Can it be established using the tools of modern science that evolution is guided and has purpose and that the only tinkerer is not just blind uncaring indifferent forces and collisions?
If so, how?
If not what does that mean for ID, if anything?
81 thoughts on “What modern science has to say about guided evolution”
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Have you looked at a fishing reel? [KF]
And you know, ATP synthase is pretty complex [UD]. Just ignore the fact that ATP is made by pumping protons across a membrane and having them flow back in to make it, in a kind of evolutionary kludge that continues to this day in our mitochondria.
Yes, they do have sermons with the kinds of “analogies” expected in homilies. Just nothing that can hold up under rigorous cause and effect analysis.
Glen Davidson
Modern science has lots to say about guided evolution.
Natural Computing Algorithms
Handbook of Natural Computing
Wow! Two entire books about the empty set.
Apparently the idea of guided evolution is anathema here. Religious intolerance at it’s skeptical finest. However:
Introduction to Evolutionary Computing (Natural Computing Series)
Fundamentals of Natural Computing: Basic Concepts, Algorithms, and Applications
Compositional Evolution: The Impact of Sex, Symbiosis, and Modularity on the Gradualist Framework of Evolution (Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology)
Please, join the rest of us in the modern world.
Mung,
None of those three things appears to have anything to do with guided evolution, so I’m confused about your point. Could you explain?
OMagain:
No. In fact, science shows that evolution is unguided, just as it shows that the weather is not orchestrated by the Rain Fairy.
It means that the Designer has to retreat to the next gap.
I’m not intolerant of religion as a personal philosophy. I’m intolerant of religious authority, especially where it’s used as an excuse to meddle in ethics and politics.
ETA especially
Then why are you asking that it be demonstrated that it is unguided?
So you think that evolution has purpose? What is it? Do those links support that? How?
Your conflation is noted however.
The inspiration for this post was this comment
In that thread we’re clearly not talking about evolutionary computing. We’re talking about design and the Designer, Intelligent Design. And you ask for it to be demonstrated, ruled out, that intelligent causation is ruled out in evolution.
And yet here when I ask about guided evolution you pull out the academic references as if the type of guided evolution you reference is what you referenced on the other thread. Well, let me reset you. This thread, this OP is about the type of guided evolution where the purported Intelligent Designer is the guider. Not a human programmer, a “invisible guider” capable entity as spoken about in hushed terms at UD.
If you don’t have anything to say on that particular topic, I will fully understand.
Mung,
One cannot accept every proposition put before one. It is not intolerant to demand some better evidence than that so far presented on your side. Computer programs written for a purpose have a purpose. Quelle surprise.
It would be impossible to have a finite reproducing population without variation being steadily eliminated within it (absent new mutation and/or specific selection conditions maintaining it). Are all finite sampling processes therefore guided processes? If not, what distinguishes a guided finite sampling process from an unguided one?
This question would be objected to by any lawyer in court. It’s a leading question.
In principle, it’s impossible to determine whether there’s any guidance. The best anyone can say is that the mechanisms of evolution identified so far seem sufficient to explain the results we see. Whether those mechanisms are being controlled somehow, can’t be determined. So as with everything in science, we can never either establish or discard the possibility of Divine Guidance, but so far we’ve never needed that hypothesis to explain anything. Even if it’s correct.
One thought that seems not to occur to the ‘guided tinkering’ proponent (is Mung of that persuasion? You’d think I’d know after 3 years of his posting … ) is that recombination, a significant source of novelty, needs extra-special guiding. In order for a particular gene combination to arise, the possessors of the two halves have to meet and mate. So you have to pick who mates with whom. Then wait 20+ years for a mature gamete. And you have to place a crossover at a particular point, and ensure that this is the egg which descends, or the sperm which wins the race. A lot of farting about when you could just go ‘kaboing’ (or whatever sound it makes when a Designer makes a mutation happen).
And you have to guide the result through the eliminative contest to fixation, if your plan is that this is the Next Big Thing for the species. If the change is actually maladaptive, you have to oppose natural selection. If the change is actually adaptive, you still can’t leave it entirely up to fate.
Flint,
Science can’t prove the absence of guidance, of course, because science doesn’t deal in proofs.
Science can’t prove that the weather isn’t guided, in exquisite detail, by the Rain Fairy. Yet scientifically informed people scoff at the Rain Fairy hypothesis, and rightly so. The idea of guided evolution is just as ridiculous.
Allan:
It’s “poof”, Allan. Why presume to criticize ID when you’re not even aware of the sound it makes?
“Evolution is a directed process…it’s directed.”
– Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence Krauss must be an IDiot.
As I said, this hypothesis is unnecessary. The notion of guidance adds nothing to our understanding, and suggests no fruitful lines of inquiry. And THAT, in a nutshell, is why ideas of guidance are regarded as ridiculous. Scientists are not anti-religion in principle, and would seize quickly on any TESTABLE aspect of guidance that would add genuine predictive value to their theories.
