(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.
When ID types come up with arguments that are, or seem to be, quantitative, analyses of these arguments need to appear here (or at other relevant forums such as Panda’s Thumb). I’m going to keep doing that.
Of course I am not assuming that the hard-core ID posters and commenters will be convinced. They never acknowledge that any of their arguments are wrong.
But there are numerous spectators out there reading these threads, and they need to hear how theoretical and quantitative arguments work, and I can supply that.
There are also other TSZ and PT commenters who don’t know how to evaluate these putatively-quantitative ID arguments. These commenters seem to find it useful to have a careful explanation of the theory.
We need an accessible place for these quantitative and theoretical arguments to occur. TSZ and PT are such places.
gpuccio, you have to start posting comments on this side if you want a reply.
It’s not fair to readers to have to follow two blogs for one conversation.
Is your “dFSCI” important enough to be defended in a cold objective non-biased environment?
Gpuccio,
I have given you an explicit example that shows why the design hypothesis doesn’t predict an objective nested hierarchy. In your response, you carefully avoid my example and merely reassert the claim that I had just debunked:
First of all, you haven’t given any independent justification for your assumption. A designer (and especially a Designer) doesn’t have to work through common descent, and he doesn’t have to reuse what already exists. Your only reason for assuming that he does these things is that you are trying to force-fit your theory to the existing evidence. It’s the same error made by an advocate for the Rain Fairy hypothesis who assumes that the Rain Fairy always acts in ways that match the weather we are actually observing.
Second, your assumption doesn’t even work. The example I gave, in which a computer designer takes a Blu-ray drive (which already exists) and adds it to 25 different computer models (which already exist), thus intelligently modifying them, conforms to your assumption. Yet I have already shown that it spoils the objective nested hierarchy.
Third, the Blu-ray example is easily translated into a biological context. The Designer takes a complex structure that he implemented elsewhere (analogous to the Blu-ray drive) and “transplants” it into 25 distinct lineages (analogous to the 25 separate computer models). It’s design, it conforms to your unjustified assumption, and yet it still ruins the objective nested hierarchy.
You have a serious problem. The theory of evolution makes the audacious prediction of an objective nested hierarchy, out of trillions of alternative possibilities. The prediction is confirmed. Under a design hypothesis, you have no reason to expect an objective nested hierarchy.
If you “follow the evidence where it leads”, as IDers like to say, you find that it leads directly away from design and straight to modern evolutionary theory.
You appear to be making a Bayesian argument, and Bayesian arguments are off limits according to Dembski, unless it is convenient for him (as in his analysis of election fraud).
Joe F.,
Gpuccio confirms that he is still confused about the difference between the model and the thing being modeled:
What he’s suggesting is not a model of NS, it’s an “implementation of NS” — his words. He’s rejecting the idea of modeling selection and saying instead that we must actually implement selection by creating computer viruses which compete for computational resources, which he oddly labels “natural resources”.
The obvious irony (obvious to us, anyway) is that in trying to model NS, he ends up implementing selection, rather than modeling it. And it’s a form of selection that isn’t derived from actual natural fitness landscapes. Instead, it’s based on the success of artificial replicators in an artificial environment with an artificial source of variation.
He seems to understand that it is perfectly fine for the programmer to model variation:
Yet for some reason he doesn’t understand that if it’s okay to design a model of random variation, then it’s okay to design a model of natural selection.
Anyway, once you cut through all of his confusion, the bottom line is this: Random variation plus selection can produce functional complexity, as gpuccio himself admits. Whether it does so in a particular case depends on the specific fitness landscape involved.
Gpuccio is therefore betting the farm on the hope that actual biological fitness landscapes will consist of separated “islands of function” which NS cannot navigate.
The evidence for the objective nested hierarchy demonstrates that this is a huge mistake. Studies by Szostak, Lenski, Thornton, etc., are additional nails in the coffin.
http://toddcwood.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/biochemistry-tour-de-force-in-nature.html
Forums such as Panda’s Thumb and The Skeptical Zone can be good places to learn science as well as for debunking ID/creationism.
Debating ID/creationists may get one some insight into their tactics; but those tactics are always variations on the old “Gish Gallop;” they will never converge because their only purpose is to make it appear that the ID/creationist can stay in the game and take on multiple opponents at a time. If they can do that – no matter how stupid their on-the-spot concocted “arguments” – they win.
