according to the system we are considering (500 bits is an UPB; 150 bits is, IMO, a reliable Biological Probability Bound, for reasons that I have discussed) is said to exhibit dFSCI. It is required also that no deterministic explanation for that string is known.”
(In some other definitions Gpuccio has also included the condition that the string should not be compressible)
These ambiguities emerged:
Some functions are not acceptable but it is not clear which ones. In particular I believe that functions have to be prespecified(although Gpuccio would dispute this). Also functions which consist of identifying the content of “data strings” (a term which is itself not so clear) are not acceptable because the string in question could have been created by copying the data string.
The phrase “no deterministic explanation for that string is known” is vague. It is not clear in how much detail and how certainly the deterministic processes have to be known. For example, it appears from above the possibility that the string in question might have been copied from the string defining the function by some unknown method is sufficient to count as a known deterministic explanation. This implies that really it is sufficient to be able to conceive of the very vague outlines of a determinist process to remove dFSCI. I think this amounts to another implicit condition: no causal relationship between the function and the string.
Lesson 2) dFSCI is not a property of the string.
It is a relationship between a string, a function and an observer’s knowledge. Therefore, it may be that dFSCI applies for a string for one observer with a certain function but not for another observer with a different function. The rules for deciding which function are not clear.
Lesson 3) The process for establishing the relationship 100% specificity of dFSCI and design is not commonly found outside examples created by people to test the process.
Gpuccio says thisabout the process:
“To assess the dFSCI procedure I have to “imagine” absolutely nothing. I have to assess dFSCI without knowing the origin, and then checking my assessment with the known origin.”
When challenged he was unable to name any instances of this happening outside the context of people creating or selecting strings to test the process as in our discussions. This is important as the dFSCI/design relationship is meant to be an empirical observation about the real world applicable to a broad range of circumstances (so that it can reasonably be extended to life). If it is only observed in the very special circumstances of people making up examples over the internet then the extension to life is not justifiable. To give a medical analogy. It might well be that a blood test for cancer gives 100% specificity for rats in laboratory conditions. This is not sufficient to have any faith in it working for rats in the wild, much less people in the wild. Below I discuss what is special about the examples created by people to test about the process.
A Suggested Simplification for dFSCI
dFSCI says that given an observer and a digital string where:
1) The observer can identify a function for that string
2) The string is complex in the sense that if you just created strings “at random” the chances of it performing the function are negligible
3) The string is not compressible
4) The observer knows of no known deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Given the rather lax conditions for “knowing of a deterministic mechanism” that emerged above, surely (2) and (3) are just special cases of (4). If (2) or (3) were present then deterministic mechanisms would be conceivable for creating strings.
So the dFSCI argument could be restated:
Given an observer and a digital string where:
* The observer can identify a function for that string
* The observer cannot conceive of a deterministic explanation for producing the string
Then in all such cases if the origin eventually becomes known it turns out to include design.
Conclusion
There are two main objections to the ID argument:
A) There are deterministic explanations for life.
B) Even if there were no deterministic explanations it would not follow that life was designed
For the purposes of this discussion I will pretend (A) is false and focus on (B)
No one disputes that it is possible to detect design. The objectors to ID just believe that B) true. The correct way of detecting design is to compare a specific design hypothesis with alternatives and assess which is provides the best explanation. This includes assessing the possibility of the designer existing and having the motivation and ability to implement the design. If no specific hypothesis is available then nothing can be inferred.
So is the dFSCI claim above true and if so does it provide a valid alternative way of detecting design?
The trouble is that there is dearth of such situations. One of the reasons for this is that digital strings do not exist in nature above the molecular level. At any other level it is only a human interpretation that imposes a digital structure on analogue phenomena. The characters you are reading on this screen are analogue marks on the screen. It is you that is categorising them into characters. So all such strings are created by human processes. It follows that design is a very plausible explanation for any such string. People were involved in the creation and could easily have designed the string. If you add the conditions that the function must be prespecified and there should be no causal relationship between the function and the string then design is going to be by far the best explanation. It goes further than that. It also means there almost no real situations where someone is confronted with a digital string without knowing quite a bit about its origin – which is presumably why Gpuccio can only point to examples created/selected by bloggers.
What about the molecular level? Here there are digital strings that are not the result of human interpretation. Now human design is massively implausible (except for a few very exceptional cases). The problem now is that carbon chains are the only digital strings with any kind of complexity and these are just the one’s we are trying to evaluate. There are no digital strings at the molecular level with dFSCI except for those involved in life.
