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250 thoughts on “What was the most significant scientific development in Intelligent Design in 2018?”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Totally a coincidence.
Yep, that’s the way to exercise that insatiable curiosity! If we don’t know, let’s play dumb and not even hazard a reasonable guess.
For any trait passed non-culturally from parent to offspring where the cause is known, that cause is genetic. But for any trait where we don’t know the specific genes, it could be literally anything? Even though breeders can select for it? That’s hilarious. The Selfish Gene has really got your collective backs up.
Is there any evidence for another mechanism? Sticking ‘epi’ in front doesn’t really help.
While this would be great from an anti-evolution perspective, it doesn’t seem essential to the ID argument. All the info could be front loaded into the evolutionary processes.
The question that matters to the ID argument is if evolutionary processes can generate ASC without front loading. While there is always a chance of anything happening, the probability of chance ASC drops off exponentially, as Dr. Ewert proved in his paper “On the Improbability of Algorithmic Specified Complexity”:
https://robertmarks.org/REPRINTS/2013_OnTheImprobabilityOfAlgorithmicSpecifiedComplexity.pdf
and Dr. Montañez has elaborated on in general in his “Unified Model of Specified Complexity” paper:
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2018.4
Dembski’s Vertical No Free Lunch theorem in “The Search for a Search” proves something similar,
https://evoinfo.org/papers/2010_TheSearchForASearch.pdf
showing you can never get out more active information than you put into the search process. The stronger conservation law shows the search for a search requires exponentially more active information.
To rephrase in computer science language: the ID argument is *not* “genetic algorithms don’t work.” They clearly do, and can be quite useful. The ID argument is that when GAs work, it is due to intelligent intervention on the part of the engineer. Dr. Dembski et al. wrote a great book “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics” breaking down their analysis of various computational evolution simulations and demonstrating where active information is added to the simulation by the programmer. I highly recommend checking out their analysis if you are interested in this question. Their book is probably available through your university library.
You seem to be saying here essentially that your arguments don’t apply to evolution at all, since evolution could easily work, but then you’d just insist the universe must have been designed such that evolution would work.
He maybe be confused, or not fully understanding, that “evolution” means different things to different people… Common descent is often another example of confusion…
I have used this example many times: the evolution of dogs from wolves and descent of dogs from wolves is a perfect example of “evolution” what I personally like to call descent with gene (s) modification or decrease of function (devolution as per Behe)… within “kind” (s)…
Sounds like the argument for ID.
You’re right. ID seems a reasonable guess to me so I shouldn’t rule out reasonable guesses. 🙂
And for some reason keiths could not fathom how Wagner’s book could fail to be an “ID killer.”
Either the search space is designed, or the search itself is designed, or both.
How does ‘ID transmission’ differ from genetic transmission?
Same question again. It sounds like you’re just scent-marking an existing concept.
In the Dembski/Ewert/Marks arguments they argue that the search is designed if fitnesses of closely similar genotypes are noticeably similar. In effect, they are assuming that the fitness surface is a “white noise” surface, unless a Designer intervenes to smooth it. This ignores the fact that the ordinary laws of physics predispose to similarity of fitnesses of similar genotypes. That would call into question whether smoothness of a fitness surface indicates Design.
Rumraket,
Who do you think wrote:
Eric Holloway!
Darwinian evolution was never a theory or hypothesis by Darwin’s own admission…
He’d hoped it would be confirmed or found false.. When it became apparent it was false, people who needed it to feel intellectually fulfilled continued to keep it on life support by ignoring the evidence against it… Even people like Larry Moran moved on because of the embarrassing lack of results by Darwinian mechanism of mutations and natural selection…
Perhaps there is no contradiction?
The first statement does not follow from the second.
Can you cite this?
One wonders what ensemble of hypothetically altered physical laws would even produce white-noise fitness surfaces. Is that even possible? It is difficult for me to see how one could even predict the global topology of the fitness landscape of realizable phenotypes from first principles of physics.
There’s an incredible amount of unproven and frankly highly implausible bullsights stuffed into these ID arguments.
Where did he admit his theory of natural selection was not a theory or hypothesis? And whether he did or not matters little today. His initial idea has been developed, enriched and supported with evidence.
Can’t say the same for ID theory as there isn’t one, so far.
I’m not saying it follows logically (nor am I accusing you of having argued that it does). I’m saying that is what you appear to be doing, as in using two different arguments depending on the situation.
If and when a GA works (which could be some model of evolution), you will argue it works because the GA was engineered in such a way that it works.
