This offers the simplest “neutral” colloquial mixture of “design” and “evolution” that I’ve seen in a long time. The site is no longer maintained, but the language persists.
“As a designer it is important to understand where design came from, how it developed, and who shaped its evolution. The more exposure you have to past, current and future design trends, styles and designers, the larger your problem-solving toolkit. The larger your toolkit, the more effective of a designer you can be.” http://www.designishistory.com/this-site/
Here, the term “evolution” as used just meant “history”. The author was not indicating “design theory evolution”, but rather instead the “history of designs” themselves, which have been already instantiated.
The topic “design is history” nevertheless enables an obvious point of contact between “evolution” and “design”. They both have histories that can be studied. Present in the above meaning of “design” are the origin, processes and agent(s) involved in the “designing”. This differs significantly from the Discovery Institute’s version of “design theory”, when it comes to history, aim, structure and agency, since the DI’s version flat out avoids discussion of design processes and agent(s). The primary purpose of the DI’s “design theory”, meanwhile, is USAmerican religious apologetics and “theistic science”.
The quotation above likely didn’t come from an IDist, and it isn’t referencing “Intelligent Design” theory as a supposed “scientific theory”. The “designer” in the quotation above is a (more or less intelligent) human designer, not a Divine Designer. This fact distinguishes it “in principle” from the Discovery Institute’s ID theory, which is supposed to be (depends on who you’re speaking with in the IDM) about first biology, then informatics, and statistics. The DI’s ID theory is not actually focused on “designing by real designers”, but rather on apologetics using “design” and informational probabilism.
The Discovery Institute’s failure to distinguish or even highlight the differences and similarities between human design and Divine Design, and instead their engagement in active distortion, equivocation, double-talking, and obfuscation between them, are marks of its eventual downward trend to collapse.
That is because the variation needs to be heritable and stable in order to be evolutionary relevant. Genetic variation satisfies these requirements. All the other stuff … occasionally, but most often not.
As far as I know nobody has ever quantified how much non-genetic variation contributes to evolutionary change. I suspect it’s a negligible amount, but if you have data suggesting otherwise, please let us know.
But don’t those factors show up in development? Aren’t they part of what is studied in evo-devo?
I don’t believe you. I think you have a very specific God in mind. It might be good to admit that.
And the scientific evidence of this is … ? Personal incredulity is not the answer.
Besides, human imagination is a wonderful thing. Perhaps it exists for a reason.
Burden of proof never rests on the doubter. Haven’t you learned that by now?
Theists == mind readers. They think they have everybody worked out. It’s really just the same as FMM and his presuppositions.
Mung == FMM
The scientific evidence of what, specifically?
I’m confident, without a formal experiment that Alan is telling the truth. What is it, specifically, you want scientific evidence for? His observation that it all seems made up?
Notice how good they are at saying what things are not the answer. Not so great at saying what is. colwed wants you to study the bible. I wonder what Mung things is ‘the answer’. Perhaps the DI will tell him what to think, soon.
If, maybe, perhaps.
The fence sitting is majestic to behold.
And anyway, perhaps it does not exist for a reason. Checkmate!
What is it that is being doubted? Can you name it? Mungs inferences are several levels deep at this point. Is he talking about an Intelligent Designer acting like god, just god as per the bible or what? Aliens?
How does that work with incompatible religions? Is there a ‘proof’ off? Who wins and how’s that done?
Fair enough. I was about eight or nine when I realised the particular Anglican religion being gently presented to me was an empty fraud. It’s human frauds and hypocrites that I dislike.
The concept that a god can be both all-powerful and yet not affect the comings and goings of any part of reality is the failure. Cultural norms can sometimes be relatively harmless and no longer need the made-up justifications. The golden rule is enough. No issue with cultural Catholics, there’s plenty of them by me.
Might it? Confession? Do you still go?
[gods are human inventions]
Absence of evidence is all around us. But I’m not proselytising. All should be free to make their own choices (within the constraints of the golden rule)
Of course it is. I revel in it. You can supply your own reasons. If they work for you, great.
omagain wrote:
The idea for this thread began after reading the following quotation:
This person is not an IDist. They are a non-IDist “design thinker”. Do you agree their combined usage of “design, development & evolution” makes sense and is possible to adopt? I believe that at least in some ways you do. Why? Because it is “neutrally used” – it seems “outside” of the conversation here, yet it uses strangely perhaps, exactly the same terms. Design, evolution, development. Designers are human beings, not gods, and this person is not peddling “theistic science” apologetics, so it’s clearly not ID theory. So, maybe you misinterpreted with your above quote?
