My copy of No Free Lunch arrived a few days ago, and there are a couple of posts I want to make about it, but the first thing that struck me, reading the preface, and not for the first time, is how little Dembski (and other Intelligent Design proponents) seem to know about either Intelligence or Design.
As it happens, I have a relevant background in both. I’m a cognitive scientist, and I came into cognitive science from a background in educational psychology, so I’ve always been interested in intelligence – how it works, how it is measured, what factors affect it, etc. And, somewhat unusually for a cognitive scientist, I also have a training in design – I trained as an architect, a design training that is specifically focussed on “problem solving”, but I also applied that training to other “design” modalities, including composing music, and writing children’s books that attempted to explain something, both to commission, and therefore with a “design brief”.
And in both areas, what is abundantly clear, is that learning is critical.
When a child is struggling, cognitively, we say she is “learning disabled”, or is a “slow learner”. When we design a building, or a piece of music, or a piece of writing, we embark on an iterative process in which our output feeds back as input into the process of critical appraisal and re-appraisal that informs sometimes radical, more often incremental, changes to our current creation.
In other words, “intelligent design” is a process in which feedback from the environment, including our own output, iteratively serves as input into the design process. Both intelligence in general, and design in particular, are learning processes.
But to read Dembski’s preface, you would not know it:
How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer’s purpose.
Well, not exactly, IMO, and the part that Dembski misses (or, at best, glosses over) is precisely the part that most resembles evolution: the iterative feedback from the environment that results in the incremental adjustment of the prototype so that it ever more closely fulfils some function. Not only that, but that function is not by any means always the original one. For a building, typically it is, at least for its first occupants. But buildings that survive the longest and are best maintained are those that are readily incrementally adapted for other functions. And anyone who has ever made a pot, or carved a block of wood or marble, knows that what emerges is the result of a kind of dialogue between the sculptor and the material, and the result may be something very different to what the designer had in mind when she started. Click on my sister’s blog in the blog roll if you don’t believe me 🙂
In fact, I’d go so far to say that the one thing that separates “intentional” design” from, I dunno, “iterative” or “tactile” design is that humans are capable of simulating the results of their iterative design before execution, so that we don’t have to build first, then dismantle. But even then, we actually make models, often very crude models, out of crude materials, in the early processes of a design (well, this is true of architecture any way) – three dimensional back-of-the-envelope sketches, made of corrugated cardboard, bits of mesh, gauze, sponge, silver paper, prototypes we can nudge and fix and re-order and reassemble, according to how well the thing seems to work.
Intelligent design is very like evolutionary processes, in other words. So it’s not surprising that the products of both should show a family resemblance. Oddly, I agree with Dembski that he has put is finger on a kind of pattern that is distinctive, when he talks about “specified complexity”. I just don’t think it has much to do with intention, and everything to do with iterative adjustments in response to environmental feedback.
Biology has all the hallmarks of a learning process, in other words. Evolutionary processes are learning processes, as is human intelligence. Those would seem to be reasonable candidate authors of a pattern that exhibited “specified complexity”. An omniscient and omnipotent creator, not so much.
You’re arguing a complete straw man, but then, that’s nothing new. You might consider the perspective that the reason IDists seem so far off the mark (from your view) is because they are not arguing about what you think they are arguing about.
Intelligence = intentional. Design = goal. Nothing more whatsoever.
All you need are some sightings of an intentional agent having the necessary capabilities.
I think “Intelligence” is better thought of as “an ability to make decisions”.
“Design” is the “process” that leads to a solution.
This process when used by humans, incorporates feedback.
When we play chess, our “goal” is not to take 6 pawns, a rook and both knights, it’s more subtle in that it is, to win the game.
That’s the way evolution works.
It’s only goal is to “win”, not make “specific” moves.
Was my comment lost in the system? 🙁
How do you think the work of an omniscient and omnipotent designer would be like? I think there’s no way to know, and that’s precisely the problem.
And “intentional” doesn’t add anything that’s not already entailed by “goal”. If that’s what ID is really about, they should be working on an argument for the existence of goals.
I would argue that there IS a way to know, since this omniscient and omnipotent designer is whatever WE say it is. And if WE decide it’s something that poofs perfect designs into existence, without any need for feedback or process as we know it, then that’s how it works. Why not?
Now granted, evolution certainly doesn’t work that way, and people don’t work that way, and there is no objective evidence of a Designer who works that way either, but so what?