There is no need for evolution with a creator. ID simply means better intelligence is behind biology. Not dumb selection on mutation.
Other options.
No but Mung certainly is a dishonest quote miner.
Flint,
I’m disagreeing with this:
While it’s impossible to prove that the Rain Fairy isn’t controlling the weather, I would say without hesitation that science has determined that the Rain Fairy hypothesis is false, just as it has determined that angels aren’t pushing the planets around.
Likewise for guided evolution.
ETA: I stress this because there are too many people, including many on our side of the ID/creation fence, who think that the question “Is evolution guided?” is not a scientific question. It is, and it has been answered by science — in the negative.
Yeah, google doesn’t recognize that alleged quote “Evolution is a directed process” as ever being said by Krauss.
At minimum we need a source (the actual book/page number, etc, not just the creationist website somebody is using) before we can discuss whether Krauss is an idiot about evolution.
Maybe he is. But Mung surely cannot produce the evidence that he is.
Yes, well, someone might want to have something more than their usual lack of evidence before charging me with being “a dishonest quote-miner.” Unless their name is Adapa.
The quote is from the debate tonight with Krauss, Meyer and Lamoureux. It’s breaking news. But I fail to see why people would have a problem with it. We all know evolution is directed.
When you leave out the context it’s dishonest quote mining Mung. The rest of us here have the integrity to know that even if you don’t.
I watched it live. That YouTube is a creationist website is news to me.
Right. Immediately before and after he said it he took it back. Twice.
How did it determine that?
It has no need for those magic hypotheses, in the first place. We can go beyond that at times, indeed, since fairies affecting weather doesn’t have telling evidence contrary to it, while intelligently-guided evolution actually does. So things differ from subject to subject, and the guidance “hypothesis” should be considered falsified unless some sort of designer and/or design process is found that produces effects like unintelligent evolution would.
I think we can say that science has decent evidence against angels pushing comets and planets around, as well as decent evidence against guided evolution. It’s weather that I think still has the gaps in which a little magic could be placed (the gaps for angels pushing things around essentially fade into quite tiny uncertainties, while weather has rather larger uncertainties).
True, but we can’t go so far as to say that science has determined that there is no guidance. It just has good evidence against, but even there it just could be that a few crucial interventions were made in life, perhaps as experiments. Useless speculation for the most part, but possibilities are hard to completely rule out in many cases.
Glen Davidson
Try to wriggle out of the dishonesty Mung. Out of context quote mining is both dishonest and despicable. Another shining example of those higher morals you’re always bragging about having.
I see, you didn’t like the context, so you left it out.
Yeah, who knows, maybe he was contradictory, or maybe he was just putting things into context.
We don’t know, because Mung just quote-mined him.
Glen Davidson
Glen,
Sure we can. “Determine” does not mean “prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
If it did, then science could never determine anything.
No, of course “determine” doesn’t mean no doubt, what it means in this context is a good level of certainty about a cluster of negative claims, since a number of intervention scenarios remain possible.
How could science be certain enough to determine that aliens didn’t intervene once or a few times during the course of evolution? Possibly at crucial junctures.
Specific claims about observable effects can be falsified, so that any honest ID hypothesis can be considered to be falsified (sensibly, it involves a great deal of intervention). Much more rarefied claims usually can’t be falsified, and, if we’re talking about ruling out guidance of evolution, the rarefied claims are possibilities as well. There might be bored aliens/gods who might like screwing with the evidence, too, so made life appear evolved when it was designed. You can’t rule that out, you can only rule out reasonable hypotheses, which is why honest ID can be considered to be contrary to the evidence, and any numbers of goalpost shifts (Behe sometimes says that design might be made to look “natural,” clearly well into absurdity) become unfalsifiable claims, and not something that science can determine to be false at all.
Glen Davidson
Or as it’s sometimes put, you can’t prove a negative–like, there was no guidance involved in evolution. Now it’s not necessarily true that you can’t prove a negative, but generally when you’re discussing what has happened in the past you really can’t rule out the claim that something intervened somehow, you can just show that it’s a pretty worthless claim.
Like any ID that posits life’s slavish derivation from ancestral DNA (plus some horizontal transfers in some lines) to be consistent with design is worthless. It’s not determined to be wrong, rather it’s judged to be an attempt to claim that evolutionary evidence would not differ from design evidence, except maybe in probabilities. But “design” whose results do not differ sensibly from unintelligent evolutionary processes isn’t even a meaningful use of that word.
Apologetics may in fact be true, for all that we can determine, but that it looks like an attempt to explain away the evidence is the more important evidence that we have as to its usefulness, and reason for existence.
Glen Davidson
Yes, well, do let us know when you have some actual evidence to back up your allegations.
Your mind reading skills are simply amazing.
Let us know when you have the honesty to include the context of your quote-mined Krauss quote.
It doesn’t take mind reading skills to see you omitted the context and quote-mined a scientists whose stated position is 100% the opposite of what you portray. People here aren’t as stupid as your fellow UD creationist buddies Mung.