I suppose it is because I have been observing this for as long as I have that so much of it seems like a time loop to me. I seldom see anything new in ID/creationist debating tactics. It’s always the same smoke-and-mirror word-gaming; never any real substance or any real science.
The focus is always on making the ID/creationist a celebrity on the spot. ID/creationists crave celebrity; and Ken Ham is falling all over himself recently in order to get Bill Nye to debate someone on the AiG staff. This has always been what they want; they simply cannot do science. I have seen up close and personal just how damned dishonest and mean that ID/creationists can be. Early on, Gish was one of the worst; but other creationists copied him and his tactics. Those tactics were taught explicitly at places like the ICR and at Liberty “University.” They are not nice people despite their façade. They are down and dirty politics to the core. Debating is their specialty.
What I learned years ago was that the public – kids especially – really appreciate honest attempts of scientists to clarify science in a way that doesn’t condescend and yet makes the science interesting and useful in their lives. They also want to understand the mechanics behind deception; and the story of ID/creationism is a perfect case study in conscious, well-organized and well-coordinated deception. The lessons of scientific thinking are also lessons in minimizing the dangers of being deceived.
ID/creationists don’t need to know who the effective educators are; they don’t need to know who to send their assassins after. ID/creationists are always looking for the high-profile, celebrity scientist on which to hitch a ride. They need to be taken down by nobodies coming out of nowhere. Good public education is necessary.
The last thing an ID/creationist should ever see when he is trying to peddle his crap is the cold, knowing glare of the public slamming the door in his face with no comment. He should never know where that knowledge came from.
Even using gpuccio’s unrealistic and illogical limitations, it seems that Tom Ray’s tierra system meets his requirements. This was raised both at Mark Frank’s blog where we got to watch him change definitions on an almost hourly basis and in an earlier thread here at TSZ when gpuccio deigned to grace us with his presence.
He seems oddly disinclined to discuss that particular simulation. Too bad, it would be nice to see an intelligent design creationist make a testable prediction for once.
Mike Elzinga:
That’s simply not true. Gpuccio, for example, doesn’t use the Gish Gallop. (He changes his argument frequently, often without acknowledging that he is doing so, but the topic remains the same, and so this is not Gish Galloping.)
Also, I’m not interested merely in tactics. The thinking of IDers and creationists is also fascinating. Many of them can see that reason and evidence are at odds with their beliefs. How they manage the dissonance, and how they maintain their beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, is very interesting.
By “ID/creationists” I am assuming you mean debaters in public, including on blogs. Some such qualification is in order, otherwise you are accusing between 25 and 50% of the U.S. population of dealing dishonestly with these issues. The great bulk of those people are of course sincere and honest in their beliefs about creationism.
Shutdown TSZ – no.
But could we have people starting new topics – please? They don’t have to be based on UD posts.
Also, with gpuccio it is sometimes possible to zero in on the crux of a disagreement. You can’t do that with Gish Gallopers.
For example:
keiths:
gpuccio:
Almost certainly real biological fitness landscapes do have well-separated islands. Probably all life exists on one of those islands, the others being unknown to us. There might be much better ways to be life, but life never got there.
The issue is not whether there are such islands, but there is more than one such island with present-day life forms on it.
Yup; primarily the dispensers and political pushers of this crap.
I think I may have mentioned over on Panda’s Thumb that Duane Gish used to show up unannounced in the biology classrooms in the public schools around Kalamazoo, MI and harass the biology teachers. This was way back when Gish worked at what used to be the Upjohn Company (now Pharmacia). With the changes in the law since then, he could never do that today.
One of those teachers was a multiple award winning teacher who was a good friend of mine for many years. The pain of those encounters with Gish lasted for many years, and she still recounted them when I last talked with her a few weeks before she died of cancer several years ago.
Think of it. What kind of man would attempt to politically assassinate a biology teacher right in front of his or her students? But this is the kind of man Gish was; and he had support in the Kalamazoo community. The churches that supported him are still here; and they invite Ken Ham and his minions from time to time.
Some of the local biology teachers, even today, are skittish about teaching anything about evolution; and even the biology teachers at a highly competitive math/science center get harassed regularly about their teaching of evolution. One of the community’s former members of the Michigan State House of Representatives is still politically active and pushed ID/creationist legislation when he was in the House. He is a Tea Party member today.