I think William didn’t express himself very well. Sure, intelligence implies intent, and designs have specificiations (goals) they are intended to meet. But humans have intents and goals, and STILL iterate toward optimal solutions. William’s Designer doesn’t need to go through any of this irritating trial and error, though. His Designer never errors, so never needs trials. Neither does Dembski’s. William’s (and Dembski’s) Designer never needed to learn anything. Perfection, unlike excellence, isn’t achieved by learning.
Good point.
While ID likes to point to human design as an “example” of intelligent design, in practice, their designer is not like human design at all, as it is always seen as a “perfect ready to ship” design at “version 1.0”.
It’s interesting to notice that the places where the living world s imperfect, kludgey, remnant, are those where ID’s possible designer most resembles the only designers we actually know – that is, our fallible human selves.
Look at all the things humans design that are just barely “good enough” – pop music and advertising art, for examples. Or not even good enough – planned obsolescence. Look at the hokey work-arounds that get ensconced in the material culture – qwerty. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”.
Even our greatest artists have sketches and models, erasures, slip-ups, toolmarks; nothing springs into existence in full perfection at the first try.
The problem for ID proponents is that they have an impossible strait to navigate. We have real imperfections like the broken VitC synthesis, which we could easily believe is an unintended byproduct of The Designer’s process. If the IDers could only admit that their Designer might be imperfect, if only the IDers could point to its sketches and erasures as support for their hypothesis about its existence … But sadly for them, admitting any design flaw contradicts the very need for a Designer to begin with: to explain the otherwise unexplainable miracle of life. Life, with its “perfectly engineered” DNA and RNA; life with its “perfectly machinery” of bacterial flagella, life too perfect to be the result of random chance… Then sadly for them, unalloyed perfection in their purported Design makes it unrecognizable to us.
They have no middle way which is both necessary and persuasive while recognizably in accord with design in the real world.
If it is a straw man, then it is not of my making. I am specifically talking about Dembski (although I’ve read similar statements from other ID proponents) who explicitly excludes intention from his definition of intelligence considering it (wrongly, in my view), together with aesthetics, ethics, and the identity of the designer, as “not properly a questions of science”. He gives as his definition of intelligence:
…the power and facility to choose between options–this coincides with the Latin etymology of “intelligence,” namely, “to choose between”.
As for regarding “design” as synonymous with “goal” – again, that is not the definition Dembski is using in the passage I quoted in the OP. He considers having a goal as part of the design process, but not coterminous with design.
And if having a goal were all there were to designing, I wouldn’t have spent 7 years training how to do it!
So, William, please do not dismiss my points as “straw men” without first considering the origins of said men. If I have a straw man there, your complaint is with Dembski, not with me. And my post was about Dembski, not you.
Elizabeth,
This is why debating you is usuallly useless; you are apparently incapable of understanding or accepting that your fundamental interpretation of what is being argued from the ID side is wrong. The quote directly supports what I said, where Dembski says,
Thought = intention. Thing = finished goal. Everything else is just a process to get from A to B. That those processes getting from A to B may be indistinguishable from unguided processes is entirely irrelevant. What matters to ID detection is if the finished product bears the descriptive, qualitative hallmarks of being an intentional product.
Well, that is one interpretation of the matter. Another is that you are failing to grasp my point 🙂
But I’m doing my best. I hope you are also doing yours.
In that case, William, what we – or ID proponents – need to be doing, is identifying the hall marks of intention, which Dembski does not include in his definition of intelligence, and specifically excludes as a “question of science” (wrongly, IMO).
Or to put it differently : what, in a finished article, distinguishes one that is the result of an iterative process of matching to what currently prolongs the iterative process, and one that is the result of an iterative process of matching to what a designer intended?
By leaving out the iterative part, Dembski dodges that issue – and yet, if the paradigm of “design” is human design, we are talking about an iterative process. Human designers do not create ex nihilo – they “choose between options”, as Dembski rightly says. So do evolutionary processes.
To infer intention, we need to look at some other aspect of the finished product.
Which is precisely what Dembski says is not a scientific question.
WJM, in your opinion, what is the ultimate goal of “the designer”?
Elizabeth,
I think the number of times you have been rebuked by IDists everywhere you go for not understanding the argument should provide you with pause that maybe you aren’t understanding their argument. You understand your ID argument perfectly; you understand your interpretation of what they are saying perfectly; what you do not understand is what they mean. That you understand your interpretation of what they mean is, unfortunately, just the reification of a straw man, which has not only been pointed out repeatedly, but over time leads many IDists to conclude that you are being willfully deceptive.