So actually the dFSCI argument only applies to a very limited set of circumstances where a Bayesian inference would come to the same conclusion.
Too funny. Mung is starting to catch on:
That’s right, Mung. dFSCI is subjective. As gpuccio wrote:
Perhaps you should have learned about dFSCI before you started defending it, Mung.
petrushka:
The numerical dFSCI value reflects the probability that the target could be produced by pure random variation, without selection, in a given amount of time. This is one of the reasons that dFSCI is so misleading — the value itself is unimportant. All of the freight is carried by the implicit boolean part.
You may be thinking of gpuccio’s protein family argument, in which he argues that the distance between selectable intermediates is too great to be bridged by pure RV. In other words, his argument (at least in that case) does not deny the power of RV + NS per se; it’s really an argument about the nature of the protein fitness landscape. He thinks that NS never gets a chance to do its thing because the selectable intermediate proteins are too far apart to be located by RV in a reasonable amount of time.
But that’s assuming one protein evolves into another completely unrelated sequence, rather than both evolving independently.
OK, I have been naïve.
Here is a clarification by gpuccio (comment #462):
The dFSCI of a protein applies to a full transition from an unrelated state to the final state. That’s why I apply the concept to basic protein domains.
In the context of the comment, where gpuccio rejects the last steps of a step-by-step construction (by natural selection) of a protein sequence, insisting that we must also account for all the other steps, this means that gpuccio’s condition that we account for the “origin” of the protein is the above: origin from an “unrelated” sequence.
I suppose everyone but me noticed this long ago.
One thing it means is that once a gene family (say the globins) gets started, none of the subsequent change creates dFCSI if the original globin had it.
Yes, and he’s also assuming that evolution has a prespecified target, rather than opportunistically exploiting anything useful it stumbles upon.
Of course there is no way to prove him wrong. the original protein coding sequences could have been poofed into existence.
This belongs in the same philosophical class as Last Thursdayism.
Ignore regular processes. They only go back so far.
It also makes clear that dFCSI is not really like William Dembski’s CSI. Dembski’s concept involves being far enough out into the tail of a distribution (say, of fitnesses) so that you are the top 10-150th of it. The question is whether natural selection can get you out there.
But Dembski’s CSI is not formulated in terms of originating a new gene from an “unrelated” one — Dembski could as easily be talking of making (large) improvements in an existing gene. But dFCSI is not concerned with that, instead with the “origin” of a new protein from an “unrelated” one. Different notion entirely.
Joe,
Neither is gpuccio’s dFSCI. He attempts to apply dFSCI to the protein question, but dFSCI is not formulated in in terms of the protein question.
Gpuccio
First – I apologise about the self-critical comment. In fact I thought about editing it and removing the comment shortly after posting it – but it is bad practice to edit comments that have been posted except for clarification.
I am going to leave the “outside the debate context” argument because I have failed to explain what I mean and I am tired of it. There are easier ways to expose the problems with the dFSCI argument.
This one is absolutely fundamental.
Presumably you are aware that there are deep conceptual problems with classical hypothesis testing (and Fisher’s original formulation has been abandoned by statisticians). In fact you can’t live without Bayesian inference. You use it – but without realising. I will explain.
First let’s be clear. You can never know there is no natural necessity system. All you can say is that you do not currently know of one and assess the probability of one existing. A quite different thing.
So given a digital string with a function you have three alternative types of explanation:
Essentially your argument is
This is a fallacy. You must also know the prior probability of 3 and the likelihood of the outcome given 3. It might be even lower than 1 or 2. As it happens in the case of man-made strings both the prior probability of 3 and the likelihood of the outcome given 3 are far higher than for 1 and 2. Given the context this is so obvious you use this assumption with even realising it.
But it is possible to imagine a scenario with different context where the assumption is not justified. As always with these debates we eventually get to hypothetical planets. Imagine a planet or some such body which is as hostile as can be – there is no way any kind of life could have lived there or even visited it – immense gravity, absolute zero temperatures, no atmosphere, no water etc. Through advanced spectroscopy (because we couldn’t go there) we find there are very long complex molecules based on silicon chains which are preciseky configured to perform a distinctive function – perhaps they cause rock formations to adopt geometrically precise shapes and basic geology tells us that only these exact molecules could lead to these shapes. Now we still have the three types of explanation and the same is still true of 1 and 2. However, the prior probability of 3 has dropped dramatically. There is very little chance of a designer being able to implement the silicon chains and no apparent reason why such a designer would want to build complex geometrical shapes on this awful planet. Suddenly it becomes very unclear which is the most likely explanation. In fact the best thing to say is “we don’t know”.