During the Dover trial, one of the nearby communities was threatened with a law suit by the Thomas Moore Law Center if it didn’t allow two elementary public school teachers to continue teaching young earth creationism to the students. That battle lasted for nearly a year.
This is not the Deep South. These people are out there; and they are still angry and active. I have responded to their diatribes in the local newspaper as recently as 2008 or 9. They were expecting much from this last Presidential Election; but fortunately they lost. But they never quit.
When you meet some of them, they can be very cordial; but they are politically nasty behind the scenes. They try not to tip their hands much any more. I’m glad the election turned out the way it did; but it’s not over.
Even if we use
tierra, there is still this issue:[gpuccio #888] e) if and when the replicators develop new functions, we check their code to see if the new function is complex.
We would need to agree on what was or was not a “new function”. And it would not suffice to examine the code that made the new function immediately after it arose, as if it become “complex” later, by elaboration, that would seem to satisfy the requirements of dFCSI.
Joe F:
And of course, gpuccio thinks that life is spread over multiple islands, and that it had to be poofed onto each one since unguided evolution is incapable of bridging the gaps between them.
Certainly I encourage folks to study ID/creationist tactics. Debating is not as efficient as sitting down and really dissecting their misconceptions, misrepresentations, and tactics.
But ID/creationists who want to debate aren’t really interested in science; and from what I have seen for many years, I doubt that there are very many who can follow any real science. Most of them have vague, hand-waving ideas they pick up from creationist literature.
What I have seen of them is that they want the practice so that they can win debates. Many declare victory even when they loose. They never learn any science from a debate. By just getting a debate, they think they win.
However, as long as there are people who plunge into debating them, if I happen to see anything interesting, I use the occasion to simply sit back and study. I am generally not interested in debating ID/creationists because their understanding of science is not adequate enough for them to understand any point one is making. They don’t want to learn anyway. It’s just the debate for them.
I personally prefer helping people to understand science; and I don’t like the game-playing of debates. Debates are horribly inefficient at conveying reliable information. ID/creationist debaters are a waste of time for me.
If one is to engage in debates, I would certainly suggest that one come away from such encounters with the ability to do a thorough post-mortem of the debate as far as content, concepts, and one’s own understanding of science.
For the scientist, it isn’t enough just to win a debate; one has the additional responsibility of educating the audience as well. Scientists are at a disadvantage in this regard because they are expected to be responsible for not misleading people.
ID/creationists don’t care; they can make up crap as they go and be glib enough to bamboozle the audience into thinking they are great. It is never a fair match from the beginning; and they already know that.
Debates on the internet are a little different because there is a “transcript” generated; but when threads get as long and and as drawn out as they do here, for example, they stop holding interest, and nothing is every learned by the ID/creationist or any of the spectators who get bored and walk away.
I quite franky got bored with all this gpuccio stuff. Learning something usually doesn’t take that long in real life. When you sum it all up, what have you learned? What else could you have learned with all that time?
These days I usually ignore Mung, except when he a) displays a misunderstanding that I think others might share, or b) says something that is too funny not to point out. This is an example of the latter:
Let’s take a closer look at Mung’s logic. Suppose gpuccio claims that the designer 1) works through common descent, 2) reuses what already exists, 3) makes changes only on the third Tuesday of each month, 4) fiddles with eukaryotes in the spring and summer and prokaryotes in the fall and winter, and 5) appears to earthly observers in the form of a giant, diamond-encrusted lobster.
I object, saying that the designer doesn’t have to work through common descent, doesn’t have to reuse what exists, doesn’t need to restrict changes to the third Tuesday of each month, can fiddle with both eukaryotes and prokaryotes year round, and doesn’t have to present the appearance of a diamond-encrusted lobster.
By Mung’s logic, I have made five assumptions and gpuccio has made none. Too funny.
Mung should be in logic’s “Hall Of Shame” many times over! 🙂
And here are a few Mungish misconceptions that are worth rebutting because others might share some of them:
No, because lineages can share features and still be distinct. Think of different eukaryote lineages, for example.
No. We don’t see complicated structures being “transplanted” simultaneously and identically into 25 distinct lineages. That would be much too improbable to happen by chance.