However, you are free to believe that your straw men have merit, and to make posts that define terms convenient to your attempt to equivocate intelligent design with”natural selection”.
Natural (not artificial) processes do not have goals. They do not imagine a state that does not exist, and attempt to manipulate resources to turn that imagined state into reality. Natural processes do not design or select things in the normative sense. Natural selection is itself an obfuscating term where Darwin stole a normative design concept – selection – and used it erroneously in a positive sense.
What does “selection” really mean in the positive sense? It only means “what nature produces”. It is an outcome, as Joe has tried to tell you countless times. There is no “natural selection”; there are only “natural outcomes”. “Outcomes”, meaning product of what came before, and natural, meaning without deliberate manipulation by an intelligent agency towards a goal.
Your attempt to equivocate “natural selection” with “intelligent design” by reducing both to positivist descriptions of process fundamentally ignores and obfuscates the difference between the normative and the positive; that an intelligent designer imagines an ideal state that doesn’t currently exist and then might use iterative, Darwinian (as you call them) processes in a deliberate attempt to achieve that goal (your so-called evolutionary algorithms). Selection, in this normative sense, is what an intentional agency uses before each step to get to a currently non-existent state; selection, in the positive sense, is what you describe the steps as after they have already been produced by what came before.
You can positively describe the steps intelligence uses to realize a specific potential state as “natural selection” if you wish, but that positive phrasing misses and obfuscates the normative point altogether, that selection is not a post-hoc description of something that happens to occur non-artificially, but is rather a prescriptive intention that occurs before the physical step, intended to acquire a specific goal.
Yes, humans design ex nihilo, if by ex nihilo you man they design something that doesn’t currently exist. Design is an imaginative (normative) occurrence, not a physical (positive) one. It is a prescription, not a description. Building or manipulating materials to realize the design is not equivalent with the design itself. You are once again equivocating a normative concept with a positive one.
Have you read how Tesla “designed” things? There was no physical, iterative process to it. There was an artist named Alfredo Alcala. Whole, finished images would appear in his head, and he could mentally project them onto a canvas, take a pen and ink (he was mostly an ink artist), start at any point on the canvas and “trace” the image he was mentally projecting onto the canvas perfectly.
An iterative process is useless to a designer without a goal. Describing the “design process” in a positive sense ignores the fact that designers know where they are going, and manipulate any iterative processes in between thought and thing in order to get to the thing. The “thing” is indeed “ex nihilo”, because it is imagined before the physical iterative process towards realizing it even begins. This is the ex nihilo creativity, the ability to imagine what does not already exist, that is the fundamental difference between “natural” and “artificial”.
Nature produces things that do not already exist, but it is not selecting for those things. Nature produces outcomes, it doesn’t select. It doesn’t imagine non-existent states and then try to produce them; that is what intelligent agencies do. Your grand equivocation of “natural selection” with “intelligent design” is fundamentally rooted in obfuscating the difference between the normative and the positive, stealing normative concepts and using them erroneously in positivist descriptions.
This is where you fail to understand most ID arguments; you hear an argument that uses normative terms, and you interpret it in positivist terms. It’s why you misunderstand Dembski and can’t see the difference between design itself and the physical construction of the design, even if we are talking about one iterative step in a long process, that next step must be imagined first, so that “next step” is itself a different design than what currently exists, and it exists in the context of a larger design goal.
Calling it an “iterative process” is entirely irrelevant; what matters is not that there are steps along the way that are informed by circumstances and context, but rather how that reiterative, looping information is deliberately utilized by an intelligent agency in pursuit of realizing their design goal. Each next step is a new design in service of the overall purpose. The “design” for achieving the next step is fashioned in mind in service of the purpose, then realized physically. Design is not created by the physical, iterative process itself; the physical, iterative process serves the designer as he manipulates resources towards realizing the final design.
In the process of realizing an intentional design, natural (unintelligent) forces do not simply produce the next step as a consequence of what came before. If, halfway through a process to physically realize a design, the intelligent agencies with the final design or design purpose in mind close shop and leave the project, nature doesn’t finish the job for them; nature destroys what they have physically created so far. It is only because intelligent agencies, acting on a purpose in mind, manipulate materials to physically manifest a design in mind to suit that purpose, that there are physical, iterative steps that lead towards the finished design.
