FMM: Purposeful intervention is pretty much the opposite of random mutation.
FMM notes in the same comment:
If there in nothing about an idea that distinguishes it from it’s alternative it seems to be superfluous.
So the idea is “non designed mutations” and the alternative is “purposeful intervention”.
Give that, and given FMM has not discarded the idea of purposeful intervention there must be something that distinguishes it from non designed mutations.
What is that distinguishing factor? What is the actual evidence for “purposeful intervention” regarding mutations?
And, more broadly, what is the evidence for “purposeful intervention” in any area of biology? Apart from, of course, wishful thinking.
Exactly, now I think you are getting to the meat of my idea.
I am not asking for exact replication I’m asking for replication that the observer won’t distinguish from the original. There is a big difference.
The extent of similarity that is required will depend on things like the background knowledge and interests of the observer.
I for one would be satisfied with the algorithms I provided I think they are close enough.
Another person might not be.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to ask for a pattern that is indistinguishable. Folks will be satisfied when the pattern is close enough to satisfy them. The threshold will vary with the individual.
I think that neo-Darwinism produces a pattern that is not even in the same ballpark for what we see in nature.
You might disagree. Individuals are different and our inferences will be different as well. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Do you?
peace
Yes, Your point?
Not everyone believes we live in a predetermined universe.
peace
All,
I think that a problem with ID as it is currently configured is that it tries to make the design inference infallible. That is a fools errand.
If we could infallibly infer design then we could construct an algorithm to mimic it exactly. Which would prove it was not design in the first place.
It’s intentional design precisely because we can’t mimic it exactly.
That’s my idea anyway.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
The design inference has two pieces. The first is the structure and/or function you are observing, for example, the bacterial flagellum or birds powered flight.
The second is how that structure is built. The cool part here is that the structures lies inside code (example DNA) and that code gets translated to a functional structure.
These two things together are what support the design inference.
I think this gets rid of your algorithm problem. In this case you are making a functional structure starting with code.
Interesting.
I think you can infer design by looking at either a building or at the blueprint used to construct it individually. Or at a computer animation or the code that used to construct it. either one in isolation is enough
I just don’t see two parts being necessary for an inference.
Keep in mind the design inference needs to work for cro-magnum man or Bubba at the Walmart. It should be simple and self-evident because We all do it all the time with out thinking much about it.
I think that there is structure in the code and structure in the artifact either one will do.
Do you need to have code to make an artifice? Can’t you just make it up as you go along?
peace
PS thanks for the interaction. between you and Corneel and Newton this might get interesting
fifthmonarchyman,
It is not required but when it is made by code that is strong evidence for design. When you have code making something you need something to translate it into the artifact. In fact you probably need an irreducibly complex system to get from the code to the artifact.
True, do you?
Why? Because you can’t come up with actual evidence for design, so you have to claim that what exists is design?
You really don’t make arguments, you merely restate baseless claims made by other true believers.
Yeah, so what? I mean other than that it gives you another baseless claim to make in lieu of your inability to make a case for design.
Glen Davidson
yep. I also believe that Marvel is better than DC and red wolves are a species.
Why does it matter?
peace
Is 2+2 a “code” for making 4?
Is 8675309 a “code” for calling Jenny?
I’m just trying to understand
peace
But that is what you believe, right? Then I do not understand. If everything is intentional, then everything is intentional. What is left to compare it to?
You dismiss patterns that are algorithmic in nature. But, every pattern can be approximated by an algorithm. Patterns are, by definition, regular and ordered.
I’m hardwired to infer somethings are intentional regardless of my theological position and I infer other things are intentional because of my theological position.
I’m not really comparing anything to anything else.
every pattern can be approximated by a algorithm but every pattern can not be produced by a algorithm.
Exempting an algorithm that contains the actual pattern in question. That is a different but related discussion.
Say the word and I will elaborate
Yep, ordered and regular are just ways to say nonrandom.
Nonrandom is not the same thing as algorithmic.
peace
Shorter IDiot; “It LOOKS designed to my uneducated eye, therefore it must BE designed!”
fifthmonarchyman,
The first may not be code because it is not encoded and decoded.
The second is code and the telephone/telephone system, is the encoder and decoder.
GlenDavidson,
Ok, I got it. Deny all evidence that is contrary to your theory. There you go again.
That’s your modus operandi.
Remember this?
Except that flight is effected exactly by the co-option of parts “designed” for something else. The only reason you’d even say such a thing in the first place is that you’re too rude and anti-intellectual to consider the copious evidence to the contrary that has been presented to you repeatedly, and you accidentally managed to make a realistic ID prediction. One that has long been known to be falsified, by anyone who actually pays attention to the evidence.