No, because HGT is explained by known unintelligent mechanisms. As gpuccio will tell you, it’s a mistake to infer design when something can easily be explained by non-design mechanisms.
No. I’ve stated repeatedly that HGT has to be limited in order for an objective nested hierarchy to be inferrable. Note that in Theobald’s example of the 30 taxa, prokaryotes are confined to a single taxon. Thus HGT among prokaryotes doesn’t obscure the objective nested hierarchy.
If you found a case like the one I described, it would be evidence in favor of design. No one has found such a case, however.
Quite the opposite. Unguided evolution predicts the objective nested hierarchy. There are trillions of times more ways for this prediction to be falsified as there are for it to be confirmed. Evolution sticks its neck out and survives unscathed. ID can’t compete.
Not according to gpuccio. See comment #913 at UD.
gpuccio #1:
gpuccio #2:
Gpuccio,
Those statements contradict each other. You need to retract one of them.
If statement #1 were true, it would mean that a fitness function could never legtitimately be included in a model of natural selection. That is obviously false, as you yourself have admitted.
I therefore recommend retracting statement #1.
gpuccio:
As I explained to Mung, you are the one making the assumptions. You state that “the designer needs to act through common descent”. How do you know that?
The answer, of course, is that you don’t. But you need to make that assumption, because otherwise your hypothesis doesn’t fit the evidence and gets tossed out.
A Rain Fairy proponent could make the same flawed argument that you are making:
Why do we see an objective nested hierarchy?
Because gpuccio says the Designer always acts (whether by choice or by limitation) in a way that produces an objective nested hierarchy.
How does gpuccio know this?
He doesn’t. But if he doesn’t make that assumption, then the design hypothesis doesn’t fit the evidence and gets tossed out in favor of unguided evolution, which fits the evidence exactly.
Why does rain happen in low pressure areas, and why do low pressure systems rotate in opposite directions in the northern vs. southern hemisphere?
Because this is how the Rain Fairy operates (whether by choice or by limitation), according to the Rain Fairy advocates.
How do the Rain Fairy advocates know this?
They don’t. But if they don’t make that assumption, then the Rain Fairy hypothesis doesn’t fit the evidence and gets tossed out in favor of modern meteorological theory, which fits the evidence exactly.
Gpuccio, isn’t it a little embarrassing to be making the same argument as the Rain Fairy advocates?
This could be summed up by saying that ID proposes an unobserved, discontinuous process to replace a regular process that is routinely observed, without proposing any agent capable of performing this activity,
All predicated on the truth of the isolated island metaphor,
It’s really that simple.
Now can we please have a thread discussing the island metaphor? Everything else about ID is superfluous.
Petrushka:
That’s pretty much it. I would only add a few things:
Gpuccio’s argument is an attempt to rescue ID.
ID comes into the fight with a huge disadvantage: it makes no predictions. Evolutionary theory, by contrast, makes risky predictions that are confirmed by the evidence. This includes the prediction of an objective nested hierarchy, which is validated to a spectacular degree of accuracy.
Gpuccio’s only hope in this lopsided battle is to show that unguided evolution doesn’t really explain the objective nested hierarchy. The “islands of function” assumption is intended to accomplish that. Unfortunately for gpuccio, he can’t justify the assumption, so he is left arguing that until the fitness landscapes are mapped in sufficient detail, the default must be to assume that life occupies isolated islands.
Even if he could justify the “islands of function” claim, gpuccio still has a problem: ID doesn’t fit the evidence. He makes additional unjustified assumptions to correct this.
The complete list of assumptions he must make:
1. Assume that life occupies isolated islands in the fitness landscapes, so that unguided evolution is ruled out.
2. Assume that a designer exists at the appropriate times and places.
3. Assume that the designer has the necessary capabilities to do the job.
4. Assume that the designer just happens to operate in a way that mimics unguided evolution (if unguided evolution were not ruled out by #1).
Gpuccio’s argument depends on all of these assumptions. He hasn’t justified any of them.
Funny you should say that. I’ve been working on one and hope to post it tonight or tomorrow.
You could certainly do worse than start with Darwin’s own formulation of the problem.
Hey, kairosfocus, read my comment. I didn’t accuse gpuccio of being a Gish Galloper. I defended him from the charge.