To claim that design is a natural, iterative process mistakes the normative for the positive and ignores the obvious fact that intention creates things that cannot be created without imagining states that do not exist and then deliberately manipulating forces and materials in order to physically realize that imagined state. Selection is a prescriptive, normative capacity of mind, not a description of whatever happens to be produced by nature.
At its foundations, the human inference (or better: “attribution”) of intention, and the primitive “intention -> goal,” is grounded upon characteristics of others’ behavior, and is a facet of human social cognition in real time. It is a set of competencies that include gaze-following, understanding what others see and therefore know as a way of anticipating behavior, the discrimination of intentional versus unintentional actions, the interpretation of the positions and postures assumed by others’ hands, the ability to understand the actions of others in terms of our own bodies (enabling a startling capacity for imitation that is present at birth), and so on. The attribution of intent inferred from iterative efforts is clearly one of those very early competencies (per Metzoff’s work with infants). Researchers have parsed the emergence of these competencies in infants and toddlers as well as their phylogenetic distribution among other primates. The attribution, or perhaps discernment, of intent has a developmental history in individuals and a evolutionary history across species.
Of course, we each spend a lifetime, literally starting from birth, immersed in the actions and products of other human beings and navigating the social landscape of others’ motives and intentions (we are adapted to do so) – as well as engaging in actions, generating products, and deploying motives and intentions of our own. Moreover, we spend our lifetimes also encountering unguided physical events such as wind, rain and the general increase of disorder observed in non-living processes over time. As a consequence we are quite adept at identifying the characteristic markers of human actions, products, motives and intentions, and distinguishing them from unguided physical events. Moreover, each human being behaves in realtime in a manner that recognizes that others inescapably make attributions regarding his or her states of intent, and sometimes manipulate those attributions for the purpose of deception. With that, the perception of intent shades over into the perception of meaning – the discernment of what was “meant” by a behavior, or whether it was “meant” at all.
This is the background against which the processing of “intent” and hence “design” in even ordinary human actions and artifacts is accomplished. In this light, the primitive, “intent -> goal” is not so primitive at all, and indeed seems a simple only because we are so adapt at “agency processing,” due to our long history of, and lifelong immersion in, the representational coin of intent and agency.
For me, it follows that generalizing the human processing of attributions of intentions and goals to other contexts (such as biology) is fraught with hazard.
Sure it does; it marks for emphasis the distinction between the normative use of the term “goal” and the obfuscatory, positivist version of the word, where natural “selection” can have the “goal” of producing long strings of H’s.
William,
Selection in Liz’s example did not have the goal of producing long strings of heads. Saying so is wrong on a couple of levels.
First, the program did not specifically select strings with long head runs. The selection criterion was different: the product of the lengths of all head runs had to be maximized. The program did not know in advance what kind of strings would be most fit in this environment. Neither did the programmer who created the environment.
Second, when we figured out which sequences would be most fit, it turned out that they weren’t long head runs. Head runs had to be neither long, nor short, length 4 to be specific.
I didn’t make any claims whatsoever about “Liz’s example”. I didn’t even refer to it.
Then what did producing long strings of H’s refer to? 🙂
This stuff is hard to come to grips with. Of course nature makes selections. Pour a bucket of water on a hillside, and the water selects channes to run in. The resulting channels are an outcome, produced by this selection process.
I suspect William cannot separate a selection, from the puirpose for which that selection is made, and he can’t separate THAT from a human purpose. And I’m going to suggest the reason William is conflating things that need not be conflated is because he starts by assuming an essentially human Designer (albeit extraordinary experienced and skillful), associates Design with the human thought process involved in human design, associates selection as being part of that thought process, and compares the results with what he infers the (essentially human) designer had in mind. And THAT is what Design means. William doesn’t consider it valid to disentangle the various aspects of his design process, because if he does, his Designer becomes increasingly irrelevant.
As William notes, other ID proponents work exactly the same way. Their concept of Design ASSUMES a Designer, who cannot be decoupled from human goals, processes, intentions, motivations, intelligence or purposes. These are as inherent to the ID “design process” as Behe’s concept of Design as being an inherent property of an object, and for the same reason. Design isn’t merely a feedback process, Design is what the Designer does, and nothing else.
Remove William’s Designer, and even if completely natural processes starting with the same raw materials produce results identical to the Designer’s, this is simply NOT “design”. For William, Final Cause is the ONLY cause, it’s what makes accidents different from intentions – even when the two are alike!