But of course, unless you have a prior belief in a God, the same is true of 3 as it applies to life. There is very little chance of a designer being able to implement life and no obvious reason why such a designer would want to do so.
PS
I didn’t mention dFSCI throughout this comment. dFSCI is an attempt to formalise the case where 1 and 2 are extraordinarily unlikely. It is because of the context of man-made strings that you find that if 1 and 2 are very unlikely then 3 is usually the case. I will resist the temptation to explain how all this fits in with the “outside the debate” argument.
That’s a little hard to unwrap. ‘Transitions’ are all about moves between related states – related by descent. But separating out ‘protein domains’ is an arbitrary class that we can see but evolution/genetics cannot. It amounts to protein baraminology. There is this presumed class of DNA -> amino acid sequence segments that cannot arise from precursors, but which can then evolve without making excessive demands of the probabilistic resources of the universe.
But the string-copying process doesn’t know where genes start and stop, let alone domains, and makes no contribution to assessments of the length of a segment whose entire linkage sequence is discretely ‘functional’. Function is assessed in lives, skewing the distribution of non-demarcated strings presented to the copy process in favour of the ‘useful’.
What GP misses is the fact that parts of biological strings are related to each other. The basic unit of the protein is simply the amino acid, not the domain. And the basic unit of the amino acid coding segment is the nucleotide, blindly copied. These ‘modules’ can build by duplication locally or distally into higher-order modules, among which are the domains that have proved of evolutionary value en bloc, and hence are found repeatedly in various proteins of various functions. But the domains themselves are modular. A four-acid sequence may give you one turn of a helix. Duplicate it and you get two. Duplicate that you get four… In no time at all you have a lengthy structural element. A bit of point mutation, with quite a bit of latitude due to relatedness of amino acid properties, may then obscure the ‘true’ relatedness of these elemental repeats. Then GP comes along and says that there is no way that this longer sequence could have arisen by mechanical means. And with no clear audit of the steps, thanks to the eliminatory and obfuscatory nature of the very processes of evolution, his diagnosis of Design is irrefutable – but for the fact that he has not, in fact, eliminated all ‘necessity mechanisms’.
Gpuccio
Further to my comment above. I got fascinated by pursuing the analogy with medical diagnostic testing.
Imagine a population where there are two common known disorders A and B which produce symptom X. In addition B is most unlikely to produce significantly raised temperature while A quite commonly does so (but also may not). There are numerous other conditions that could produce X and some of them could also produce a high temperature but they are extremely rare in this population. And of course there might always be some unknown condition that produces X plus a high temperature.
Then you could imagine this very sensible diagnostic procedure:
If
* patient presents with symptoms X and
* temperature is raised above a certain level
* and no other known condition can be envisaged for this patient which might produce X and a high temperature
then conclude A.
If you set the temperature high enough then this test could well have 100% specificity for that population.
But its success is highly dependent on A being very common in that population and knowledge of what other conditions might have caused a high temperature.
If you were to move to a new population where the prevalence of A is unknown or known to be low and where other conditions with which we have little experience are prevalent it would be an extremely risky procedure.
I think the analogies are fairly obvious but just to drill it home:
Empirical tests can normally be repeated whether you think they are useful or not. ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ In any case, #4 doesn’t measure anything. That means dFSCI is just a restatement of Paley’s watch, while rejecting what has been discovered since Paley.
Of course, the vast majority of scientists believe that evolution does result in functional complexity. The entire biosphere is the counterexample.
Not sure what you’ve accomplished with dFSCI, as #4 is determined external to your calculation of functional complexity. The most you can say is that you have identified a property, functional complexity, then assert by analogy, while rejecting the evolutionary sciences, that the property signifies design.
Is that the entirety of your point?
Of course it’s negative: “#4) It is required also that no deterministic explanation for that string is known.” That’s a negative condition.
keiths wrote:
I disagree. gpuccio talks about whether an “explanation for that string is known”. And then clarifies that this means an “explanation” of the origin of that string from an unrelated string.