You, however, accused me of something I didn’t do. If you were in my position right now, you would be demanding an apology, as we all know from long experience. Since the tables are turned, will you be offering an apology, or will you choose instead to be a hypocrite?
keiths:
gpuccio:
Gpuccio,
You’ve changed your position yet again without acknowledging it. Reread this comment of yours and note the bolded portion:
gpuccio:
And in particular, the objective nested hierarchy. The problem is that you know nothing about the designer, so you can’t independently justify your assumptions. He’s an unknown designer (maybe more than one), with unknown abilities, unknown limitations, and unknown goals.
The only “justification” you offer for your assumptions is that you want to fit your hypothesis to the evidence of the objective nested hierarchy. But then you’re committing the Rain Fairy fallacy.
It’s the equivalent of this:
You are arguing against a Rain Fairy proponent. You point out that under the Rain Fairy hypothesis, there is no reason to expect low-pressure systems to rotate in opposite directions in the two hemispheres. Any wind pattern is compatible with the Rain Fairy hypothesis, so it is completely arbitrary to assume that the Rain Fairy just happens to choose (or is somehow limited to choosing) the counter-rotating scheme.
Your opponent responds, “I am making a simple and reasonable assumption. I assume that the Rain Fairy likes symmetry, and this is why low-pressure systems rotate in opposite directions in the two hemispheres.”
Are you persuaded by the Rain Fairy advocate? If not, then why should we be persuaded by your argument, which is logically identical?
To summarize, the problem is that if you know nothing about the designer, you can’t independently justify any assumptions you make about him. And if you try to force-fit your hypothesis to the evidence by simply tacking on arbitrary assumptions, then you are committing the Rain Fairy fallacy.
gpuccio:
No, convergent evolution is not a violation of my rule. I wrote:
Complicated convergent structures are not genetically identical and they are unlikely to happen simultaneously. To get complicated, identical structures in 25 distinct lineages requires design.
You’re being too specific, I think. The Rain Fairy fallacy applies generally to gods, who are typically unconstrained and undefined, and can be used as a post facto explanation for anything. I defy you (or gpuccio or anyone at UD) to point to anything whatsoever, such that “the Designer chose to do it that way” wouldn’t be a “perfectly reasonable explanation”.
He’s got *very* upset (comments closed) here:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/darwinism/notice-on-the-gish-gallop-false-accusation-tactic-and-fallacious-dodge/
KF – read carefully before you go off on a rant, or you might just look silly.
Absolutely. That’s my point, but I find that people “get it” better when I use a specific example that they immediately recognize as ridiculous, such as the Rain Fairy.
Another one I like to use is the hypothesis that angels are pushing the planets around, but that they just happen to choose the same paths that gravity would have produced if it were operating in the solar system.
My observation is that “convergent evolution” is easily misrepresented. At a high enough level of abstraction, everything converges. Motility is common in organisms, so motility is convergent evolution. Where motility is not a strategy, then being stationary is convergent.
Get a bit more specific – look at flight, or at sight. Both are very useful, so one would expect numerous very different approaches to these abilities. And so on.
Where “convergent evolution” breaks down is where we go from the functionality level to the mechanical level. Multiple similar solutions to the same general problem is qualitatively different from multiple mechanically identical solutions.
I don’t think creationists want to understand the difference between homologies at the structural level, and similarities at the functional level. Birds, bats and bees all fly. HOW they fly is completely different. Hummingbird flight is MUCH more like eagle flight than like bumblebee flight.
Well, I’ve never seen anyone get through whether using general principles or specific examples. Personally, I think it’s reflected in the terminology. If you speak of garden fairies, or zeus, or the Great Green Arkleseizure, they know it’s silly fiction so they ignore it. If you attribute all the same characteristics but ascribe them to God, suddenly the toilet training kicks in, their god is REAL (when spelled right), and all manner of idiocy becomes “real”.
To those not infancy-trained to associate the word-icon “god” with indubitable certainty, with magic, with explicit support of whatever they might prefer to be true, everything the UD people argue is clearly insupporable. For those trained from infancy, they CAN not see it no matter how deeply your cram their face into it.
So I kind of feel sorry for gpuccio. I agree that he has recognized that his arguments fail, and the more he tries to reposition them, the more they fail. He is unhappy because he KNOWS his arguments MUST be true, god said so, but he just can’t find any way to explain it that isn’t arrant nonsense from the start.