What I can do, and did in my post, was draw the distinction between a selection in the normative sense, and a selection in the positive sense, which was apparently a distinction lost on you, since you simply reiterated my explicit statement that natural “selections” are merely “outcomes”.
I explicitly made that “separation”, which you almost reiterated verbatim. A normative selection cannot be separated from the purpose for which it is made any more than a positivist “selection” cannot be separated from the process from which it is generated.
Accidents and intentions (in the context of natural vs artificial) are never alike. What they produce might in many cases be alike, but what they are is not “alike”. And, final cause is not the only “cause”, it’s the only source of design (in the normative sense). Natural forces produce outcomes, not designs.
You, also, are conflating the normative with the positive.
It didn’t refer to anything. It’s a self-contained example of the difference between prescriptive and descriptive “selection”.
Indeed I did miss that distinction, and, re-reading your post, it is still not visible to me.
Could you explain, explicitly, the distinction you are drawing between “normative” and “positive” senses of “selection?
I’m sorry, I am not parsing this. So if you’d explain the meaning of “positive” and “normative” as you apply it to “selection” I would be grateful.
Unless what you are saying is that “normative” selection is a choice that maximises the probability of a distal goal, and “positive” is a choice that maximises the probability of a proximal goal, which is how I would distinguish between “intentional/intelligent” “design” (in my sense) processes.
Sorry, William, I had missed your longer post. I will read it now.
Once again, you attempt to parse prescriptive normative concepts into physical descriptions, creating a vat of obfuscation. There’s no such thing as a “goal” of any kind in positivist descriptions. There are only outcomes. “Goals” are strictly a normative concept.
There are no goals in darwinian evolution – there are only mechanistic outcomes that are the function of what precedes them. Design is a strictly normative concept. Natural forces do not design anything, they simply produce whatever they happen to produce as a function of prior states.
Actually, a better “Darwinist” definition of “selection” would be “what nature could not stop from reproducing in this current environment”.
Any life-form that finds it possible to survive and and reproduce new copies of itself has “been” selected.
It is important to stress the “been” in the previous sentence as this stresses that this round of “modification and selection” is over and the next round is up to the offspring.
Alternatively that IDists haven’t yet spotted the flaw in their argument.
Well, I’m not. I do suspect that some IDists are willfully self-deceptive, however, and it seems to me that if people want to be understood, then they have to be clear. It’s no use saying something that sounds nice and precise, and then saying “oh but we didn’t mean that, we meant something else” and then blaming their readers for erecting a “straw man”.
However, the reason I posted that xkcd cartoon is that I am aware that it looks like that from both sides. So we will keep trying, I guess.
I am not equivocating intelligent design with natural selection. You are misusing the word equivocating. I have, in the past, pointed out that Dembki’s operational definition of intelligent design includes natural selection, but that is not “equivocation”. It’s pointing out a “legal loophole” if you like, that he needs to close if his argument is to be watertight.
If we define “natural” as “not-designed” (one definition, but not the only one) yes. I agree. Artifacts are usually made to serve some goal (not always – sometimes the only goal is the making itself, not the finished product).
Right.
No. He did not “steal” the term. He noted that artificial selection (breeding) results in morphological changes, and pointed out what is clearly true, that any environmental pressure for a particular trait will have the same effect, whether that pressure is “artificially” imposed by an intelligent agent (a dog breeder who wants long bodies, short legs, for instance) or by environmental circumstances (nutritious prey who live in burrows). It was not an “erroneous” application, and has been shown, by lab, field and mathematical investigations, to be true. It doesn’t matter whether you breed spotted guppies by artificially selecting the spotty ones to breed, put them in gravel tank with predators, or observe them in the wild in a gravel-bedded stream with and without predators. You still get spotted guppies.
Darwin did not equivocate between artificial and natural selection; he noted, correctly, that morphological change in a population (adaptation) would occur in both cases. As it does, and as even ID proponents agree (“microevolution”). Indeed creationists depend on it (microevolution from “kinds”) to account for the size of the Ark.
Yes, and as I have said to Joe G, countless times, yes, indeed, it is a result. It is the result of heritable variance in reproductive success. And it does not matter whether that variance in reproductive success is because fashionable ladies form a market for small yappy dogs, or whether it’s because the small yappy dogs are good at catching nutritious rats. The heritability of the smallness and yappiness, coupled with its advantageousness in the breeding stakes is what results in a thriving population of small yappy dogs. The reason why smallness and yappiness is advantageous (fashionable ladies; nutritious rats) is irrelevant.