I had misunderstood gpuccio as talking about how a string came to have a high amount of “function”, starting with a much lower amount. That is what Dembski talks about, and gpuccio is using Dembskian terms like CSI. But gpuccio seems to be talking about the origin of the string from an unrelated string.
I see that gpuccio (#476) has agreed with you. Of course gpuccio does not formulate dFCSI in terms of proteins — it’s strings. But gpuccio does want an “explanation” of the string, as a step-by-step scenario for the evolution of the string from an unrelated string.
Gpuccio has been at this for at least a couple of years, and I thought he had made it plain that he believes protein domains were created ex nihilo by a non material designer.
At one point I believe we discussed the possibility that the designer revisits his creation every million years or so to pop in a new domain. As evidenced by the apparent history of new domains appearing in new lineages.
Two lines of reasoning are critical to GP’s argument.
1. Function is isolated and cannot be bridged by evolution.
2. At least some domain sequences have no relatives or variants. He uses this to reinforce the concept of isolated islands.
I see no reason to get excited about the fine points of his definition of dFSCI when these are the real meat of his argument. If he is correct that one needs 80 or more bases in a precise sequence before any selectable function appears, then he has a strong argument.
gpuccio, I need some help here,
Why would you say that only finding a “necessity mechanism” after a positive “dFSCI” assessment, falsifies the validity of the procedure?
Any string X, that has passed all other tests except an assessment of whether it is a result of a “necessity mechanism”, is already functional at the level you claim only design can deliver.
If you find a “necessity mechanism” that can generate a string that you would assess as positive for “dFSCI” had no “necessity mechanism” been found, then “dFSCI” has already failed as a procedure for testing design.
There is no need to wait to find a “necessity mechanism” to invalidate “dFSCI” as a design detection tool for an otherwise suitable string, if you’ve already found it beforehand.
Joe, gpuccio does not assess “dFSCI” positive if a string is the result of a known “necessity mechanism”, even if that string passes all other tests for “dFSCI” except for its origin due to a known “necessity mechanism”.
If a known “necessity mechanism” can generate a string that would be as functional as one requiring complex design above the UPB, why would I need to go through a design procedure?
The finding of a known “necessity mechanism” is already the end of your search for the origin of a string’s information, which in this case, is not design, despite that fact that the string meets all other requirements of “dFSCI”.
Yes Joe, you and I have, but gpuccio is simply using a short form for “dFSCI” and positive design assessment, like here:
Again you miss the point Joe.
If gpuccio assesses “dFSCI” positive for a string and then …afterwards….. accepts that its origin was a “necessity mechanism”, he asserts “dFSCI” negative and admits a failed test for design, due to his acceptance of a “necessity mechanism” as its source.
This clearly says a “necessity mechanism” can be used as a disqualifier for design.
The problem is that his definition precludes him allowing non-design, i.e. “necessity mechanisms”, for the acceptable bit configuration of a string that in all other ways except origin, would have resulted in a “dFSCI” positive.
If necessity mechanisms can result in complex unlikely useful bit configurations above the UPB as gpuccio claims only design can provide, then design has already been ruled before a positive assessment of “dFSCI” is even made.
In short, we don’t need design if “necessity mechanisms” are up to the task.
Whether you accept that they exist has nothing to do with whether it is acceptable to exclude them simply due to definition.
In this case they can’t be excluded since design is what they’re being tested against.
I can see you not reading carefully what I say, but why do you not read gpuccio’s points more carefully?
gouccio does not exclude a “necessity mechanism” after the fact but does exclude it before.
That makes no sense.
If you can find a “necessity mechanism” that can generate the types of information that you claim only design can, then the theory of “dFSCI” is already invalidated.
But of course, that’s exactly what’s going on. Design is determined. Which means “dFSCI” is assessed because of that design, which means that no “necessity mechanism” could have been the cause, because of that “DFSCI”!
Design exists because it is asserted to exist, by those who prefer to believe it. And everything else from dFSCI to CSI to irreducible complexity to “chance and regularity” are stubbornly superfluous. You can omit them entirely from every ID argument and the argument itself changes only in that it’s more compact It’s designed because we said so.
Can anyone here seriously imagine any ID proponent applying any of his methods or custom terminology or circular arguments or whatever tool he wishes to bring to the task, and discovering to his astonishment that he’s WRONG, and something wasn’t Designed after all?
Hey, we’re getting somewhere. 🙂
Gpuccio does not exclude evolution because it is insufficient, but because we don’t know the detailed history.