The same pattern informs all of the UD arguments. They are all roundabout ways to find their non-negotiable god hidden SOMEWHERE in a perverse reality that needs no such hypothesis. I think I’d be depressed if I could find NO direct evidence for what I was trained to believe was true, and had to make up threadbare arguments and defend them with censorship, doubletalk and bafflegab.
It is very peculiar to read this kairosfocus character’s comments on the Gish Gallop. He is a master at the Gish Gallop himself.
I was looking in on the discussion of entropy and thermodynamics a few of months ago when Sal Cordova posted his disagreement with Granville Sewell over on UD. Of course, the KF character jumped right in with tons of copy/paste material.
This KF character’s responses were classic Gish Gallop. KF dumped boatload upon boatload upon boatload of totally bogus material on several threads over at UD when all that “discussion” on entropy was going on. Some of it was simply crap that he made up out of thin air, and other stuff was simply copied from sources he quote-mined without comprehension.
One seldom sees such a witch doctor caricature of mumbo-jumbo voodoo dumped in such a copious manner in order to overwhelm the discussion and give the appearance of great erudition and deep understanding. And all of it was thrown in with an air of confident authority and condescension. The kindest thing I can say about KF is that he is a complete, double-down, triple-down fraud.
But that is the nature of UD; and that is why one should study them and not try to debate them. They have no clue; but they use every Gish tactic developed at the ICR to bully and bluster as though they are experts in all things. That has been the case ever since Morris and Gish started the ICR; and it has been ever downward and dirtier from there. The tradition continues at UD.
Now those people over at UD are trying to rewrite their own history using the same tricks. It isn’t going to happen.
keiths wrote (I leave out the details):
Gpuccio,
You’ve changed your position yet again without acknowledging it.
That is a pretty noticeable example of a self-contradiction. Wonder what gpuccio will say.
But in any case there is another contradiction. Some hundreds of messages ago, gpuccio and other commenters at UD were raising a completely different objection. Not to the fitnesses being unnatural. But that using a computer algorithm to model the reproduction of a population could not investigate whether CSI could be put into the genome by NS because the CSI is already there in the code that reproduces the digital organisms.
Now they seem to have a different objection, the one about naturalness of the fitnesses, and they do say that some kinds of simulation might be able to investigate this. Have they abandoned that earlier argument?
I doubt it’ll be “oh, I was wrong, the whole idea was flawed from the start, can we start over”?
IDists believe in design despite the lack of evidence, not because of it.
I don’t think simulations can address the actual fitness landscape or whether islands are isolated. That still needs to be done by Lenski, Thornton, et al.
What simulations can do is explore the abstract mathematical argument, and that argument is DOA.
What Axe, Behe, Dembski and that tribe have done is take the last series of Lotto winners and argue that there must have been fraud involved, because the odds against those particular people winning, taken as a group, are prohibitive.
In the world of DNA, they pretend that the path taken was the only possible path.
Did anyone else notice Cornelius Hunter’s blog where a commenter, RobertC, linked to Todd Wood’s take on this paper by McLaughlin et al? Seems yet more confirmation that fitness landscapes are not so rugged as some have surmised.
That Nature paper should come as no surprise; basic textbooks in organic chemistry have made this point for many decades. Function and behavior are more often related to structure rather than the specific constituents.
And there is a good physical reason behind that; it has to do with the way that structure and charged distribution in complex systems of molecules are interrelated.
Also, increasing smoothness in the shapes of potential wells always occurs with increasing complexity. Binding energies among constituents decrease with complexity.
The “smoothness” of potential wells is also related to the relative sizes of the potential energy well depths and the thermal kinetic energies of the bound constituents. If it is soft matter, the wells are smooth.
Fitness landscapes are directly related to the binding energies of the atoms and molecules that make up the organism. It’s all basic physics and chemistry.
This is the paper I hoped would form the basis of a new thread on islands of function. It looks like the creationists have responded in a creative way. Because most substitutions don’t have any effect, proteins can’t evolve.
If you would like to start a thread, let me know. I think I am able to give you that ability.
I’m not sure, but I think you can contact me with the mail link on the front page of TSZ. Alternatively, click on my name to get to my blog, hold out mouse over the “about” tab near the top of the page, and you should see a “contact me” link.