So repeating “natural selection is a result” over and over again is silly. Yes it’s a result. We all know it is a result. It’s an extremely important result. It’s the biasing of the sampling in each new generation in favour of what works best in that environment. It doesn’t matter that the environment is without “intention”, it biases the sampling anyway, just as an intentional agent does. If I intentionally drop a brick on your head, or accidentally kick one off the roof just where you are standing, my intentions my affect whether I go to jail or not, but they make not one whit of difference to the damage to your head.
Yes. I know.
Exactly. So the “pattern that signifies intelligence” – if by “intelligence” we mean an intentional designing agent – should be one that signifies intention, not one that signifies an iterative matching of phenotype to what maximises reproductive success. And my case is that the pattern Dembski has identified signifies the latter (and therefore includes NS, as well as intentional design) not the former.
But when you ask an IDist how to detect intention, they say: “that’s not the point – we are only trying to detect Design”. And Dembski says it is “not properly [a] question… of science”.
Well, it is the point, and, in fact, I’d say it is a questions of science. It’s just they’ve got the wrong science.
Nope. I’m trying to be clear, but you’ve missed my point, so I’ll make it again. Yes, humans have the capacity to simulate before execution, i.e. reject silly ideas before they even hit the back-of-the-envelope let alone the building site. But it is still iterative, I’d argue, and even when an idea appears to emerge “fully formed” from the brain of some genius, as Newton said, the genius still “stands on the shoulders of giants”.
I think your distinction between “prescriptive” and “descriptive” is not the relevant razor here. I’d say the difference is between “distal” prescription (“does the block I am placing here conform to the vision of the cathedral on the plan?”) and “proximal” prescription (“does this phenotype stand a better chance of survival in this environment than its fellows?”) Both are highly prescriptive. If the runt of a litter has legs that are too short to keep up with the pack, it will die before maturity. That’s not descriptive, it’s prescriptive. Or, at any rate, predictable.
Yes, and as I said, the great thing about animals with brains is their capacity for simulation – to entertain distal goals, and do the iterative part internally. Interestingly, that very process is well-modeled by evolutionary algorithms (and reflected in Hebb’s Rule: what fires together, wires together).
That’s the important thing – we are capable of acting with intention – of having a distal goal and selecting our actions so that they serve that goal.
But what IDists need to show is that it is the mark of intention that is apparent in the pattern of biological organism, not simply the mark of iterative matching to what works in the current environment. But they show no signs of doing so, and IMO, the reason they do not is that they equivocate between intelligence and intention. As I said, Dembski’s definition does not include the word intention, which he explicitly leaves out of account. Yet it is the key to his project.
Not necessarily. Some iterative processes result in goal change, for a start. But more to the point, while it may (or may not) be true that all designers have a goal, it is not true that all iterative natural selection process (i.e. goal-less selection processes) are useless to the things being iterated. This is a really key point, and exemplifies the difference between teleology and teleonomy. The results of both can result in Specified Complexity. It is therefore not the Pattern That Signifies Intention.
Well, see above.
I know. This is precisely the point I’m making. With the corollary that if we want to demonstrate that biology is the result of an intentional agent we have to find a feature that is unique to the products of intentional agents, and not to natural selection.
The fact that you think it is “obfuscating” is the problem here. No, I am not “obfuscating” nor “equivocating”. I am pointing out that the products of the two systems have a great deal in common, and that if you want to find a marker for intention, it is going to have to be carefully chosen so as not to generate false positives for non-intentional “natural” selection.
Specified Complexity doesn’t do that.
With respect, this is where you are (consistently) misunderstanding me, and mistaking confusion within ID for my own confusion. Yes, I can see the difference. What I am saying is that Dembski can’t. He just assumes that something that “selects” must be intentional, missing Darwin’s fundamental point.
Moreoever, he insists that we can detect this “intentional/intelligence” not by looking at the process but at the resulting pattern.
No, it isn’t irrelevant at all. For a start, you seem to agree that “reiterative, looping information” is involved, and secondly, there are two ways in which that information can be “utilized” – one is by a population within an environment in which the environment weeds out the solutions that don’t do well in it, thus benefiting the population (it persists); the other is by an intelligent agency, as you say, in pursuit of realizing their design goal. Very different, I agree. What I am saying is that you can’t tell the difference by looking at the result.