And you’ve just mobilized the goalposts to argue a bunch of other BS. And to repeat your baseless ID claims, since you’re unwilling and unable to deal with design principles, just like the other IDiots.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Another unsupported claim. I love when you use assertive words like falsify when you can’t support your position.
My God you’re given to massive confabulations. It’s a well-supported claim, based on the bones and other structures, data mentioned by myself, Harshman, and many others. Anyway, it’s a fact that has been well-demonstrated by comparative anatomists, basic information that you should know instead of your myriad misrepresentations. But after you’ve been given the information that you should already know, you just make another false claim that my claim is unsupported.
I can and have supported my position, not that I had the burden to support what honest people would know before pontificating as do you–exceedingly ignorantly and without a modicum of decency or intellectual propriety. So cut out the fatuous misrepresentations, and start dealing with the facts (like you could). You’re not fooling anybody, except possibly yourself, spewing extreme prejudice as you do.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
There you go again another assertion.
Then demonstrate the support you have provided.
You don’t even know the difference between an observation and a (bare) assertion, do you? Clearly you’ve made a host of misrepresentations and utterly baseless claims, and I am entitled to note that fact. That you ignore the evidence of that, like you do whatever you don’t want to believe, is just part and parcel of your failure to engage intellectually with these issues.
You’re the one who ignores the evidence, and I’m supposed to run around repeating the repeated evidence because you’re too anti-intellectual to engage these issues. One thing you really need to do is to learn what it is to consider issues without extreme prejudice. If you can ever do that, you might begin to deal with the evidence that you both demand and ignore.
Back up this nonsense:
Why don’t you crack a book and learn how bird flight depends on massive co-option of parts “designed” for something else? It’s not an issue, you only made that claim because you were too ignorant–despite the attempts to correct your abysmal lack of knowledge–to recognize the fact that bird flight involves the co-option of historically-constrained parts on a scale that has never once been seen in real designed objects.
Glen Davidson
Anyway, here’s a site discussing the fusion of wrist bones into more rigid bird wings. Notably, up to nine (non-avian) dinosaur bones become four in birds, with evidence from fossils, development, and comparative anatomy. One of many facts that colewd ignores in order to repeatedly state baseless IDiot talking points.
Pictures 3 and 4 are particularly good at showing how bird wings are “designed” by co-option of ancestral bone structures, as wrist bones in their wings become fused into rigid wing bones. Why would a designer bother with ancestral bones, only to have to fuse them in bird wings, with the attendant inefficiency and unnecessary complexity of such a strategy? Colewd avoids answering that, only to repeat baseless claims about design that ignore good design principles like parsimony and unnnecessary complexity that much of life clearly fails to meet.
Of course one never gets anywhere with colewd, as he doesn’t know much, but claims much that is based on nothing but IDiot BS.
Glen Davidson
LOL! Says the guy who ignored every last bit of evidence presented in scientific papers about dino-bird evolution.
You couldn’t be a bigger hypocrite if you tried.
GlenDavidson,
I agree he would not. What I see is a novel bone expression probably from differently designed expression levels. The bone expression is designed to match the muscle structure and wing structure of the birds. The wing bone was designed to be a wing bone there was no cooption required. How exactly do bones fuse?
Here is the comment from your attachment.
So 9 bones fused to 4. This explanation seems to be force fitting the data into the evolutionary narrative. Do you see it differently? Why?
Oh I see, you’ve got ancestral bones fusing into the rigid structures of bird wings, and you’re just denying that and restating your baseless claim.
One problem with your belief system is that it seems not to allow you even to recognize what evidence is. Probably this is partly because you didn’t take science courses, and partly because you have gotten into the habit of thinking that whatever you believe is right, with evidence hardly affecting your circular belief system.
You’re shown ancestral “bones” that fuse over the course of development of a bird wing, and all you do is repeat your blithering cant that it’s forcing data into the evolutionary narrative. Do you even know how to think hypothetically outside of your worthless beliefs about “design”?
See, one problem with your lack of acquaintance with evidence-based hypothesis making is that you can’t even recognize that all that you have ever done regarding design is to force fit data into beliefs that didn’t come from the evidence, while evolutionary theory exists because of the fact that biologists recognized the lack of design aspects in life in so many instances, while the strangely (strange in a design view, that is) related and derivative facts of life pointed to evolution and nothing else. You haven’t explained a damned thing in my link, merely projected your own extremely prejudicial view onto others.