He also excludes, by definition, any mathematical demonstration of sufficiency, as in models
Is it just my imagination, or does every new ID theory start by assuming the insufficiency of evolution?
It strikes me that after nearly a year of trying to clarify Upright Biped’s semiotic theory, what it boils down to is that evolution requires a system capable of evolution, and that such a system can’t arise naturally.
Gpuccio has been peddling dFSCI for a couple of years (at some length at Mark Frank’s blog). After you boil away all the fancy calculations, you find that it simply assumes evolution is insufficient. The calculations are useless without that assumption.
In order to demonstrate the need for design intervention, they engage in a great deal of verbiage, but at bottom, they start by assuming their conclusion.
Just start?
It ends that way too! 🙂
I disagree. It STARTS with “goddidit”. This is axiomatic, not to be questioned or doubted. Evolution proposes a mechanism which doesn’t required the creationist god, and THEREFORE evolution is insufficient.
Seriously, nobody is going to dismiss any proposed explanation in a vacuum. Proposals are rejected because they are regarded as inferior to existing explanations. Goddidit is evaluated in contrast to “god did NOT do it”, which is of course rejected a priori.
Yes, they start by assuming their conclusion. But their assumed conclusion is that goddidit. Evolution is rejected only because it’s the only currently coherent threat. None of the ID folks seems to understand what evolution actually IS, of course. But that’s not necessary, so why bother learning it?
“es, they start by assuming their conclusion. But their assumed conclusion is that goddidit. Evolution is rejected only because it’s the only currently coherent threat. None of the ID folks seems to understand what evolution actually IS, of course. But that’s not necessary, so why bother learning it? ”
Thats the problem with evolution. Its a !@#$% shell game. It supposed coherence depends on the pliability of the definition of evolution. Its useless to understand what is happening in living systems. Its the equivalent of saying ‘ shit happens so stop pestering me about it already’.
At least ID is making the attempt at actually trying to understand how life works by grappling with the implications of the information in biological systems. TSZers and PTers are simply applying the ostrich effect; putting their heads in the sand and hoping it all goes away.
Well, it isn’t going away. You can diss gpuccio and UB to your heart’s content but at the cost of your eventual embarrassment.
Remember, humans design —> Humans are embedded in nature —> Therefore, nature designs. Inescapable. There is nothing accidental, or unguided, or un-designed about anything that happens in life.
To deny design is to deny yourself. That is the ultimate mark of incoherence.
gpuccio has added (#486) this:
Interestinger and interestinger. So the thing that must be explained is not origin of a gene from an unrelated sequence but new information needed for the origin of a “new function”, even if from a related sequence.
So what has to be “new” about a new function? Where is that explained in the definition(s) of dFCSI?
Gpuccio 483
Well that depends a bit what you mean by “natural necessity” which I find rather vague but I think means “not designed or random”.
It is a bit stronger than that. If 3 is even more unlikely then it would be irrational not to prefer 1 and 2. Do you accept that this is true? It is not clear from what follows.
Yes under your world view God is the most likely explanation for everything for which we cannot find an answer. But the design argument is meant to be independent of any world view. It is an important concession that it is only valid if you adopt your world view.
Well actually the probability of 2 is also unknown. We don’t know what necessity mechanisms might be round the corner. I only said that your argument assumed this probability was low.
Careful. What I have discovered over the course of this debate is that dFSCI is a relationship between a person’s knowledge, a function and digital string. (It also describes a process which might work well for detecting design if design is a common explanation (see my medical analogy)). Only by accepting this can you avoid the circularity objection. A string can have dFSCI for one function and not for another. It can have dFSCI for one observer and not for another. It can have dFSCI for an observer at one time and not at another. It is not a property of a string which can be “output” by anything.
Well I could quibble over a lot more – but I am happy if you accept these two things:
Actually the argument from dFSCI works because we observe cellular activiity exhibiting intelligence.
On the other hand, the argument from evolution is not derived from observation but says we can ‘imagine’ the plausibility of incremental complexification of matter over eons because we have tantalizing bits of circumstantial evidence to provide comfort food for that head trip.
But alas, it isnt less probable since we observe unmistakable intelligent activity in the cell; compared to the more improbable, long-winded extrapolation from a slice of presumed random cellular activity.
Indeed, if we grant that the evidence for evolution is “circumstantial” as you say then it’s no wonder you believe in ID where the evidence for a designer and a design is rock solid.