And by analogy, real evolution, if and when it works, it works because the laws of physics are such that it works. But then why are the laws of physics such that it works? Well because they were designed for that.
Is that not the implication you wish us to take away from this?
“…We can see that evolutionary processes are not typical members of DEM’s space of searches, because all of them, no matter what the shape of their fitness surface, do much better than blind search…”
Do better than blind search?! What physical law could be directing this evolutionary search? Can anyone guess? 😉
That’s not what I said!
Natural selection could be real and many ID proponents accept it…But that’s not the same thing as so-called macro-evolution or evolution of new body plans that Darwin was hoping to find proof of in the fossil record and by experiments, such as by selective breeding…
The combination of all of them in so far as they are responsible for effectuating and manifesting living organisms, their attributes including fitness, and the environments in which they live and reproduce.
You wrote “Darwinian evolution was never a theory or hypothesis by Darwin’s own admission…”
I’ve not come across any prominent ID proponent who accepts the idea of natural selection. Can you name names?
That’s YEC double-speak! 🙂
Darwin did not learn about Mendel’s work so others had to develop his initial idea. Biologists have built off that initial idea. He deserves full credit for his work but we’ve moved on.
Electrostatics.
Are they non-random?
What’s the difference between natural selection and Darwinian evolution, in your own words?
Behe, Loning, P. Nelson to name a few…
ETA: They accept NS but they do not accepted what Darwinists claim it can do…
You quoted from a post by Tom English and me. You could try reading the rest of it. Have genotypes and have those genotypes have phenotypes, and have the phenotypes have fitnesses. Then very normal processes do the rest.
You’ve got me. You’re absolutely right to call me on that. No actually they don’t assume white-noise fitness surfaces — they assume things are even worse than that. Because if you do have a white-noise fitness surface, you do make some progress under natural selection, enough for there to be a small amount of Dembski and Marks’s “active information”. (Where white-noise fitness surfaces appear is implicitly, in Dembski’s “No Free Lunch” argument).
In the recent DEM papers and in their book, they define a set of “evolutionary searches” that include not only all cases where there are genotypes and fitnesses, with the fitnesses affecting the contributions that genotypes make to the next generation, but also all processes that can lead to wandering in genotype space. Including ones that tend to go uphill on the fitness surface and ones that then to go downhill, and lots and lots of ones that wander without any attention to fitness. Then they show that on average over all of them, those processes don’t do any better than random wandering.
In short, their “evolutionary searches” include vast numbers of utterly crazy processes that totally ignore the constraints of physics.
I am glad to see that you have cast aside their argument, and want to base ID arguments only on ASC, rather than on anything involving fitness or adaptation.
Define fitness.
Define environment.
I have…
Anything in particular what those normal processes are exactly? How can they be identified or measured?
Since they involved physical laws, it should be no problem detecting them or measuring them…
How do you like that, Eric?
Welcome to the world of weirdness!
Or as some here would put it: Welcome to the world of scientific magic! 🤣
In other words evolution is still a mystery…
In other news… The search for an organism with a simpler genetic code than the one currently found in ALL ORGANISMS that have ever been looked at continues…
Scientists speculate that the current code seems too perfect or optimal for information processes and if a “doublet” code were to be found, it would take a lot of pressure of materialists who need evolution of the genetic code to be more than a fairy tale to get creationists off their backs…😂
A commonly used definition of fitness that is measurable is relative fitness. That’s the definition used in the Long term evolution experiment with E coli: “Relative fitness is a dimensionless quantity, which is calculated as the ratio of the growth rate of the derived type to its ancestral competitor during direct competition.”
The total collection of entities with which any part of an organism interacts during it’s lifetime.
Now you can proceed to ask for definitions of all the words I’ve used in this post of course. Which would be silly, because I’m only asking you for definitions of two words (“natural”, and “supernatural”), as those are the ones for which you claim to have evidence. Even so, I’ve now clearly done what you refuse to and I have to wonder why, because defining concepts actually isn’t all that hard.
I think if you really meant to persuade, you’d just define your terms. But you’re not here to persuade, or even discuss, you’re here to try give yourself the experience of having scored points. So opening up your case to an analysis that could even potentially expose it’s weaknesses is not conducive to that end, so that’s why you refuse to define your terms.
I see, so the definition of “relative fitness” would be relative relative fitness. And the definition of “relative relative fitness” would be relative relative relative fitness.
Ok, so the definition of supernatural is relative supernatural. Relative to natural its supernatural.