Don’t be more of an ass than you have to be. I’m not a mind-reader and you didn’t provide any clue with your quote that it might be from something you were watching — rather than a creationist website which is what you typically copy/quote from. Turns out the wads running either UD or EvolutionNews have been crowing for days about the prestige they gain by having one of “their own” debate a legitimate scientist, but since I don’t taint my mind with those sites, I had no way of knowing.
And we still have no way of knowing what you happened to omit … or change … or misunderstand … in the bit you quoted since we don’t have a transcript.
And balance of probabilities, based on previous examples, is that you’ve likely missed something of Krauss’ intended meaning.
So feel free to get off your goddamned high horse any day now.
I found the source of Mung’s quote mine, which is as blatant as you would expect. Krauss said:
What is wrong with you, Mung?
ETA: Here is Mung’s quote-mined version, for comparison:
Glen,
Falsification isn’t the only reason to reject a hypothesis. We’ll reject a hypothesis (provisionally) any time we have a better alternative, and if two unfalsified hypotheses are competing (such as the Rain Fairy hypothesis and modern meteorology), we’ll consider the better hypothesis to be the one that requires the fewest unjustified assumptions.
Modern meteorology requires only an acceptance of the laws of physics, and because there is plenty of independent evidence for those laws and their universality, the assumption that they hold everywhere on earth is well justified.
The Rain Fairy hypothesis, by contrast, requires us to
1) assume that a Rain Fairy exists,
2) with the requisite capabilities,
3) who just happens, whether by desire or limitation, to produce weather that is indistinguishable from what modern meteorological theory would predict, were it in operation.
There is no independent evidence for those three assumptions. They are wild and unjustified.
So even though the Rain Fairy hypothesis remains unfalsified, we reject it for other good reasons. But the reasons are philosophical, not empirical, and have to do with our preference for hypotheses that make fewer assumptions.
Why is anyone compelled to care what Krauss thinks? More than the next guy, that is. I am reminded of a discussion on ‘code’ I once had. Which mostly consisted of a series of quotes and links where respected people used the term in a manner that appeared to contradict me. I can’t give a shit about everyone’s opinion!
This sometime denizen of internet backwater The Skeptical Zone thinks that the sense in which Krauss says evolution is directed differs from the sense in which the average ID-er does. IMO NS provides a direction, it does not direct. When asked for some specifics about what is actually not directing, or how it isn’t doing so, Miller fell strangely silent.
I am not persuaded. I think if it can’t be addressed empirically AT ALL, then it is not a scientific question. And this question has NOT been answered by science in any way, or even addressed. It has simply been ignored by science as irrelevant and unhelpful. Because it’s not a scientific question.
We ignore (not reject) it because (1) it can’t be fruitfully addressed by the scientific method; and (2) we have scientific explanations which are sufficient. The distinction between ignoring and rejecting is important, because if any relevant evidence should be found, we’d pay attention. We would not dismiss the evidence because the idea has already been rejected.
I think we have a different view of the Rain Fairy theory. The way I see it, the Rain Fairy is influencing physical factors (at some low chaotic level) so as to produce the eventual conditions necessary for rain. Much as when humans channel streams into canals and aqueducts, we don’t try to make water run uphill, we just move the hills around. The water flows exactly as gravitational theory would predict.
IF the Rain Fairy is somehow manipulating atmospheric conditions, meteorological theory would never be able to notice this. If, for example, weather patterns on earth could be manipulated by subtle changes in currents inside the sun, how would your meteorological theory determine that the Rain Fairy does NOT live inside the sun doing this? Regional variations in insolation would look entirely normal, and indeed be the result of perfectly normal forces.
So, as expected, Mung has nothing to say about guided evolution (the ID type), rather he conflates what is accepted by the reality based community (evolution is guided by the environment) with the claims he makes when talking about evolution and ID.
Further commentary will be in the designated thread.
Still no evidence that I quote-mined Krauss. None.
Not that it’s ever about the evidence here at TSZ.
Three times Krauss claims evolution is directed. I only caught two of them.
How do you people who are claiming I am dishonest reconcile your claims with the facts? The facts are that Krauss says evolution is directed. That’s what I quoted him as saying. That’s what he said.
Again I ask, we all know that evolution is directed, don’t we? So why the objection?
Go back and look at my comment about mind-reading. It was directed at Glen, not you.
Here’s what he said:
An obvious claim to be reading my mind.
Mung,
We only all agree if by ‘directed’ we mean differential reproductive success (NS). Is that what you mean by directed evolution? Evolution by NS?
Well, except someone provided the whole context of the quote which showed you to be a dishonest and despicable quote-miner trying to imply something Krauss never argued. Other than that…
Directed by what Mung?
As expected, you dispute the characterisation of your reason for quote-mining, not the quote-mine itself.
Does what Krauss says it is directed by happen to also be the thing that you think it is guided by?