Yes, knowledge isn’t everything, after all, and there’s little time worth wasting on pointless speculation in human life. However, I would contend there is indeed significant agreement across a range of “anythings”, indeed to enable a better conversation than what is required by muzzling people with “skepticism”. Opening the conversation so that people understand the “world religions” is in my view allowed, so that people who were never taught about the “human universal” of “religion” in our “species” (i.e. in human history), seems to be a preferable solution to shutting it off, throwing doubt on it, and stifling it. Wouldn’t you agree?
Try thinking as if you were born in what in Canada we call “First Nations”. As a member of those cultures, societies and communities, the vast and amazing physical world that we see around us is however at the same time simply not the only world. In academese, this means that they do not accept a physically causally-closed universe, and meaning of existence for human life. Instead, Indigenous Canadians live as if the two – physical and spiritual – live together at the same time. Is this understanding of “reality”, this worldview that they hold, somehow considered as “unevolved” or “primitive” to you?
The Indigenous peoples who are taught in their ancestors’ traditions, at least those who I have personally met, actually “live” theology; it is not “wank” to them, unless that means “water”, “air”, “sustenance”, “breath”, etc. This too is a type of “theology”, one that cannot be easily wiped off the map with arrogant scientism and civilizational discrimination, such as what is common here at TSZ.
Yet you hold yourself in judgment of them, omagain, as much as you do me. This is because “we” (non-atheists, non-materialists, non-physicalists) do not limit ourselves to a physical causal-closure model of reality, or “simulation” hypothesis put forward by Bostrom, or “multi-worlds” fantasy hypothesis that simply multiplies problems, without answering key human questions.
Congrats on your contribution to a community there. Stackoverflow is neat, especially for programmers. I know people who are active there. It’s not my go-to hub for philosophy or theology though, no surprise.
Again, I don’t see the need to compartmentalize “science & religion” here. The forced separation comes across as needlessly artificial & “numbing”. It seems rather a personal compartmentalization, rather than a requirement, especially given the vast numbers of “religious” scientists, scholars and innovators over the millennia. That would seem to reveal, if true, a massive blind spot in your claims that you don’t think people can “do both” when that is simply the reality for most people who live and work, not just in sciences, but in all other fields of employment.
In modern western democracies (MWDs), religion, or at least the free expression with one’s family of their own personal worldview (weltanschauung) should surely be expected to be, and also likewise welcomed as being, stronger at home than it is at work. Does anyone here disagree, given that everyone here (assumption) lives in an MWD (except the pink ex-pat from the USA living in China)?
I’m curious what was your strongest impression of any one monk or collectively of those monks at school? It’s a unique personal story to have, if/when one is in contact with actual monastics at a young age. Most people aren’t. I wasn’t, and don’t think it was until I was 25 yrs-old before I first met a monastic.
Hmm, apophatic theology seems to withstand that sort of hubris. Are you familiar with it at all? I believe I’ve mentioned it here on occasion before. Can you please state what you think “apophatic theology” means? Thanks.
Just for background, he and I have not been in contact for several years, since his “science & religion” days, from his “transhumanist”, then “post-truth” turns. He’s not someone I look to for much “authority” these days, though his voice and views in the history of the IDM certainly cannot be avoided.
Steve Fuller helped me to see the conundrum the DI’s CSC had placed themselves in and why they simply could not allow certain things to be openly stated. They could not speak freely because that would be effectively to concede.
Yet almost all Abrahamic monotheists who looked carefully at the ID theory to see what the DI’s leaders said and wrote about it, now reject it (a fact that current IDists always avoid). We don’t need Fuller’s philosophistry to recognize that, nor does it seem he has realized how he removes himself from conversations. Instead, Bruno Latour’s work as a Catholic sociologist embraces and includes “sharing” his voice with others, rather than trying to dominate stages like big-brained, small-hearted Fuller with his spontaneous dehumanization wrapped in a Catholic kernel of Truth that hasn’t entirely disappeared.
From what I understand, the teachings of the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not accept the language of “biology as divine technology.” ID theory rather seems to be a tempting-for-some, Protestant-inspired schismatic ideology based on theistic science apologetics. Fuller after all, fashions himself a kind of Nostradamusian prophet who was educated by Jesuits, but became jaded and only “nominally” Christian, so his pushing IDism (while rightly identifying its theistic roots, & distancing himself from the DI’s considerably far right-leaning politics) kinda makes sense in the broader picture, right?