Glad that’s settled.
Relative to natural, atoms are supernatural.
I havent been following the entire thread.
Has anyone come up with a list of ID achievements ?
Yes, electrostatics are non-random. Someone with your level of expertise in QM would be aware of this fact, methinks. In particular, interactions between atoms that are closer together are stronger than interactions between atoms that are far apart.
But I was making the same mistake as Joe, in that I was addressing the idiocy that is the white noise landscape of No Free Lunch, whereas the latest foray into cluelessness involves averaging over all search algorithms, including hill-descending algorithms. I hope you can see why natural selection is going to do better than the average of ALL algorithms…
I hope.
Yeah…
They have scientifically proven that materialism based science can detect design in nature provided that the design appears to have errors…
However, if the supposedly faulty design that has been detected by materialism based science turns out to be error free or optimal, then the processes of denial are introduced and the attacks are shifted at the supernatural…
Isn’t this achievement great? Now ID have an undeniable proof that materialism based science is a scam promoted by people who want to feel intellectually fulfilled without any accountability to an ID/Supernatural…
How do you like that? I gotta tell y’all 2018 was a great year of achievements for ID and Behe’s book hasn’t been published yet…
I sure look forward to 2019 with more hope than ever….🤣
What makes you think I believe they are non-random? Because I’d asked you if you were sure? I was thinking of quantum electrodynamics… I hope you can see the difference between (good ) predictability and non-randomness…
However, with your level of expertise in enzyme design and full knowledge of Venter’s work, even his backstabbing employees calling him different names, you even acknowledged that you have the skills that Venter was shopping for, how is it possible that you were at loss why Venter would be looking for a restriction enzymes expert? He actually hired the guy who identified restriction enzymes and got Nobel Prize for it…
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1978/summary/
I gotta tell ya your expertise story is getting darker each time you attempt to catch a discrepancy in my statements…🤣
Hope in not on the side of evolution, I’m affraid…
No, I don’t see IT, but I’m pretty sure that another 5000 comments OP will further enhance your speculative evolutionary science…That’s where evolution is at its best…
The most significant ID achievement in 2018 is J-Tard’s discovery of the https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/svg/1f923.svg emoji
You forgot to mention your embarrassment with the okapi evolution…
Or was it in 2017? Maybe you should check and see if evolution, as you would like it to be, is happening ? 🤣
J-Mac, You seem incoherent.
Natural selection is a hill-climbing algorithm. It will, on average, go UP. The average of ALL algorithms (including hill descending algorithms) will go sideways.
You asked me if electrostatics are non-random. You did not ask me if ‘I was sure’. I replied that they were non-random.
I assumed that you (too) thought that electrostatics are non-random, because they are non-random (or do you dispute my statement about the effect of distance on the strength of an electrostatic interaction? wanna go there?) and because I thought that you were not a complete idiot. You have even claimed expertise in QM. [Although you do seem to get rather touchy whenever I bring THAT claim up. Weird.]
I may have to rethink my assessment of your mental capabilities.
Similarly, your bit about Venter makes no sense. You are claiming that I was “at a loss” as to why Venter was seeking “a restriction enzymes expert”.
No, I was not. I am at a loss as to why you think this factoid is relevant to anything.
I am not surprised that he has back-stabbing employees, although I am curious as to who they might be. No-one I know. I am at a loss as to why you raised that factoid either.
I suspect that you did not understand my reference to John Sulston. Neither he nor I would ever work for Venter.
John, like Hamilton Smith, has a Nobel.
And it is still true that I was designing and building synthetic genes years before Venter got into that game. Impress us all with your knowledge of gene design: tell me what is unusual about the gene I described in Noyau.
ETA Sulston on Venter, for the lulz.
J-Mac,
Do you have that stuff bookmarked or what? LMFAO, what a loser.
Why would we expect to find one, if evolution is true? Competitive extinction of primitive organisms by more ‘advanced’ ones is a reasonable expectation.
As I’ve explained, a constraint on substitution would actually give the ‘optimal’ features – assuming you mean fault tolerance – as a by-product of the progressive subdivision of codon groups from a simpler code. Given the ‘wobble’ rules, that would also involve moving from doublet to triplet specificity – and many codon groups are still doublet, which is why they are fault tolerant. Your response – “Venter … lol … it just hit me … speculation” – needs work.
Ahh I see that you have become confused again. My first sentence should have been rephrased to “A commonly used definition of fitness that is measurable is the one used for relative fitness:”
Which would make the actual definition the thing in italics I quoted: “Relative fitness is a dimensionless quantity, which is calculated as the ratio of the growth rate of the derived type to its ancestral competitor during direct competition.”