Oh, wait….
Steve – welcome to TSZ.
My comment was in response to a comment by Gpuccio where he went to some length to describe the importance of our respective world views to the validity of the argument from dFSCI. Are you disagreeing with what he wrote? I don’t understand what you mean by “observing cellular activiity exhibiting intelligence”. Perhaps you could explain what it is and how it makes the dFSCI argument valid?
I am not a biologist so I will not comment on the strength of evidence for modern evolutionary theory. I am more interested in the proposed alternatives.
A design hypothesis includes the presence of a designer with the power and motivation to implement the design. So the probability of the design hypothesis includes the probability of such a designer existing. I don’t understand what you mean by “intelligent activity in the cell” but it surely does not include a designer, its powers and motivation?
1) Who’s ‘we’?
2) What is the causal relationship between your proposed cellular intelligence and the DNA strings that manifest its activity by their quality of ‘dFSCI’?
3) How does your proposed cellular intelligence compute the distal biochemical and organismal consequences of its actions in order to choose between options?
4) Likewise, how does your proposed cellular intelligence anticipate or sense the longer-term benefits of those consequences within the environment?
5) If cellular intelligence underpins adaptive change, whence comes maladaptive mutation?
Of course, you can strike ‘cellular’ and the questions become more general ID ones (unanswered because ‘we are only looking for the signal, not the mechanism’). But you are specifically saying ‘cellular’, so you have reason to say something about the nature of the designer, and I’m curious why you plump for intracellular rather than the more common extra-universal.
gpuccio,
I’m glad you’re pleased with my understanding of your argument. Contra your past insinuations of dishonesty, I do try to understand what you are saying and I have no desire to misrepresent your argument.
However, you must be aware that this very same understanding of your argument is what leads me to the conclusion that dFSCI is a useless concept that adds nothing of value to the discussion. All it does is to impart a pseudo-scientific sheen to the ID argument and disguise the fact that it is really just an argument from ignorance.
I want one! That is going straight on my Christmas list. 🙂
Gpuccio 492 (I have only responded to some of your points)
So we have random, design and “without the need for probabilistic treatment”. Where do explanations that make the outcome more probable than random but not fully determined fit?
What do you mean by “best” explanation? Is it different from most probable?
But you accept we need to centre it on an intelligence with power and motivation to design life? Whether this corresponds your God or not I am happy to leave.
This is unreasonable. There are an infinite variety of world views. You write as though there were only two alternatives my view and yours. You make it sound as though I am making the commitment which excludes ID. But you can believe in non physical conscious beings and still think it impossible that there was something with the motivation and power to design life. You have to make the prior commitment to the extraordinary possibility of such a designer for ID to work.
Therefore a string can have dFSCI for one function and not have it for another, right? Therefore it is not a property of the string which can be correlated with design.
You have previously said
Whatever type of necessity mechanisms we are talking about (and this does seem to be getting rather complicated) one observer may know of such a mechanism while another does not. Therefore for one observer the string has dFSCI while for the other it does not. It may that as a result of discussion one observer will change his or her mind. But that happens later. I cannot see how you can avoid this. It follows from your definition.
It seems to me your are saying that dFSCI is only true if there is no necessity mechanism (as opposed to no known necessity mechanism). That way leads back to circularity.
Why phrase it in terms of my prior belief? It can equally be phrased in terms of your prior belief that an intelligence with the power and motivation to design life is possible
I would still like to know what you mean by the best explanation – do you mean the most probable?
In response to my request as to how “new” a function had to be to qualify as “new” when we had a change from a related protein, gpuccio writes
I disagree. gpuccio’s argument seems to basically be Michael Behe’s “Edge of Evolution” argument with some added terminology but no basically new features (I restrain myself from saying “no new function”) but with some features missing. Behe says that more than 6 (or whatever) changes that are individually not advantageous cannot be achieved, on theoretical grounds. gpuccio cites no theory but argues that more than X amount of dFCSI has never been observed to be achieved. gpuccio starts by removing cases where it has been shown that RV+NS can explain the evolution based on whatever is known now, so we may have to wait to know whether gpuccio is correct. dFCSI is effectively just a formalization of a threshold for amount of change observed.
In fact gpuccio is willing to declare dFCSI present in cases where we have not established that the intermediates are neutral or disadvantageous, but we just have no evidence on that.