United by their fantasy heroic-science story, “divine technology” is the One Ring that is precious to the IDM, as they covet “design universalism” for their apologetics weapon against atheists and anti-theists. This is so different from the quotation that started this thread, that one can’t help think there must be another way forward to sort out this linguistic mess!
Good question. My experience with theists is they avoid being pinned down to such details. If they put that much thought into it, they either accept massive contradictions or they become atheists.
Sounds like the Gong Show. Down that road lies madness. Instead, each detailed claim must be examined by itself. Getting a believer to specify his claim in such a way as to make it testable is the problem.
I don’t think that’s accurate. There’s a bit of a demarcation issue here. Evolutionary biologists don’t tell other biologists what they should study. Someone who insists that the gene is a unit of selection is not saying that physiologists should only be interested in genes. I think that’s where Third-Wayers like Noble go astray. In an organism, there’s a lot going on, and the genetic perspective may not be the most useful. But at the bottlenecked exit, all that comes out, to persist into the future, are chromosome copies, and it’s that near-eternity of genetic copying that interests the evolutionists. Oh, sure, they are in cells, and those cells are provisioned with (gene-derived) proteins capable of extracting more such proteins, but the primary source is always the genome. Even the much-trumpeted epigenetic level is gene-associated – either a gene itself may be methylated, or the histones it wraps around may be likewise modified, ultimately to control gene expression. And, the modification patterns themselves are also controlled by genes – which is why they tend to be consistent in a species, like songs and nests.
See above. What I may agree with in studying an organismal life is not necessarily what I would agree with in considering a long evolutionary succession of lives.
Must? Whence comes this dogmatism? The flow of sequential information is always from nucleic acid to protein, as a simple biochemical fact. This is even true for the genes that underlie this flow: the genes of transcription and translation are themselves transcribed and translated – not by anything external, but by the products of those same genes – a kind of bootstrapping. Therefore it seems entirely appropriate to represent the relationship in that way.
A gene does not need to be capable of isolation in an individual to be ‘upstream’ in a causal chain. But, there is an important process that does, essentially, ‘isolate’ genes: serial recombination. It is precisely this process that led Wiliiams to argue the gene as a unit of selection. By recombining into multiple genetic backgrounds in multiple lives, a genetic stretch delimited by that recombination is ‘tested’ repeatedly for its contribution to organismal fitness (however complex the interplay with each individual ‘system’ in a single life).
I use ‘epigenetic’ as in its basic meaning, lying above the genome. And by ‘behaviour’ I meant the actions and environmental circumstances of the cave fish which resulted in them inhabiting the caves.
But your second point and question are more important and worth pursuing.
I don’t discard the genetic changes that must take place in the visual development of these fish. In fact I think it would be good to look at these changes in more detail.
When discussing mutations, Michael Behe always stresses how much easier it is to break something as opposed to producing it in the first place. But as can be seen from the article linked below even breaking something (eye production) cannot be achieved by a simple mutation of a single gene without taking into account other effects that will be produced.
Here is a very recent article on this subject, “Gene found that causes eyes to wither in cavefish”, by University of Maryland.
They discovered that a mutation to the gene, ‘cbsa’ disrupted the blood flow during eye development and thus the eyes failed to develop normally. The article states:
and:
They knew that “blind cavefish larvae have aneurysms and hemorrhages in the blood vessels of the eyes as the eyes begin to degenerate” and they knew that ‘cbsa’ was involved. This is something that would need to be brought under control. I wonder what other genes are involved in controlling this? Whatever the full story is we can be sure that the genetic activity is well coordinated.
If it takes the coordination of ten to twenty genes to achieve a loss of function in these troglodytes how much more coordinated activity is needed to produce functional sight in the first place?
Here is a summary from a further article:
No one denies that genes are important but there needs to be higher levels of control by the cell, the organ and the organism.
As Denis Nobel said, Barbara McClintock:
I don’t have to look for anything outside of my consciousness to explain my consciousness. I cause my own consciousness. Neurons are not conscious, my brain is not conscious. I am conscious. Consciousness is the property of the whole which is me.
Lying behind and preceding every genotype that we can observe there will be a phenotype.