If gpuccio’s basic argument is about “islands” of function, then his dFCSI concept has nothing to do with SI or CSI or FC. These concepts developed out of Leslie Orgel’s SI. They involve a scale of some sort (the canonical example would be fitness), and the idea of CSI is to define some region far enough out on the scale that pure mutation, unaided by natural selection, cannot be expected to get you there even if every particle in the universe was an organism, mutating as fast as particles interact.
So the argument is then that something nonrandom must have gotten the organism there. Then there were supposed to be theorems showing that natural selection could not have done that, leaving Design.
What has the whole argument about “islands” got to do with that?
gpuccio:
It’s a shame that you find consistency so boring, because science depends on it. If you want your argument to be taken seriously, it needs to be consistent, and that means correcting your inconsistencies when they are pointed out to you.
You previously stated quite adamantly:
Now you have reversed yourself:
Those statements contradict each other. Which do you affirm, and which do you retract?
Joe F.:
Many (perhaps most) of the IDers concede that natural selection is effective, but they claim that its effectiveness is limited to microevolutionary change.
In other words, they think:
1) that organisms are spread across multiple “islands of function”;
2) that movement within each island (i.e. microevolution) is possible via mutation and natural selection; and
3) that movement from island to island (i.e. macroevolution) is impossible via mutation and natural selection, because the islands are too far apart. Therefore the Designer operates an inter-island ferry service.
There are many problems with this argument, of course, but that’s what they’re claiming, and that’s why gpuccio agreed with me when I wrote:
Aack, this is seriously misleading mostly because it embodies the creationist picture of “macroevolution” as one current “form” morphing somehow into another current “form”.
They envision these islands as having been poofed into existence at creation. We DO note that no current form morphs into another current form, so we do not observe macroevolution. This model doesn’t lend itself to the notion of islands splitting into two or more islands and drifting gradually apart, until the distance between them can no longer be bridged.
Evolution is the process of making new islands. Not travelling from one existing island to another.
OK, thinking about it a bit more, my most recent comment was ill-thought-out. To answer my own question, I think the relation of SI, FC and CSI to gpuccio’s “islands” is that we make our scale the extent to which the particular function of these sequences is achieved. The distance out on that scale would be big enough if that much of that sequence could not be achieved by mutation alone. So it sort-of is related to Dembski’s argument.
Still, there is no proof that natural selection cannot get that far. And we know how gpuccio responds to this — he declares that it is an empirical generalization to which no exception has yet been found, and that no proof is needed.
So I guess it is not possible for more energetic transitions or tunneling to improbable states to occur in physics and chemistry. All biological creatures are tightly bound solids that no amount of energy or tunneling can change.
Oh dear; chemistry never happens! How did the entire scientific establishment miss the polls that have been saying that all along?
A common feature of Creationist argumentation is an inability to distinguish the continuous and the discrete. Finding the underlying pattern involves trying to go behind one’s own perceptions of how the world presents itself to us. I wonder if they think that the rainbow really is divided into 7 bands, rather than the physical interaction of photons of different wavelengths with our restricted set of opsins, and the subsequent brain processing …
One finds this in the certainty that, variously, species cannot change at all, or they cannot change beyond a certain range within a common morphology, or that a protein has a ‘function’ and can wobble about in that discrete patch but never outside it.
One could change one letter of a book every 1000 years. At no point does the text become anything other than a minor variant on what went before. And yet cumulatively, over say 100 million years, 100,000 substitutions have taken place, enough to obliterate the original. Books are islanded, of course. They must be comprehensible to be ‘viable’. And so in comes that other Creationist favourite, the argument from analogy. The space of all books is islanded, so the space of [string-system X] must also be islanded. One can therefore (fallaciously) eliminate incremental progression (including that concentrated by differential fitness, the ‘functional/specified’ part) as a ‘necessity mechanism’.
Languages present the best analogy I can think of for evolution. They are semiotic, their elements are discrete, their implementation is always physical.
Yet they evolve. we have written histories showing their evolution in great detail.
And we have examples like Basque, that are isolated and have no known historical connection to other languages.
I understand that languages are used by “intelligent” agents, but I have not seen any intelligence directing their evolution. Actually the reverse. Intelligent agents appear to oppose their evolution and take active steps to hinder their evolution.