Why do separate bones begin to form in bird wings, only to fuse into single rigid structures later? It’s a simple issue that you can’t even grasp, let alone deal with properly, because you can’t even imagine what it would be like to base biology on evidence rather than on your own baseless beliefs. And I don’t bring up bird wing bones fusing ancestrally separated bones into more recent rigid structures because they’re the exception, but because such things are common throughout animal life. Many other bones fuse in birds, too, and so do human vertebrae in the sacrum and coccyx that were articulated in our ancestors.
I realize that you can only see what you wish to believe, but it’s certainly amazing to present excellent evolutionary evidence to you without you doing anything but repeating the mindless BS that you write all of the time that merely asserts design.
Do you even know what to expect from evolution? Frankly, I doubt it, since you don’t even seem to know what evidence is. It is not whatever you decide based on your a priori beliefs that you find convenient to claim for your beliefs (like atoms being designed), you actually have to understand cause and effect relationships. And I suspect that you really do not understand cause and effect relationships, save a certain subset of those involving human causes.
Glen Davidson
Ok
If random/ nonrandom distinction does not exist for your worldview,why include it as a variable? Why not say simply algorithmic vs not algorithmic?
peace
Because I’m not looking to understand how the design inference works for only people who believe like me but for humanity in general.
I could but it’s important to say we are looking at patterns.
A pseudorandom number might not really be random but often it contains no pattern that we can see.
peace
colewd,
Thanks for running interference. I owe you one. 😉
So if you came across 2+2=4 you would not necessarily infer design but if you came across 8675309 you would?
peace
Archaeopteryx had the same wrist bones as any flightless maniraptoran. The semilunate carpal is a fusion of two formerly independent bones and happened considerably before the origin of flight, but all the rest of the fusion happened after the origin of flight, within birds. None of it is associated with the origin itself. You know nothing about the data, so how can you tell what’s being force-fit?
Not by itself.You would know need to more.
From my perspective I agree. Namely I would need to know if it was produced by an algorithm.
I would like to hear what colewd has to say however.
peace
Let me get this straight.
1. We can witness the development of those bones in embryos (for example).
2. In all those embryos we see things starting as if to build more than four bones.
3. In flying birds, we see that in the end there’s fewer bones than “promised” at the beginning of development.
4. We can actually witness some of those developing bones getting closer until fused.
5. Therefore we’re forcing the data on embryos to look as if fused bones?
6. On the other side, we see fossils.
7. the fossils show something like progression and bones from separate to closer, to fused.
8. Therefore we’re, again, forcing the fossil data to look as if fusions happened?
9. Etc.?
Really? We look at evidence for fused bones, and we should not conclude that there’s fused bones? Why not? because you don’t like it? Because you look at a paragraph, rather than at the evidence?
fifthmonarchyman,
If I see 2+2=4 I would infer a human writing on a piece of paper.
If you gave me that number and a phone and the girl you mentioned answered the phone I would infer a designed functional phone. I would also infer you know the girl 🙂
Right.
It does not seem that the presence or absence of a code has all that much to do with it.
It’s more about what is involved in what you see ie “the pattern”.
peace
Entropy,
The only one to present evidence so far is Glen and that evidence looked forced. John is now telling a different story about Archaeopteryx being a transitional wing structure but a short search shows Archaeopteryx with a bird like wing bone structure. How do you propose bone structures fuse in embryo development? How solid are these Archaeopteryx fossils as far as showing wing bone structure?
fifthmonarchyman,
Can you translate the pattern? 2+2=4 … 4 may mean 4 chairs so the code 4 translates to 4 chairs.
If you see a pattern of sand on a beach. Chances are the pattern has no symbolic meaning.
The phone number symbolizes or translates to how you get her phone to ring so the number has a meaning different then the numbers.
Information is a set of symbols (numbers letters etc) that carry a meaning separate from those symbols.
Apple is 5 different letters in a row. Yet you can visualize the fruit it symbolizes.
DNA is 4 letter code but when 3 of those letters are together they symbolize an amino acid. 50 sets of those 3 letters in the right order symbolize the protein insulin. If transcription and translation occur to those 50 sets of three letters the insulin protein is produced by the cell.
Supernova-bright projection.
Have you ever been right about anything substantive? Is there anything but your bias that makes you eagerly lap up pseudoscientific swill while discrediting honest evidence informed solely by your wretched ignorance?
Really, this is fairly analogous to showing a flat-earther a series of great photos of the spherical earth with developing weather and all, only for the flat earther to declare that the photo is faked, the evidence forced to fit the spherical earth model. These people cannot admit that the true evidence is evidence, while they must insist that flaccid homiletics-type “evidence” indicates that they’re right.