I’m not looking for a non-genetic rationale. My rationale includes the genome, it includes the epigenetic markers, it includes the cells and it includes the organisms, it includes the environment, it includes the processes. All of these things in combination having their role and their place.
By the cells, the organs, the organisms.
The same genome used in various ways as required.
I have many friends and acquaintances who do not wish to get their genomes replicated. In fact they go to great lengths not to.
But all of their parents did.
I agree with your last sentence. We can observe a gradual sequence from wholly innate behaviour in the lower organisms to a higher stage in which individual learning plays a significant role. You won’t find amoebas playing and expressing their emotions in the same way as cats or primates do. Individual behaviour and learning are relatively recent features in the evolution of life.
In biology I don’t see much talk about the evolution of individuation because it entails associating evolution with a certain direction which is taboo as far as conventional evolutionary thinking is concerned.
Not everyone who has become a parent has wished for it to happen. Look at how many women choose to abort rather than let nature take its course.
Human individuals can consciously decide on the future in a way that is not available to other animals. The ‘progress’ of individuation.
Unless I am gravely mistaken, you were brought into the world carrying the family jewels. Can we agree on their purpose?
It’s interesting how you keep emphasizing teleology, but squirm all you can whenever the most obvious goal shared by all lineages is brought up. Each and every organism alive today is the product of an ancient unbroken chain of succesful reproduction. I am pretty sure that won’t end soon, including for humans.
All of this is produced, howsoever indirectly, by the genome. Paste that inside your hat.
And you think that this would have been a good thing? Imagine warring tribes with weapons of mass destruction.
Religion knows nothing. Individuals should be free to choose their own worldview. The time is past when organised religion dictates what its members must believe. This does not lead to individual freedom. We gain knowledge of the world through science and this knowledge is universal. Religion should not be about knowledge, its more to do with controlling one’s will and individual responsibility. Any leaders or followers of a religion that attempt to make it universal do not understand its place in the world. We cannot be commanded to become moral beings, it can only come from within.
One’s religion, the concern of the individual
One’s science, the concern of all.
That’s detailing specifics, is it? I think you’ve missed out a couple of steps, there. Your consciousness is self-created, hanging by its own bootstraps? Nothing to do with that thing sitting on your neck?
If you can find such a phenotype that does not result from a genotype, I would be interested to hear it.
Epigenetic marks, cells, organisms, detection of environmental stimulus, interlocking ‘process’ – all comes from the genome. None of the things you invoke as separate from the genome has any presence except through genomically-derived operations.
Which owe their entirety to genetic sequence.
As required by the genome.
Good for them. Can we therefore conclude that the reproductive imperative is not, after all, a thing in biology?
When you make statements like this!:
Allan Miller,
I let a confusion slide by there – the reproductive urge, even in humans, does not simply manifest itself in a ‘desire to have children’. In other animals, probably even less so. It’s more complex and subtle. We find members of the opposite sex simply … appealing. We don’t choose to, it just suddenly happens (typically around age 11 or so, across the species). We seek their good opinion, are differentially susceptible to the more ‘attractive’ ones, would like to buy them coffee, find out their favourite music, kiss … should it lead to sex, we might choose contraception. In no way does that final preventative step negate the fact that levers are being pulled by genes that have successfully managed to propagate themselves through all the preceding generations, by generating tendencies that can – not must – lead to procreation.
So it is with (say) birds. The urge to start singing in spring, susceptibility to that song, to display, nest building, feeding, protection … what’s all that about? Why do all organisms possess this generalised urge: those without nervous systems as much as those with? Why is the result reduced to single cells, possessed of little more than a genome, each turn of the cycle?
That certainly explains the irrationality often in evidence here.
God. 🙂
Or, if you prefer, because if they didn’t you wouldn’t be here to talk about it.
Yes, but (to echo a child’s question) why?
-Because Gawd’s da necessary being, son
-Yes, but w…
-Shut up and eat your cornflakes!
You read more into that sentence than is there. “Teleology” is not an explanation. Saying the word explains nothing. It could be the heading to a text that gives a teleological explanation, I suppose. Has anyone (I won’t be impressed with any more walls of text from Rudolf Steiner) supplied an explanation of what they think “teleology” is and how the concept has any relevance to biological phenomena?
Genes are real and are similar to the components of a nest. Most songbirds build their nests out of twigs, moss, feathers and items such as these that they find scattered around. They arrange them into a structure that is suitable for their needs. The body uses genes in a similar manner. It uses the genes to arrange structures suitable for its needs.