So it seems to be a considerably weaker argument than Behe’s.
(By the way, in UD comment #442 gpuccio chastised me as misrepresenting gpuccio’s method for analysing the strings proposed in the Challenge. I will accept chastisement for not having read all of that exchange, so I should not have shot off my mouth on that. As I don’t have time to go back and read all of it, I still don’t know what I actually should have said. I will leave that aspect of the Challenge to its participants and discuss only how we analyse the possibility of evolution of natural strings.)
Upright BiPed relies on data strings as he treats them as “semiotic codes” and “materially arbitrary”.
If you exclude data strings, Upright BiPed is not working with “dFSCI” positive strings.
If you exclude highly compressible strings, you have excluded an “origin” for strings that in all other respects would qualify as “dFSCI” positive.
If the “information” in DNA is found to be compressible by some algorithm, does DNA now become “dFSCI” negative?
You and I have said that regardless of origin, any string whose bit configuration meets “dFSCI” requirements, has “dFSCI”.
It’s funny but the standard refrain of ID supporters is that whatever new data is found “evolution” will adjust to adapt to it, rather then be falsified. Even if that data is the classic rabbit in the wrong epoch.
Yet here it seems that despite the fact that dFSCI has “billions of billions” of usable examples (KF’s claim) the fact that it can be used to detect design has been, well, falsified.
Yet will that cause the notion of dFSCI to gather dust and be forgotten about? Of course not.
So they do exactly what they accuse others of doing.
That says that the “whoosh” sound you hear, is our position sailing right over your head. 🙂
By excluding a highly compressible string you have implicitly rejected the string on its possible origin.
A compressible string might have as an origin a mechanism of generation that has much less “improbability” in a random distribution.
This is what you are testing the “dFSCI” attributes of the string against.
If the improbability of the “origin” is below the UPB, design is not necessary for the “dFSCI” of that string.
If you don’t consider such a string, then you have ruled out a known “necessity mechanism” for that string and you claimed such a mechanism would invalidate “dFSCI” as a means of distiguishing design.
Neither the explicit, or in this case, implicit origin of the string, can be taken into account when testing for a case of “dFSCI” positive.
If you do take the origin into account, “dFSCI” as a design indicator, is not useful.
gpuccio,
As mentioned here by many, self-replicators are necessity mechanisms that can generate a lot of information that would be considered “dFSCI”, and yet the “information” required for self-replicators is below the UPB.
It means you cannot exclude compressibility for the same reasons we agreed you cannot exclude necessity mechanisms.
If you find an algorithm that can “uncompress”, i.e. generate, a string that for any other reason would be acceptable as “dFSCI” positive, and that compressed string is below the UPB, the concept of “dFSCI” is invalidated.
Hmm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime#The_first_illegal_executable_prime_number
4 85650 78965 73978 29309 84189 46942 86137 70744 20873 51357 92401 96520 73668 69851 34010 47237 44696 87974 39926 11751 09737 77701 02744 75280 49058 83138 40375 49709 98790 96539 55227 01171 21570 25974 66699 32402 26834 59661 96060 34851 74249 77358 46851 88556 74570 25712 54749 99648 21941 84655 71008 41190 86259 71694 79707 99152 00486 67099 75923 59606 13207 25973 79799 36188 60631 69144 73588 30024 53369 72781 81391 47979 55513 39994 93948 82899 84691 78361 00182 59789 01031 60196 18350 34344 89568 70538 45208 53804 58424 15654 82488 93338 04747 58711 28339 59896 85223 25446 08408 97111 97712 76941 20795 86244 05471 61321 00500 64598 20176 96177 18094 78113 62200 27234 48272 24932 32595 47234 68800 29277 76497 90614 81298 40428 34572 01463 48968 54716 90823 54737 83566 19721 86224 96943 16227 16663 93905 54302 41564 73292 48552 48991 22573 94665 48627 14048 21171 38124 38821 77176 02984 12552 44647 44505 58346 28144 88335 63190 27253 19590 43928 38737 64073 91689 12579 24055 01562 08897 87163 37599 91078 87084 90815 90975 48019 28576 84519 88596 30532 38234 90558 09203 29996 03234 47114 07760 19847 16353 11617 13078 57608 48622 36370 28357 01049 61259 56818 46785 96533 31007 70179 91614 67447 25492 72833 48691 60006 47585 91746 27812 12690 07351 83092 41530 10630 28932 95665 84366 20008 00476 77896 79843 82090 79761 98594 93646 30938 05863 36721 46969 59750 27968 77120 57249 96666 98056 14533 82074 12031 59337 70309 94915 27469 18356 59376 21022 20068 12679 82734 45760 93802 03044 79122 77498 09179 55938 38712 10005 88766 68925 84487 00470 77255 24970 60444 65212 71304 04321 18261 01035 91186 47666 29638 58495 08744 84973 73476 86142 08805 29443
It’s a shame there is no program for determining dFSCI….