So your newfound excuse to duck out of giving a definition here also doesn’t work. Back to the drawing board with you. Of course, I’m going to give you the credit of not actually believing you’re so stupid you didn’t get this to begin with.
phoodoo,
I see that Rum believes in repetition as a pedagogic tool. This has come up before.
The fitness measurements really are quite elegant. Some visual support can be found here and below that Rum linked to the actual fitness measurements of the LTEE.
You say genotypes have phenotypes. Isn’t that a bit like saying, for example, cardiovascular systems have organisms?
I don’t think that anyone would argue that there is a link between genes and traits. But there is a great deal of argument over causal relationships. Do the genes cause the traits or does the organism’s manipulation of its genes allow for a trait to be expressed?
DNA Jock linked to this site where John Sulston talks about Craig Venter and the human genome project. From there I found a link to him (Sulston) saying:
First he makes an assumption, concludes that his assumption is correct, and then asks questions based on his initial assumption. This is the type of science that Goethe was so against.
Now we are getting to the heart of the matter.
Of course, cosmological fine tuning can still be appealed to as the source of the design needed to explain the actual world constraint on the fitness surfaces that matter to biology. But that implicitly accepts NS mechanism for biological evolution, conditional on such cosmological fine tuning.
ETA: Just to connect the dots with EricMH’s K-complexity approach as I understand it. Eric says that NS amounts to random+deterministic variation of the current genome only and math theory prohibits that from creating new MI of some relevant type (which I don’t think Eric has been specific enough on to capture NS — more below on this).
But if there is a constraint on the fitness surfaces, that constraint has to be captured in the allowed variation functions for the K-complexity of the genome info. It seems to me that would imply a correlation that the theorem does not allow for when it describes the nature of the functions modifying current genome info.
The trouble is that the Eric’s argument is not specific enough to formulate that objection in detail. Which is a problem for an argument purporting to constrain biology when that argument exists solely as abstract math.
BruceS,
Exactly. The niche environment can be modelled as a fitness surface and there seems no harm in suggesting The Creator made the universe with the “right” niches at the “right” moments to get us to where we are.
So the definition of fitness is relative fitness, and the definition of relative fitness is the ratio of the growth rate of the derived type to its ancestral competitor during direct competition?
So humans that grow more are more fit. Does it matter if they grow vertically or horizontally, or what? Like do we weigh them? If so, America must be the most fit country by far. I guess Russia is next.
A quibble. For models with growth in continuous time, we compute relative fitness by taking the difference between the growth rates. Thus if genotype A is growing at rate 0.03 per unit time, and genotype B is growing at rate 0.02 per unit time, the relative fitness of A is 0.01, not 1.50.
For models with discrete generations, the statement is correct provided we interpret “growth rate” as the fitness of the genotype, fitness being in a simple model the product of viability and fertility. Thus in an asexual case if a newborn A gives rise to an average of 1.5 newborn offspring in the next generation, and B gives rise to 1.2, the relative fitness of A is not the difference 1.5-1.2, but the ratio 1.5/1.2 = 1.25.
I encourage you to compare the track record of Goetheans versus those, such as Sulston (or Smith or Venter for that matter…), who applied a less “gentle” empiricism. You might want to read up on what we know about the development and the nervous system of the worm C. elegans, all thanks to Sulston, Brenner and their collaborators.
No, EricMH was (in effect) questioning whether Dembski/Marks/Ewert assume a white noise fitness surface. I conceded that they don’t. (I have made that mistake before, been called on it, and corrected myself).
They do assume that the relevant comparison of an evolutionary process is to the average over all “searches”, where searches are any process that comes up with a final state. (In that case the average is over all possible final states, so it is not surprising that on average the result is the same as random wandering).
A white noise fitness surface is very nonbiological, but all-possible-searches is utterly incomprehensible, and not the right thing for D/M/E to take as some average outcome of non-Designed evolution.
We are considering the outcome in simple models that have different genotypes, each of which comes with a phenotype, which comes with a fitness value.
You are welcome to go off to into a great big discussion of what “causes” what, and it might be enlightening to someone, but I will not join you there, as the issue is irrelevant to the discussion of the behavior of these simple model schemes. Dembski/Marks/Ewert have used such models, and I agree that they capture enough behavior of evolutionary processes to enable us to make their argument for, and Tom’s and my argument against, their conclusions.