Or, if you can, that case has not been made by Dembski. Quite the reverse – he rejects it as not being a scientific question.
Well, see above. You are preaching to the choir, here, William. I’m a cognitive scientist, remember! My point is not the one you seem to think it is, and I am not failing to make the distinction you think I am making. My point is that the distinction is not inferrable from the products.
OK, I’m not disputing any of that.
Well, see my comments above.
We do realise this, William. The question is: can you tell, from looking at the result, whether it was designed with a goal in mind, or is the outcome of a continuous process of optimisation to the current environment?
I’d actually say “yes” 🙂 Human artefacts show far more evidence of distal-goal oriented processes that biological organisms do IMO.
In a related misrepresentation, Sal Cordova over on UD has what he thinks is the ultimate challenge that he claims “Darwinists” will misrepresent.
Cordova, as do all ID/creationists, still thinks that cards and knives and glasses all interact just like atoms and molecules do. Hence he offers them as examples of “irreducible complexity” that refute evolution.
The question that Cordova needs to answer is, “What do any of his examples have to do with the way atoms and molecules interact?” I would suggest that no ID/creationist will even comprehend that question let alone be able to answer it.
The misrepresentation Cordova is making is still the same “tornado-in-a-junkyard” argument that implies that inert, non-interacting things blown about by the wind are examples of what nature does with atoms and molecules.
This misrepresentation runs through all ID/creationist thinking. It’s why they can’t grasp science. When ID/creationists think of design, they are thinking of non-interacting or weakly interacting objects being selected at random and being put in some kind of “purposeful” arrangement that is an infinitesimal subset of all possible arrangements of those objects.
No, they’re not. They’re thinking about how humans employ such interactions and forces in the service of a purpose or goal that no non-intelligent collection of forces or materials is trying to reach, nor can be reasonably expected to reach without intentional manipulation of such commodities.
Just more misrepresentation (willful or not) on the part of anti-ID advocates. It is, apparently, an ideological chasm that cannot be breached via argument.
What does optimised mean here?
The first thing wrong with the ID argument that is that they’re trying to model the “design of humans” with how humans design.
The only thing capable of “designing” humans is something that is NOT human and therefore doesn’t think like one.
The second thing wrong with ID is their claim that only one “goal” was intended.
Since any number of “designs” might work in an environment, the odds are “n to 2^500” not “1 to 2^500”.
How big is “n”?
IOW, optimsed to what aspect of the environment, and for what purpose? “Optimization” doesn’t carry with it an understanding of what something is being optimized for. It could be optimized to destroy itself – I assume you do not mean that. It could be optimized to consume all available resources as fast as possible, or optimized to transform the environment itself into something else. It could be optimized in relation to providing a service of some sort to some other animal. “Optimized” .. for what?
Exactly. The neo-Paleyist case seems to have rested on bad analogies from Hoyle’s tornado-in-a-junkyard to Behe’s mousetrap to Cordova’s 3 knives/3glasses ever since Paley’s original watch-on-the-heath.
We suspect design when something looks like what we might design. If Paley’s pedestrian had found one of the “data crystals” from Babylon 5 would he have thought it was a human artefact or something that occurred naturally? If some alien race built a solid-state computer that looked like a lump of granite would we infer design?
Ok, then do this.
Take 10^23 cards and 2 x 10^23 knives and throw them all together and make the compound knife 2 card. Make the bond angle between the two knives 105 degrees.
Now take all those knife 2 card molecules and allow them to condense into six-sided arrangements.
I’ll bet you can’t do it.
On the other hand, I can this with oxygen and hydrogen atoms and I don’t even have to touch any of the atoms.
Now you try to take a huge pile of Chrysler transmissions and kitchen knives and have the transmissions come together in hexagonal arrays with knives sticking out from each of the transmissions.
I can make benzene rings out of carbon and hydrogen.
Can you make a pile of engines come together in hexagonal arrays, heat them up and put them under pressure and make them rearrange into tetrahedral arrays? Can you make Fullerene arrays out of them?
Can you make cards and beer glasses stick together with forces that require something like 10^10 megatons of TNT to take them apart? Betcha can’t.
Optimised such that the pattern continues to be replicated.
No purpose. That’s the point.
To promote self-replication. I apologise for not being explicit. Self-replication/persistence is the inbuilt pseudo-purpose that the function of biological structures serves.
That is the essence of teleonomy – function that serves only the persistence of the whole replicating unity, not the distal goal of some other agent.
You accuse scientists of misrepresenting ID/creationist notions; but it is you who insists on comparing man-made structures with atoms and molecules as though atoms and molecules are just piles of junk and boards.
Take a close look at Cordova’s little glass and knife pyramid. It’s a silly little thing compared to reality. He cheats with gravity. Nature does better all by itself.
Take away the gravity. Make it self-assembling. See that beer glass on the top. I want you to design a pyramid structure like that in which – when placed in an oscillating electromagnetic field – the beer glass will tunnel back and forth through the knives. I want to see the entire structure flipping back and forth between mirror images of itself.
In other words, make a pyramid that behaves exactly like an ammonia molecule, and behaves exactly like an ammonia molecule does in the presence of other molecules.
In fact, try this with just about any simple molecule or atom you can name. Make a structure that self-assembles, condenses, evaporates, takes on entirely different properties when combined with other structures, and even with identical copies of itself.
In other words, design and build man-made structures that do everything that atoms and molecules do. Make a periodic table of man-made structures that we can use in exactly the same way we use the periodic table of elements. And that is just the simple stuff. We haven’t even considered organic compounds yet.
You might as well be talking to a wall, Mike Elzinga. Do you appreciate how much you know about chemistry that is terra incognita to persons who know little or nothing about science? William J Murray, among others, has no idea what you’re talking about. And, from their behavior, would prefer not to learn about it.
It’s all this blooming little word “random”.
Even when people think they know what they mean by it e.g. “not intentional”, they end up using it in some different sense, usually “equiprobable”.
Chemical reactions aren’t “equiprobable”, nor are they “intentional”. Biology is full of chemical reactions that are not equiprobable. That doesn’t make them intentional, nor does it make them like jumble of glasses and knives.
To everyone: One of the problems in debates like this are the different ways in which people interpret words. Selection, goal, cause, reason, intent, design, solve, optimize, solution, fit, fittest, fitness, micro, macro, function, interactions, forces, complexity, intelligence, meaning, information, specified, species, and a lot of other words have multiple definitions, especially in different contexts.
To WJM, I think I understand what you’re saying, but I also think that one of the problems for ID (if not the biggest) is ‘what difference does it make’? Designing things is practical for humans and many other living things, but what practical use is there for believing that a supernatural God designed the universe or humans or anything else? And whether any IDists will admit it or not, it is a God (and mostly the Christian God) that IDists believe is “the designer”.
If it turned out that the Christian God, or the FSM, or some God other than the Christian one designed anything or everything, would it matter? Would it change the way science is done? If so, how exactly? Would it change the way nature is? If so, how exactly? Would it change the way humans or any other living things design things? If so, how exactly?
I would also be interested in seeing how you or any other IDist can connect your belief in ID to a particular God, with evidence. In other words, even if the universe or anything in it were designed by a God, how could you possibly know which God did it, or why they did it?
And I ask again, what, in your opinion, is the ultimate goal of “the designer”?
The goal of the Designer is to give the designee a sense of purpose.
Other than that, the design looks just like what evolution would produce,
Or a sadist.
How do you know pattern replication has been optimized? IOW, what is the significant difference between an optimized and non-optimized pattern?
No, I don’t, didn’t, and as far as I know, never have.
When I make an argument about “the designer”, I’ll answer questions about “the designer”.
Where does anyone claim they are?
Nobody said pattern replication has been optimized. Evolution may well be incapable of optimization in an engineering sense, since the specification (suitable for the environment) is a moving target. But it’s still possible to say that optimization is approachable, and that successful pattern replication “satisfices” – that is, it is optimal enough to continue to replicate.
ALL of your posts have been arguments about the Designer. About His intentions, His procesess, His goals. Indeed, if the Designe were to be omitted from ANY of your arguments, you would simply be saying the same thing evolutionary biologists say, and for the same reasons.
No, they haven’t. They’ve been about what intention and goals are in relationship to any designer, and the difference between those normative concepts and non-artificial process descriptions.
Elizabeth said:
I asked:
Elizabeth responded:
Elizabeth is the one that claimed the natural (unintelligent) process was optimizing self-replication (unless I misunderstood the above).
Definition of “optimize” from Merriam-Webster:
So I asked the pertinent question: how does one discern between an optimised and a non-optimised self-replicating system? If one is going to claim that natural selection optimizes self-replication, then surely they can explain what that means in terms of the difference between optimal and non-optimal self-replication patterns.