Gpuccio 497 (I have eliminated some lines of question to concentrate on the more important ones)
And it is only your commitment that makes it seem possible – after all we have never observed any examples that come close to it. We have no idea how it could be done. It seems to me that we are both assessing the design option on the basis of prior commitments – why stress one rather the other? I have the slight advantage in that there have been many phenomena that were formerly explained by a commitment to a the design(s) of a supernatural force of some kind which are now universally accepted as being explained by previously unrecognised natural forces. There are zero occurrences the other way round.
Accepted. I guess you are saying that if a string is found to have dFSCI for any function then it always turns out to be designed. I can live with that definition – although I think you will have to modify it to any prespecified function for a man-made string to make it true.
I don’t think you are the best person to judge whether you are clear – that way lies hubris
There is an important point here. Normally a group of experts are discussing whether an independent objective state of affairs pertains. According to what you have written earlier this is different (it may help to remind you that your comment was in response to this comment of mine). Imagine a group of experts examining a digital string. They come to the conclusion there are no laws they can conceive of which would account for it performing this function. They therefore conclude it has dFSCI.
a) Has it got dFSCI because they can’t think of a necessity explanation
Or
b) Do they think it has dFSCI because there actually is no necessity explanation
To put it another way – if one of them has a revelation at a later date and thinks of a necessity mechanism –
a) Did it have dFSCI before (and was not designed)?
Or
b) Have they now discovered it did not have dFSCI after all because it was not designed?
Formerly you answered a) which avoided circularity – but of course that implies dFSCI is relative to an observer’s knowledge. It sounds like you are now shifting to b) which is makes dFSCI circular.
Well of course the body of widely known scientific laws changes dramatically from time to time. There is nothing magic about that. But what I am really getting at is that an explanation may be totally unanticipated by one observer or a group of observers even without discovering new laws of nature: tectonic plates are a good example. No one among all the community of geologists thought of this as an explanation of the formation of mountains and earthquakes. But it did not require new laws of nature – just a fertile imagination.
The problem here is that you and I have much the same body of knowledge and intellectual skills. So any explanation that I thought of you would have already thought of and therefore there would be a necessity mechanism and you would not regard the string has having dFSCI. Suppose I found an example of a person or group of people with less knowledge than us because of history or age or education. Then I produce an example of a functional digital complex string for which they cannot see the necessity mechanism that created it, but we can. Would that refute the dFSCI argument?
Hang on – dFSCI only points to design if you accept your world view!
Nice example. Kudos to Gpuccio 500 for accepting it may be an example of non-designed dFSCI. I reallyy hope for more from him on this as it may make some of his ideas clearer.
And of course even the most expert group of people cannot guarantee a string is not compressible. That’s why encryption works.
Might I point out that somewhere in the expanded digits of pi there will be a string equivalent to all the plays of Shakespeare. Or to any other arbitrary string.
EDIT:
It occurs to me that the expansion of pi might be equivalent to Luis Borges’ Library of Babel. Not proven, but interesting to me.
I don’t think that’s been proven yet, though it is suspected to be true.
Amusing to think that somewhere within the digits of pi is a representation of the best possible defense of the argument from dFSCI. The only question is: is it good enough? I strongly suspect the answer is no.
I did say not proven, but perhaps not strongly enough.
But any “random” number generator, say one that derives its digits from radioactive decay, is definitely equivalent to the Library of Babel.
But the problem with ID is not a problem that can be solved with mat. It is a problem in chemistry, and any solution requires doing the hard work of testing sequence space with chemistry. The problem with the concept of isolated islands is that it is simply wrong.
I’m not sure if “non-terminating, non-reoccuring” = “exhausts all possibilities”
Flint,
I just ran across yet another example of this in the person of Eric Anderson, who’s been involved in these debates for years but still doesn’t understand the basics of evolution:
I suppose I should be used to it by now, but I find that level of obtuseness stunning.