Glen Davidson
Notice Billy is reduced to flat out lying as I have posted several papers on dino-bird evolution. Billy even commented on one of them so I know he’s at least looked.
With Creationists it always comes down to lying about the scientific evidence. Always.
What do you mean by “bird like wing bone structure”? Archaeopteryx has no fused bones. It has a standard maniraptoran forelimb morphology, not similar at all to a modern bird, or no more similar than any closely related dinosaur’s.
What source, precisely, did you look up?
I have come to the unhappy conclusion that part of human nature is to define “evidence” as anything (even outright fabrication) that supports a foregone (usually emotional) conclusion. And anything that does NOT support it, however well attested or replicable, is simply not evidence and discarded.
I wonder if education has much effect, after watching Behe on the witness stand, a 3-foot stack of scientific literature on the evolution of the immune system on his lap, saying that it “didn’t count as evidence” and complaining that it was too heavy!
In each our own ways, we are all flat-earthers about something we NEED to be true. The human mantra remains “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts.”
In your initial example you proposed a test with a non-algorithmic non-random pattern and a random distribution, and in which people had to guess which was more likely to come from an intential process. From your theological position either answer is wrong, because they both come from an intential process. But from your not-theological position you expect them to prefer one over the other, because people are hardwired to infer intent when they observe certain patterns only.
Now, to my mind this is a bad set-up, because it is obvious that people will associate the regular pattern with intent, so they just dismiss the sequence in which they cannot spot any pattern. This is what I tried to get across with my example of non-intentional processes which produce regular sequences. But since you rejected that, let me approach it from the other side: Your test also needs algorithmic patterns. Because, you see, the thing that people use to make the decision is the regularity. Can people distinguish an algorithmic sequence from a non-algorithmic intentional one? I would think not, as I cannot see what would distinguish such sequences, but you claim that people are hardwired to do so. Would you agree that that would improve your test?
Please do.
What is nonrandom? And what is the random expectation for a sequence of numbers?
Oh duh. Ninja’d by Newton.
True, a pseudorandom number sequence has a no discernible patterns, but that is a rather extreme example. There are algorithmic sequences that look not-completely-algorithmic to our eyes. You showed some examples of this yourself.
I think this is an important insight. In order to infer design you must first be able to represent what you see symbolically. I don’t think a nonhuman animal could do it because I think it’s wrapped up in symbolic thought that appears to be uniquely human.
One reason that the configuration of sand on a beach appears random to us is because we can’t compress the pattern into a symbolic form that has fewer “bits” than are present in the individual grains of sand themselves.
At the same time one “random” configuration of the grains of sand will look the same as most any other to us.
When it comes to chairs in a room on the other hand if we can compress the pattern we see into something like 2 rows each with 2 chairs it wont look random but exhibit a pattern.
Finally if we can’t imagine an algorithm that would likely produce this particular pattern of chairs we are hardwired to infer that they were intentionally placed there like that.
That is the idea anyway
peace
I think we agree that DNA can be seen as a symbolic representation of the things it codes for.
Therefore the only question when it comes to a design inference is can we imagine an algorithm that would produce the particular pattern we see in DNA.
peace
Please tell me we aren’t going to revisit The Game.
For the record, it seems that a rather simple algorithm can produce pi to any arbitrary precision. And as far as we know, pi contains every possible finite string.
So without some breakthrough is number theory, we can conclude that an algorithm can produce any pattern.
No, one pattern would be considered more likely to be intentional because we don’t need a particular theological position to make that determination.
There is no one standard process that will infallibly distinguish algorithmic sequences from non-algorithmic ones.
What we can do is try and think of algorithms that might produce the pattern. And it’s possible to infallibly determine that no algorithm will produce all of a particular sequence
check it out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrational
My claim is that people are hardwired to infer intent to sequences that they deem to be non-algorithmic.
In a sense when you make a design inference you are placing a bet that no algorithm will be found that can produce the pattern.
peace
Correct. that is why the design inference is not infallible
peace
petrushka,
Neat!
Fifth is hopelessly confused about this stuff. I’ve pointed out to him, more than once, that any pattern can be produced by an algorithm.
He sort of half-remembers this. From earlier in the thread:
First, he’s incorrect. Every pattern can be produced by an algorithm, and this is true even if you rule out algorithms that “contain” the pattern.
Second, it’s not a separate discussion.
Third, he’s talking about “random” and “non-random” patterns without specifying his criteria. Every pattern is random in the sense that it could be produced, with some probability, by a randomized source.
fifth:
Obvious counterexample. I infer that the following pattern is designed, yet there is obviously an algorithm for producing it: