To define:
NDE (Neo-Darwinian Evolution) = OOL & evolution without prescriptive goals, both being nothing more in essence than functions of material forces & interactions.
ID (Intelligent Design) = Deliberate OOL & evolution with prescriptive goals
(I included OOL because if OOL contains purposefully written code that provides guidelines for evolutionary processes towards goals, then evolutionary processes are not neo-Darwinian as they utilize oracle information).
I’m not an evolutionary biologist, nor am I a mathematician. Therefore, when I argue about NDE and ID, the only cases I attempt to make are logical ones based on principles involved because – frankly – I lack the educational, application & research expertise to legitimately parse, understand and criticize most papers published in those fields. I suggest that most people who engage in NDE/ID arguments (on either side) similarly lack the necessary expertise to evaluate (or conduct) such research on their own.
Further, even if they had some related expertise that makes them qualified, to some degree, to successfully parse such papers, as has been brought up in this forum repeatedly is the lack of confidence in the peer-review process as a safeguard against bad science or bad math, or even fraudulent and sloppy science. A brief search on google or bing for scientific fraud and peer review process will find all sorts of studies about a growing epidemic of bad citations – citations that reference recalled, recanted, fraudulent or disproven research.
So, for the majority of us who are not conducting active research in evolutionary biology, nor are mathematicians or information theorists, what are we really saying if we assert that “evolution has been proven by countless papers”, or “ID is necessary to the formation of DNA”? When one of us claims that Dembski’s work has been “disproven”, or that Douglas Axe has proven something about functional protein probabilities, what does it mean when we (those whom I am referring to in this post) have no personal capacity to legitimately reach that conclusion via our own personal understanding of the math or the research fields/data involved?
All we can be doing is rhetorical characterizing and cheerleading. We argue as if we understand the research or the math, but in fact (for many of us) we don’t, and even if we did, unless we are doing that research, we cannot have that much confidence in the peer-review process. All we can do (outside of arguments using logic and principle) is quote abstracts and conclusions or other people we believe to be qualified (and honest) experts about data and research we don’t really understand and which may or may not be valid. This is really nothing more than just cherry-picking convenient abstracts and conclusions and assuming the peer-review process worked for that particular paper.
Therefore, the NDE/ID argument for most people has nothing to do with (and, in fact, cannot have anything to do with) valid and informed interpretations of biological data or an understanding of the math involved in information theory as it is applied to evolutionary processes – even if they believe that to be the case. Logically, if we admit we are not really personally capable of qualitatively examining and reaching valid conclusions of research that we would somehow vet as valid research, we must admit all we are really doing is choosing to believe something, and then erecting post hoc arguments in an attempt to characterize our choice of belief as something derived from a legitimate, sound understanding of the facts (biological & mathematical) involved.
This means that for most of us, the NDE/ID argument is really a proxy argument that belies the real argument, or the reason we have chosen NDE or ID to believe in the first place. IMO, that “reason” is a disagreement of ontological worldviews, and I think that the two general worldviews that are in conflict which are fighting a proxy battle through the NDE/ID debate are:
1) Humans are deliberately generated entities that exist for a purpose;
2) Humans are not deliberately generated entities that exist for a purpose.
Now, I don’t claim those general worldviews cover every foundational motive or position in the NDE/ID debate. But, I think it is logically clear that most of us must be presenting what can only be rhetorical cheerleading in an attempt to construct post hoc rationalizations for our choice of belief (combined with attempts to make the other “side” feel bad about their position via various character smearing, motive-mongering, name-calling, belittling their referenced papers and experts, and other such invective, and so we must have chosen our belief for some other reason, and IMO the two categories above represent the two basic (and pretty much necessary) consequences of NDE/ID beliefs.
So, to simplify: for whatever psychological reasons, people either want or need to believe that humans are deliberately generated beings that exist for a purpose, or they wish or need to believe the contrary, which leads them to an emotional/intuitive acceptance of ID or NDE, which they then attempt to rationalize post hoc by offering statements structured to make it appear (1) as if they have a valid, legitimate understanding of things they really do not; (2) that they have real science on their side; (3) that experts agree with them (when, really, they are just cheerleading convenient experts), and (4) that it is stupid, ignorant, or wicked to not accept their side as true.
William,
Could you answer my question about YEC models? Are they good science?
Uhh…William…she’s not exactly in the minority in that view. Further, those since those of an opposing view are not apply empirical conditions anyway, it’s kind of hard to argue against it on equal footing. For instance, Dr. Behe freely admits that in order to accept ID, one must change the definition of science to include the non-empirical and other ID advocates freely admit the position of ID requires accepting that evidence can lay outside the empirical. That doesn’t support your premise above.
No they aren’t. The design heuristic is, but the null hypothesis is not an a priori position. It is a neutral position that requires empirical data in order to draw an a posteriori conclusion. Even theistic scientists such as Francis Collins recognize such. Collins outright dismisses ID because it is a non-scientific position in part because it is taken a priori.
Could you answer my question about YEC models? Are they good science?
I don’t know anything about YEC science (other than they claim the Earth is only a few thousand years old), so I don’t have any way to make an informed comment about it. In principle, I don’t see anything inherently non-scientific about a theory that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, any more than that it would be inherently non-scientific to have a theory that it is @5 billion years old.
What are those ontological and epistemological premises that you suppose me to be assuming?
Because that’s what matters – how many people agree with your view?
Quote and context, please.
That makes no sense William, unless you presume that all people everywhere add conditions to all arguments that are not in evidence. This certainly is the case for ID advocates, but is not the case for the majority of people. In general, parents take great pains to instill in children that such an approach can be fatal. Take this simple argument for example:
It’s a pretty straightforward empirical argument that has its own epistemological and ontological basis for interpreting and testing. If you disagree, please point out a different approach to that argument.
No, what matters is that that view has practical application and is successful. Thus far, I’ve seen nothing practical or useful come out of ID.
Kitzmiller vs Dover, Mr. Rothchild questioning Michael Behe
I didn’t say that “my view” gave me “no such grounds”. I said that in my view [in other words I acknowledge that my reasoning may be faulty] the evidence gives us no such grounds. And I more than happy to lay out my reasoning for your own perusal.
No, it is not. “Non-design” is not only not “a positive ideological position”, it isn’t even the position taken by evolutionary scientists. Not taking the view that biological organisms were designed is not the same as taking the view that biological organisms were not designed. You keep excluding a very important middle, the middle occupied by the vast majority of people who reject the ID inference.
I think you have this wrong. What the “design heuristic” incorporates, in most forms, either explicitly or implicitly, is intention – ID proposes that biological organisms were created with some goal in [some] mind. But just because something can be described as serving a function does not mean that it was designed by an external agent who intended it to serve that function. We often, quite reasonably, use the word “function” for systems in which their is no overt “goal” other than the perpetuation of the system itself. For example, a particular conformation of tides and topology may serve the “function” of perpetuating a whirlpool, and there are lots of other examples from the non-living world. It is perfectly reasonable to ask “why does Old Faithful spout so regularly?”, and give the answer in functional terms, even though nobody (that I know of) claims that Old Faithful was intentionally designed. Its steam chamber nontheless “serves the purpose” of keeping it spouting at regular intervals.
That’s why Monod uses the term “teleonomy” to refer to systems that serve their own perpetuation, rather than the ulterior purpose of some external designer.
So teleonomic function has a perfectly good place in “non-design” science. Not that teleology doesn’t – I study the mechanisms of intention myself, as science.
What “epistemological” reason dos an IDer have to do so? We have a perfectly practical reason to do so, which is that the fewer entities we have to invoke to explain something, the fewer entities we have left to explain!
This is simply not true. In fact, I’d argue that the opposite is the case. “non-IDers” (by which term I assume you are referring to people who do not make the Design Inference, not to people who positively infer that there is No Designer – if not, I suggest that you are attacking a straw man) who adopt empirical scientific methodology are intrinsically, because that is the nature of the method, seeking reliable predictive models. IDists, in contrast, are, in effect, claiming that there are aspects of the world that cannot be accounted for by such models – that there are unpredictabilities in the world that can only be ascribed to the fancy of an intentional agent.
This is a serious mischaracterization. Who has recently” been “trying to sneak in ‘natural selection’ as a substitute for a sound design theory”?
And on what grounds are you claiming that such a theory is “patently and obviously necessary to produce novel, highly complex, functional interdependent devices”? Isn’t that precisely what is at issue? Does your argument boil down to: “it’s obvious innit?” Surely not!
It is precisely our case that “design theory” is not “necessary to produce novel, highly complex, functional, interdependent devices”, and far from “sneak[ing] in natural selection”, natural selection lies at the heart of the alternative theory, and was Darwin’s idea (perhaps you are calling Darwin “recent”, I’m not sure). However, it is not the only component – in order for there to be natural selection, there has to be heritable variation, and far from objecting to natural selection, most ID proponents freely concede that it happens (as witnessed by what they call “micro-evolution”). Where IDists usually want to insert “Design” is in the variation-creation process. And “non-IDists” certainly don’t “sneak in” natural selection to do that job. Natural selection is the outcome of variation where that variation leads to differential reproductive success. With no variation generation there is no natural selection.
You are tilting at the wrong windmill 🙂
If you are arguing for design from the fact that there is a regular world at all, fair enough. But that is not the argument usually made by ID proponents, who seem far more focussed on biology. For myself, I wouldn’t attempt to argue that the fact that the world exhibits regularity is, or is not, evidence for design. That seems to me not to be an empirical question – given that empiricism depends on the delineation of those very regularities.
With respect, William (and I mean that – I’ve been enjoying your contributions), I think you are simply dead wrong here about science. Simply mistaken. I think it may be due to your (admirably confessed) lack of expertise about not just science, but about the kind of math that supports that science. Nothing “happens due to chance”. Chance is not a causative agent. That alone betrays your misunderstanding of science.
Well, it would be, if true. But it isn’t.
It may well be true that I am misunderstanding your argument. But the one you appear to be making seems to me to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
Chance is not a causative agent. Are you surprised that I say so? If so, does that tell you anything about where we might be misunderstanding each other?
The interpretation from the basis of belief in prescriptive laws: “You will get an electric shock.”
The interpretation from the basis of non-prescriptive pattern observation: “You’ll probably get an electric shock, but really, anything might happen. You can’t know until you try and see what happens.”
Guess which heuristic I used to teach my children?
When was the last time you made the point that gravitation is just a consistent pattern we observe that materials are under no prescriptive obligation to obey? It’s a nonsensical point to make. All applied science depends upon the prescriptive assumption, or else there’s no reason to build stuff based on the expectation that it will continue working according to force principles.
The idea that force prinicples are prescriptive and universal is a design concept, not a non-design concept. If you want to do non-Design science or make non-ID arguments, get your own fundamental principles and quit concept-stealing.
It’s not “non-scientific” in the sense that it is readily falsifiable.
And has been falsified, over and over again.
ID is less scientific in some senses, IMO, because it is less readily falsifiable.
However, ID arguments can be shown to be fallacious. In that sense it is more scientific than creationism, which has no theoretical underpinnings to its hypotheses – ID at least presents some theoretical models, from which testable hypotheses could, in principle, be derived.
No, it is not “a design concept”. It is simply an observed feature of the world that it is predictable. If it weren’t life, and observers, would be impossible. So it’s a necessary feature of any world in which there are observers.
If you want to infer from that that the world must have been intended to have observers in it by some intentional agent, fine, but empirical observation can’t tell you whether or not that is the case.
However, that doesn’t stop us figuring out the regularities that may have lead to the phenomenon of observers, and that is what evolutionary science is about: how did we, and other organisms, come about, given the regularities of the world in which we find ourselves?
I agree that there is nothing wrong in principle with a scientific theory that posits a 6,000-year old Earth. However, this theory, being scientific, makes certain predictions that can be falsified. Can we look at that theory and determine whether it is valid?
Do you really not understand that the phrase “happening by chance” is a euphemism for “not deliberately processed towards a goal by a deliberate agency”?
When an ID advocate says “caused by chance”, you actually think that IDist believes there is a causative entity out there called “chance” that independently generates effects?
So if turnabout is fair play, this alone betrays your misunderstanding of the entire nature of the ID argument.</cite
OK, let’s walk through a specific example. Would you like to choose one?
Robin,
I don’t see where Behe “openly admitted” anything of the sort you claimed in the quoted exchange.
Thus far, I’ve seen nothing practical or useful come out of non-ID, because the very nature of finding practical or useful applications or explanations requires an ID heuristic to begin with.
Elizabeth,
A closer inspection of a fabric will not reveal its color to those who are color-blind.
No, I didn’t understand that. You used it in opposition to the word “order”, not in opposition to the word “design”. A thing can be ordered but not designed. It can’t be designed but not designed.
In my experience, as here, the word “chance” in ID arguments is frequently equivocated.
Actually, William, I think it betrays yours. That equivocation – between “Chance” meaning “any unintended phenomenon” and “Chance” meaning “a phenomenon with a probability distribution” is the key, I’d say, to the fallacy in Dembski’s argument.
I hear what you are saying, William, but that’s the way it looks, in reverse, from here, as well.
I understand that you think we (or I) am not following your arguments. I think you are not following the rebuttals.
And I think that is because we are not talking about specifics. We need to talk about the math and the science. Are you game?
Except all you’ve done in the children example is add conditions that are not present. Guess what ID advocates do? The same thing…they think like children. But this is not a different approach recognizing some “real” external epistemology; it’s merely a response that belies ignorance of the epistemology of the conditions. So, you’ve supported my point – thank you.
Care to try again?
Incorrect. I don’t make the point that gravitation is just a consistent pattern because such is not factual. Nor is the notion that materials are under some prescriptive obligation. But then I know the math behind gravity and why it works the way it works from a predictive model. When in the world would I include some prescriptive assumption when such is not necessary?
The idea that force prinicples are prescriptive and universal is a design concept, not a non-design concept. If you want to do non-Design science or make non-ID arguments, get your own fundamental principles and quit concept-stealing.
I don’t think so. He said at the very beginning, in the opening post, that he won’t talk specifics because he can’t.
I’m not sure how much more specific Dr. Behe could be in his explanation that he’d change the definition of science such that his definition would include astrology as science. Astrology is non-empirical by its very nature.
I don’t understand what you mean here. How do TVs, antibiotics, flight, satellite technology, or beer making require an ID heuristic?
Ah – did he mean we are all “color-blind” and so looking at the specifics will do no good?
Well, I disagree. The errors in Dembski’s arguments are simply logical, if a little mathy.
I’m sure William can cope as can the rest of us.
It seems to me that the color blindness problem is precisely why science develops and uses instruments. To eliminate subjectivity in measurement. It is why there is no Catholic or Protestant science, no Communist or Capitalist science.
There have certainly been attempts to politicize science, but the attempts have seldom come from scientists, and such attempts fail over time.
I will not argue that science is pure and free from hidden motives, but I will argue that the process weeds out hidden agendas and errors and fraud over time.
If there is a bias against religion in the science community, it is precisely because the history of science is full of attempts by religiously motivated people to find natural explanations for phenomena that have traditionally been regarded as the result of divine intervention. By “natural” I mean regular as opposed to capricious.
William, are you saying that “the ID heuristic” is simply the heuristic that the world is predictable?
If so, I don’t think there is any disagreement between us.
I don’t understand what you mean here. How do TVs, antibiotics, flight, satellite technology, or beer making require an ID heuristic?
To add to my question, I’m curious what you mean by “Intelligent Design” as well. Perhaps we are thinking of two different things. I see ID as represented in the books by Dembski, Behe, Marks, and Meyers.
It seems to me that most attempts to politicize science usually reflect politicians who try to grey the area between science and policy. Climate change research has fallen victim to this with politicians and conservative pundits pointing at the policies – like the Kyoto protocol and fuel efficiency standards – and calling that science.
I’ll disagree.
That the world is predictable is just about the first thing a baby learns. I’m fairly sure they are not stealing any ID concepts. We don’t need to posit a designer to do experiments or generate useful theories. Sure, we can attribute this cosmic order to whichever higher being takes our fancy but it’s just cosmetic baggage; science carries on regardless.
WJM is sounding a lot like Steve Fuller at the moment….which isn’t good.
I should clarify – I don’t agree that that is “the ID heuristic”, just the heuristic that the world is predictable is a good one. Fundamental, in fact.
Someone said:
What’s not empirical about the claim that people born under certain astrological signs will exhibit certain characteristic tendencies? How is that not an empirically testable theory? What definition of “science” needs to be changed in order to make the theory of astrological influences a scientific (falsifiable) theory of cause and effect?
Because they rely on the assumption that humans have ID, employ ID, ane can deliberately design and generate things that do not already exist on purpose. It also requires believing that things can be figured out, and that they will produce predictable results in the future, which employs a prescriptive view of natural laws and processes. Science itself employes an ID heuristic in trying to understand the world – that we, as deliberately intelligent beings, can successfully, deliberately construct methods of examination and evaluation that will lead to “practical” and “useful” models and applications.
Those books base all ID arguments on the fact that humans have ID and employ it, and can produce things that are qualitatively different than what non-ID processes produce. ID is a fact – humans have it. It is a trivial observation that ID can produce things that are improbable to the point of absurdity if left to non-ID forces, materials and processes. There is no reason why that difference is not computable to an acceptable metric and employable in finding artifacts generated by presumably non-human intelligence. All of the above is patently non-controversial to anyone not ideologically obligated to napalm even the most obvious and trivial ID facts and propositions.
Someone else said:
Are you writing a new Dr. Suess book?
I understand that you think I am not following the rebuttal. I think you are not following the argument.
And this shows that you do not understand my argument, and that you are blind to what I am talking about. What I am talking about is the color of the fabric, which is not something any measurement of its length or analysis of its composition will help us decide. I am not making an argument from “the math” or “the science”, but that which precedes “the math” and “the science” – epistemological & ontological assumptions, which you mistakenly think are things derived from “the math” and “the science”, or contained within “the math” or “the science”.
Try this: you observe that living things reproduce, generating new living things that are like their ancestors in basic kind, but with minor variations. As a scientist, what do you do next?
If we take a laser targeted at a cornea for the purpose of corrective eye surgery that is in fact “a phenomena with a probability distribution” so tiny and functionally purposeful as to be inexplicable without reference to ID, I doubt Dembski would refer to that probability distribution as “chance”.
But, you’re free to believe that he really does mean any probability distribution whatsoever – even those intelligently guided and directed – if you wish.
Empirical (from Merriam-Webster):
1: originating in or based on observation or experience
2: relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory
3: capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment
4: of or relating to empiricism
Astrology (from Merriam-Webster):
: the divination of the supposed influences of the stars and planets on human affairs and terrestrial events by their positions and aspects .
What part of “divination of the stars and planets” would you say meets the definition of empiricism?
Further, there’s this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology
From which we get:
“At the heart of astrology is the metaphysical principle that mathematical relationships express qualities or ‘tones’ of energy which manifest in numbers, visual angles, shapes and sounds – all connected within a pattern of proportion. Pythagoras first identified that the pitch of a musical note is in proportion to the length of the string that produces it, and that intervals between harmonious sound frequencies form simple numerical ratios.[18]”
In looking up metaphysics, we find:
“Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world,[1] although the term is not easily defined.[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:
“What is there?”
“What is it like?”[3]
A person who studies metaphysics is called a metaphysicist[4] or a metaphysician.[5] The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into the basic categories of being and how they relate to each other. Another central branch of metaphysics is cosmology, the study of the totality of all phenomena within the universe.
Prior to the modern history of science, scientific questions were addressed as a part of metaphysics known as natural philosophy. The term science itself meant “knowledge” of, originating from epistemology. The scientific method, however, transformed natural philosophy into an empirical activity deriving from experiment unlike the rest of philosophy. By the end of the 18th century, it had begun to be called “science” to distinguish it from philosophy. Thereafter, metaphysics denoted philosophical enquiry of a non-empirical character into the nature of existence.[6]”
So unless you are suggesting the astrology is somehow not a metaphysical approach, I’m at a loss to understand how you can conclude that astrology is empirical.
I believe you and I are working from different understandings of the term “intelligent design”. Here’s the description from Intelligent Design.org:
“What is intelligent design?
Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago. ”
Given the above definition, I repeat my question – How do TVs, antibiotics, flight, satellite technology, or beer making require an ID heuristic – given that none of them fall under the area of study that ID supposedly investigates?
Do you have a different definition of intelligent design that you are operating under?
Humans use ID to make models of other phenomena that is apparently not like the ID they are employing. The only things human internally, empirically experience is an intelligent design process as we identify, sort, categorize, evaluate, and conclude. Every model we make, every description, characterization, and conclusion is through the lens of our intelligent, deliberate, designing process. The idea that unintelligent, undesigned, non-deliberate forces exist can only be theoretical, because we do not internally experience anything but intelligence (conscious deliberacy), and design (willful manipulation). Non-ID, physical laws, unguided processes – these are all concepts that come from a mind using ID to fabricate characterizations, models and predictive structures.
Non-ID is on the outside of Plato’s Cave; a theory about what observations mean. ID is all we have inside Plato’s Cave – inside our own mind as it intelligently designs methods and structures and theories from all data it encounters that is intelligible.
Because ID (our own, experienced ID) is our necessary starting position in all exmainations and theories, and is the lens through which all data is necessarily filtered and organized, ID must be our de facto basis of understanding our existence, because if we eliminate ID, we eliminate the only leg we have to stand on, and the only lens we can see anything through.
What is not empirically testable about the claim that people born under certain stellar configurations tend to have certain personality traits?
Under a broader interpretation of “Astrology”, what is not empirically testable about the claim that one can predict future events or human affairs by calculating stellar configurations?
Sounds pretty reasonable. Can you point out any successful empirical tests?
I don’t follow astrology, so no, I”m not aware of any other than that whole sTARBABY/ CSICOP fisaco.
I can’t speak to all the books, but several of them – including Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box and Edge of Evolution, Dembski’s, and Meyer’s Signature in a Cell – make rather elaborate arguments to try to support their claim that ID has nothing to do with the fact that humans happen to design things. Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree that the ID position is merely the fallacy of the general rule assumption that because humans design things that have purpose, anything in nature that implies purpose must be designed, but the leading ID proponents deny such repeatedly.
But, even if they conceded such, I don’t see how such would have anything to do with understanding flight, beer making, etc. Why? Because part of the definition of ID is the analysis of structures
and processes to determine if it was designed. Nobody is doing such analysis on my above list because no such determination is needed. We know the designers of such products – they are us.
Curious too that the definition specifically focuses upon ID being in opposition to natural selection, a very specific biological concept.
So it seems to me you are trying to stretch the concept of ID outside the boundaries of what the supposed authorities and “scientists” of the subject claim, to the point in fact that it becomes meaningless as a term.
But here’s the rub – nobody as yet has produced a metric that can be used to present the difference between human designed objects and the natural world, let alone non-human designed objects. While such hypothetically it plausible, and I’d certainly be fascinated to test such a metric myself, it’s not been done.
Well, see above. I certainly have no ideological obligation to obliterate anything – I’m merely operating on the definition of ID as provided by the supposed subject matter experts and what’s come out of their work. To date – nothing of any practical value whatsoever that I’m I’m aware of.
I create a hypothesis about the relationship between parents and offspring. I then measure the characteristic similarities and differences between parents and offspring and analyze the results to see if their is a pattern to the relationships that matches my hypothesis. I then present my peers to see if they can duplicate my efforts and make predictions about further offspring’s characteristics.
One can make all kinds of empirically testable claims without being scientific.
Being scientific means abandoning hypotheses that produce consistently negative results.
Astrology fails as a science not because the claims are not empirical, but because its practitioners ignore the results of experiments and continue to make claims that have been falsified.
There have been episodes within mainstream science where bad results have been ignored, but I’m not aware of any field in which negative results have been consistently covered up over a long period of time by independent researchers.
The Piltdown episode comes to mind. It certainly ranks as a low point in the investigation of evolution, but it has also created an atmosphere of caution. For example, the Archaeoraptor fossil never made it to peer reviewed publication.
There are many pseudosciences. Their defining characteristic is not the lack of empirical claims, but the lack of corrective mechanisms among the practitioners.
So why even bring it up? Just to prove the point that ID is as successful a science as astrology?
I didn’t bring it up.
Here you’re merely making the category error in arguing that humans can’t tell the difference between the land and a map of that area. While models are intelligently designed representations themselves, that does not mean that the map maker has no appreciable perception of the land he or she is modeling. Flying to the moon was not just an exercise in model confirmation or a computer simulation; real people walked on a real moon. To then belittle such an action and appreciation as merely some by-product of an intelligently designed heuristic demonstrates a either a complete misunderstanding of what occurred or a complete delusion about human activity, perception, and even science. Not everything is a model is a model or a category.
As fascinating as Plato’s allegory is, I don’t find it to be useful as a literal model.
See above. This is no different then insisting that since humans wear clothes, we can’t possibly appreciate what other animals that do not wear clothes experience on a visceral level. That we build models to be able to predict the outcomes of future instances of given phenomena does not in anyway take away our understanding of the “natural” nature of the phenomenon. As a bird watcher, the fact that I happen to know that most woodpeckers are related under the classification picadae does not somehow render me incapable of recognizing them as individuals by behavior.
Indeed 🙂
So let’s try to sort this out….
Fair enough. I don’t think what I am saying is a “mistake”. So at least we agree on what we disagree about. Maybe.
It depends what I want to know. There are lots of interesting questions to ask, but perhaps the most interesting is “what is responsible for these minor variations?” And there are a whole host of empirical techniques we could use to address that question. For example, in my own field, we are interested in genetic risk factors for mental disorders, so GWAS is one approach, as is making specific hypotheses about genes with known effects (dopamine transporter genes, for instance) and their prevalence in disorders in which dopamine dysfunction is implicated. Or, if what you are interested in is how minor genetic variations arise (as opposed to what are the genetic effects on the phenotype) then you might want to look at meiosis or mitosis, and make testable hypotheses about how sequence variations might arose during those events.
I don’t understand what you are saying. What is “a phenomena with a probability distribution”? The accuracy of the laser? And how is this relevant to what we’ve been talking about? Let’s take Dembski’s own example of a series of tossed coins. If you toss a coin 100 times, there are 2100 possible series of Heads and Tails that you could generate, and they are are all equiprobable. 100 heads is extremely improbable (1/2100), but no more improbable than any other specific sequence. However, only a small fraction of those 2100 sequences are “mostly heads” or “mostly tails”, and there is a clear probability distribution, in which sequences with about half of each are far more common than sequences with only small numbers of one and large numbers of the other. Because of this, Dembski claims that if we observe a sequence that is from this subset of very unusual sequences, we can suspect that something fishy is going on – that the coin is not fair, that it has been Intelligently Tampered With.
Which is fine, but it is only fine because we have a specific hypothesis that an Intelligently Tampered With coin will give us a distribution in which one side is much more frequent than the others. There are many natural processes that will give us a biased distribution; simply observing a sequential pattern that is one of a class of patterns unlikely to come from a process like fair-coin-tossing in which one outcome is no more likely than another is not enough for us to infer Intelligent Interference. That is the point of Joe Felsenstein’s Virtual Wombats. If a hundred loci have two alleles in which one allele is more advantageous than the other, it will not indicate Intelligent Interference if we observe, after 500 generations, that most animals have mostly advantageous alleles.
This is why, when we look at Dembski’s CSI, we need to ask how he is computing the probability distributions under his “Chance” (i.e. non-design) hypothesis. That’s where he makes his equivocation. He equates “Chance” with “non-design” in his hypothesis (“Chance” is his null), but then he models that null by defining Chance in terms of processes with equiprobable outcomes – for DNA, the tossing of a four-sided die. But mutations are not equiprobable to start with (an offspring is far more likely to have a genome that is extremely similar to its parent than one that is radically different), and natural selection is, by definition, a biased selection process, which kicks in if the offspring’s variant genome confers an enhanced or reduced probability of reproductive success.
That’s why probability distributions matter. It’s not that Intelligent Systems will have small standard deviations. Demski’s case is that Intelligent Systems will have outcomes that fall in the tail of the distribution expected under his Chance null. But he does not attempt to compute that distribution, and does not recognise that (despite lots of fancy equations in his papers with Marks) evolutionary processes will produce results in exactly the same tail as he thinks indicate Design.
No, I’m sure he doesn’t. I think you have missed both my point and Dembski’s.
The fact that the determinations require “revelation” to understand and measure them. In other words, astrology isn’t merely a claim that people born under some stellar configuration tend to have certain personality traits.
So you think Dembski is making an argument that when DNA mutates from parent to offscpring, all sequences are shuffled randomly, and we just happen to usually get offspring that is mostly nothing but DNA sequences inherited from parents? Really?
I think his argument is that whatever X amount of mutations occur from parent to offspring, and wherever they occur, that under the Darwinian paradigm the specific mutated sequences of those specific sites are eqiprobable, and that the “chance” of where they occur on the DNA is an equiprobable distribution (under Darwinian theory). IOW, if mutations occur more at specific sites, and produce only certain sequence variations, it’s not chance, and it’s not Darwinian. Something is guiding where mutations occur and what form they take.
Natural selection can only hinder a purely chance process from acquiring CSI. Part of the conceptual error you are making is conflating “getting something fixed in the population” with “generating the thing in question at all”. Dembski, Kairosfocus, Meyers, etc. are only interested in generating the CSI “at all” and are unconcerned the the need to “fix” it in the population, because once the thing is generated at all then NS can work on distributing it – which is why they run pure chance evaluations on the possibility of some target category of CSI being generated at all, in any organism, undlimited by NS, at any time.
Unlimited by NS means no death and unlimited procreation, where all variations succeed. If the generation of CSI cannot pass that liberal situation, then adding NS doesn’t help at all.
Dembski scarcely mentions DNA. He’s not a biologist. But his NFL argument hangs on the assumption not that a new sequence is likely to be dissimilar to the one that it was mutated from, but that the resulting phenotype is as likely to be completely different to its parent as similar to it ie. that fitness space is not spatially correlated.
Well, that would be incorrect. Leaving aside the fact that Darwin didn’t even know about genetics, let along DNA, mutations are not equiprobable. For example, in sexually reproducing species, one of the most common kinds of new sequence arises from recombination – where one of your strands is a mix of maternal grandma and grandpa and one of your strands is a mix of paternal grandma and grandpa. Then there are insertions, deletions, duplications and substitutions, and certain sequences seem more vulnerable to change than others. And the very non-equiprobability of mutations may itself be a result of population-level selection – in other words, populations that tend to have certain kinds of mutations may adapt better and resist extinction for longer than populations with different kinds of mutations. Same with the mechanisms of linkage between genotype and phenotype, and possible epigenetic effects too.
Wrong. Using your own definition of “Chance” i.e. undirected towards some goal, there are plenty of processes that are preferential but goal-less (or at least are not usually claimed as purposeful processes) – read any primer on chemistry. You are doing exactly the equivocation I was warning about! Defining “Chance” as, effectively “non-Design” then inferring “non-Design” from any process that departs from what is expected under an “equiprobable” null! A perfectly natural (i.e. non-Designed) process can result in non-equiprobable results (i.e. results in which certain outcomes are more likely than other outcomes). This is true of mutations. It does not make them “non-Darwinian”. It just makes the “something” that is “guiding them” physics and chemistry.
This demonstrably untrue (demonstrated, for example, by any simple genetic algorithm).
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With respect, I suggest that the conceptual error is yours, and that it probably arises from lack of familiarity with the relevant science. No, I am not “conflating” those two, but both are relevant. A new allele is a new sequence for a gene. That allele may or may not have an effect on reproductive success in the current environment, and let’s suppose that it does not – that it has a phenotypic effect, but one that is neutral. And let’s say that it drifts through the population, as many neutral alleles do. And let’s say the environment changes, and that allele now becomes slightly advantageous. We are now at the situation of one of the loci in Joe F’s virtual wombats. The chances of that allele becoming more prevalent are now greater than 50%, and it may well become fixed. So there we have both variance-generation and natural selection combining to produce a genome that results in a fitter phenotype. How is that not CSI? It ticks all three boxes.
Well separating the two is silly. In any case, drift also serves to distribute the new sequence in the population. But the point is that they aren’t separate processes. Without sequence variation (leaving aside epigenesis for now) there isn’t anything to distribute (no drift) nor heritable variance in reproductive success, so no NS. And as what is varied are the copied sequences, without distribution, you are ignoring the explosion in opportunities for further variation on those sequences, i.e. explosion in “probabilistic resources”.
Let’s take a bacterial population (so no advantage of sexual selection) – any variant sequence that occurs in an offspring organism will, unless it is disastrous, result in lots of organisms with that variant sequence, let’s call it A. It may do nothing for the organisms that bear it at all. But we now have a burgeoning population with A, in one of whom, another variant can occur, let’s call it B. Soon we have lots of ABs. In one of those we get a C. Soon we have lots of As, lots of ABs and lots of ABCs. Now, let’s say that ABC confers some advantage to the phenotype. Rapidly we have lots of ABCs, and maybe they eat all the resources, starving out the As and ABs. So now we have the ABC sequence in the population, it codes for something useful, and we have CSI. Or, at least, a sequence that is unlikely under the null of equiprobable sequences AND specifically does something useful for the organism – contains information as to how to survive in the current environment..
No, it would just mean means that death and procreation would be orthogonal to sequence variation. They’d still happen, they’d just happen regardless of genotype.
You don’t “add” NS to “CSI”. In the absence of NS, i.e. if all sequences resulted in an equally viable phenotype, clearly CSI would be extremely unlikely ever to be generated. However, if all sequences do NOT result in equally viable phenotypes, we have NS, and that means that the sequences that tend to promote reproduction will become more common, i.e. there will be more of them. And if there are more of them, then there are more opportunities for further variants on those already successful variants to occur.
That is why Dembski’s NFL mistake is so disastrous. If he was right, and that a variant on an already successful sequence was no more likely to be similarly successful as radically different in success, then he, and, you, would have a point. But he is not right. Sequences that tend to promote reproductive success are clustered in similar groups, so that a small change to a successful sequence will tend to result in another successful sequence, and a very few of those variants will be more successful, if not now, then at some later time, by which point there may be even more copies, and therefore opportunities, for the additional tweak to happen to. That’s why you can’t separate drift, NS, and variance generation. Without variance generation you will get neither drift nor NS, and without drift nor NS you won’t get the multiplication of opportunities for further refinement of the variants.
Add to that the fact that successful sequences are clustered, and Dembski’s argument fails completely.
Uh, wrong. Analysis of the fabric via spectrophotometry helps us decide what the color of that fabric is.
Over the second half of this comment-thread, it gets increasingly obvious that in all your argumentation about what science is, what scientist are doing, what ID is, and what Dembski’s argument is or is not, all you are doing “is rhetorical characterizing and cheerleading. [You] argue as if [you] understand the research or the math. [You] rationalize post hoc by offering statements structured to make it appear (1) as if [you] have a valid, legitimate understanding of things [you] really do not; (2) that [you] have real science on [your] side; (3) that experts agree with [you] (when, really, [you] are just cheerleading convenient experts [and don’t really understand their arguments either]), and (4) that it is stupid, ignorant, or wicked to not accept [your] side as true.”
I’d like to note also that WJM is constantly equivocating in his use of the term ID. He defines it clearly in his OP as: *Deliberate OOL & evolution with prescriptive goals*, and then, instead of sticking to this definition, goes on to use it to mean just about anything but that.
William, you seem completely unaware of very basic evolutionary concepts such as cumulative selection. If you wish to hold a meaningful discussion, you must at least learn the basics. Otherwise you are wasting our time.
WJM said: “we do not internally experience anything but intelligence (conscious deliberacy), and design (willful manipulation)”
What? When I experience pain, I am experiencing intelligence and design?