Of course if the nest of the average songbird was taken apart and analysed the DNA extracted would have originated in a very wide range of animal and plant types. The birds are using their own genes and also the products of the genes of other creatures when constructing their nests. In nature nothing is wasted.
To think that there is a homuncular genome sitting deep within the cells of every creature directing affairs is an abstraction too far for me to find credible.
Anthropogenic global warming has been caused by our technological age built on the findings of science. This is the result of us using technology without being mature enough to consider the consequences of our actions. And you would have liked to see science advancing much earlier than it did!
I’m not arguing that genetic variation is an important indicator of evolution. I am questioning how this genetic variation comes about. I do not believe in the power of accidents to achieve the creativity of life. Genes are vital in the production of proteins. But in order for these proteins to be produced in the right amounts, in the right place, at the right time, to use mechanistic similes, the genome needs to be played like a musical instrument, it cannot be wound up like a clock. Mechanistic, reductionist explanations are just not up to the task.
BP had reports in the 60’s that predicted the global warming we are seeing today.
Science =! capitalism.
In fact if it had we’d likely be through the carbon age with far less damage to the planet given the substantially smaller populations.
Yes. From Evolution in Four Dimensions, revised edition, by Eva Jablonka, Marion J. Lamb:
They argue that the importance of these new developments are not being given due weight.
And the primary source for house construction is the builder’s yard.
You even tell us above, ways in which genes are manipulated. I would replace your ‘controlled by genes’ to ‘controlled by the coordinated expression and suppression of genes’.
No. It absolutely doesn’t. This really is squarely in the realm of “bad analogy”. The nest is not sequentially replicated, nor is anything specified in its sequence. It doesn’t even have a sequence; it is not an informatic construct.
You misunderstand. The nest is a phenotype of genes in the bird. All birds of a given species build nests of a similar type, typically different from those of other species, or at least consistent within a given clade. This is as legitimate a phenotype as the colouration or shape of their eggs. It might not be commonly constructed due to commonly-possessed genes. But you can’t dismiss the possibility that it is with an airy wave of your hand – especially if your alternative appears to involve some kind of telepathy.
Good job I am advocating nothing of the sort.
Alan Fox,
This seems to have beome mangled anyway. My original point to Charlie ws that I don’t know who is supposed to be fearful of a Designer. Now it’s mutated into ‘who doesn’t like teleology?’.
Bad analogy.
Gosh, do I? There must be some reason I don’t think that an issue for gene-centrism, don’t you think? And there is: genes are ‘manipulated’ (which boils down to being transcribed, translated and/or turned on/off) by the products of other genes. So this is no escape from the genotype being the upstream component.
Strange how that co-ordination is consistent among members of a given species, isn’t it? The reason being, of course, that it is achieved by the operation of other genes that they all share. Epigenetic states are set and reset by genes. Promoters and repressors are produced by genes, and their binding regions are also genetic. Gross developmental determinants, such as testosterone, produced by … genes. Differential expression in the presence of testosterone … encoded within the genome.
A zygote is provisioned with a trivial amount of its parents’ phenotype – a few proteins from the mother that permit the extract of the current zygote’s genotype – always under the control of other parts of the current zygote’s genotype.
Where resides the detailed control in a gamete in your version of events? You’ve got this massive genome sat there, just the one copy, all ready and willing to provide a fundamental explanation of the repetitious production of broadly similar organisms, but you reject it in favour of ‘the system’. Where in ‘the system’, in its minimal gametic form, resides the informatic capacity to build a heart, from replication of a cell line (and its genes), if not in the genes?
Yet it is in the somatic cells of individuals where we find the greatest stability of the genome. Over evolutionary succession genomes change markedly. Our genomes are vastly different from any prokaryote. We contain the genes that are required for the function of a single celled organism. a multicellular organism, a motile organism and a conscious organism.
Neither then is “Gravity” or “Natural Selection.”
I say ‘must’ because an isolated genome is an abstraction. Put a e-coli in a petri dish with nutrients and it will thrive, but as Denis Noble said above, put its genome in a petri dish with nutrients and it will do nothing.
Take the seed of a plant sitting in a packet in a garden centre it is inert. It needs to be surrounded by the right environmental conditions to become active. You cannot isolate the genome from the context in which it exists. And of course the seed is not just a bare genome, but it is the minimum level of existence of the plant. It never is or was just a genome, and that is the reality.