My problem with the IDists’ 500 coins question (if you saw 500 coins lying heads up, would you reject the hypothesis that they were fair coins, and had been fairly tossed?) is not that there is anything wrong with concluding that they were not. Indeed, faced with just 50 coins lying heads up, I’d reject that hypothesis with a great deal of confidence.
It’s the inference from that answer of mine is that if, as a “Darwinist” I am prepared to accept that a pattern can be indicative of something other than “chance” (exemplified by a fairly tossed fair coin) then I must logically also sign on to the idea that an Intelligent Agent (as the alternative to “Chance”) must inferrable from such a pattern.
This, I suggest, is profoundly fallacious.
First of all, it assumes that “Chance” is the “null hypothesis” here. It isn’t. Sure, the null hypothesis (fair coins, fairly tossed) is rejected, and, sure, the hypothesized process (fair coins, fairly tossed) is a stochastic process – in other words, the result of any one toss is unknowable before hand (by definition, otherwise it wouldn’t be “fair”), and both the outcome sequence of 500 tosses and the proportion of heads in the outcome sequence is also unknown. What we do know, however, because of the properties of the fair-coin-fairly-tossed process, is the probability distribution, not only of the proportions of heads that the outcome sequence will have, but also of the distribution of runs-of-heads (or tails, but to keep things simple, I’ll stick with heads).
And in fact, I simulated a series of 100,000 such runs (I didn’t go up to the canonical 2^500 runs, for obvious reasons), using MatLab, and here is the outcome:
As you can see from the top plot, the distribution is a beautiful bell curve, and in none of the 100,000 runs do I get anything near even as low as 40% Heads or higher than 60% Heads.
Moreover, I also plotted the average length of runs-of-heads – the average is just over 2.5, and the maximum is less than 10, and the frequency distribution is a lovely descending curve (lower plot).
If therefore, I were to be shown a sequence of 500 Heads and Tails, in which the proportion of Heads was:
- less than, say 40%, OR
- greater than, say 60%, OR
- the average length runs-of-heads was a lot more than 2.5, OR
- the distribution of the proportions was not a nice bell curve, OR
- the distribution of the lengths of runs-of-heads was not a nice descending Poisson like the one in lower plot,
I would also reject the null hypothesis that the process that generated the sequence was “fair coins, fairly tossed”. For example:
This was another simulation. As you can see, the bell curve is pretty well identical to the first, and the proportions of heads are just as we’d expect from fair coins, fairly tossed – but can we conclude it was the result of “fair coins, fairly tossed”? Well, no. Because look at the lower plot – the mean length of runs of heads is 2.5, as before, but the distribution is very odd. There are no runs of heads longer than 5, and all lengths are of pretty well equal frequency. Here is one of these runs, where 1 stands for Heads and 0 stands for tails:
1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0
Would you detect, on looking at it, that it was not the result of “fair coins fairly tossed”? I’d say at first glance, it all looks pretty reasonable. Nor does it conform to any fancy number, like pi in binary. I defy anyone to find a pattern in that run. The reason I so defy you is that it was actually generated by a random process. I had no idea what the sequence was going to be before it was generated, and I’d generated another 99,999 of them before the loop finished. It is the result of a stochastic process, just as the first set were, but this time, the process was different. For this series, instead of randomly choosing the next outcome from an equiprobable “Heads” or “Tails” I randomly selected the length the next run of each toss-type from the values 1 to 5, with an equal probability of each length. So I might get 3 Heads, 2 Tails, 5 Heads, 1 Tail, etc. This means that I got far more runs of 5 Heads than I did the first time, but far fewer (infinitely fewer in fact!) runs of 6 Heads! So ironically, the lack of very long runs of Heads is the very clue that tells you that this series is not the result of the process “fair coins, fairly coins”.
But it IS a “chance” process, in the sense that no intelligent agent is doing the selecting, although in intelligent agent is designing the process itself – but then that is also true of the coin toss.
Now, how about this one?
Prizes for spotting the stochastic process that generated the series!
The serious point here is that by rejecting a the null of a specific stochastic process (fair coins, fairly tossed) we are a) NOT rejecting “chance” (because there are a vast number of possible stochastic processes). “Chance” is not the null; “fair coins, fairly tossed” is.
However, the second fallacy in the “500 coins” story, is that not only are we not rejecting “chance” when we reject “fair coins, fairly tossed”) but nor are we rejecting the only alternative to “Intelligently designed”. We are simply rejecting one specific stochastic process. Many natural processes are stochastic, and the outcomes of some have bell-curve probability distributions, and of others poisson distributions, but still others, neither. For example many natural stochastic processes are homeostatic – the more extreme some parameter becomes, the more likely is the next state to be closer to the mean.
The third fallacy is that there is something magical about “500 bits”. There isn’t. Sure if a p value for data under some null is less than 2^-500 we can reject that null, but if physicists are happy with 5 sigma, so am I, and 5 sigma is only about 2^-23 IIRC (it’s too small for my computer to calculate).
And fourthly, the 500 bits is a phantom anyway. Seth Lloyd computed it as the information capacity of the observable universe, which isn’t the same as the number of possible times you can toss a coin, and in any case, why limit what can happen to the “observable universe”? Do IDers really think that we just happen to be at the dead centre of all that exists? Are they covert geocentrists?
Lastly, I repeat: chance is not a cause. Sure we can use the word informally as in “it was just one of those chance things….” or even “we retained the null, and so can attribute the observed apparent effects to chance…” but only informally, and in those circumstances, “chance” is a stand-in for “things we could not know and did not plan”. If we actually want to falsify some null hypothesis, we need to be far more specific – if we are proposing some stochastic process, we need to put specific parameters on that process, and even then, chance is not the bit that is doing the causing – chance is the part we don’t know, just as I didn’t know when I ran my MatLab script what the outcome of any run would be. The part I DID know was the probability distribution – because I specified the process. When a coin is tossed, it does not fall Heads because of “chance”, but because the toss in question was one that led, by a process of Newtonian mechanics, to the outcome “Heads”. What was “chance” about it is that the tosser didn’t know which, of all possible toss-types, she’d picked. So the selection process was blind, just as mine is in all the above examples.
In other words it was non-intentional. That doesn’t mean it was not designed by an intelligent agent, but nor does it mean that it was.
And if I now choose one of those “chance” coin-toss sequences my script generated, and copy-paste it below, then it isn’t a “chance” sequence any more, is it? Not unless Microsoft has messed up (Heads=”true”, Tails=”false”):
true false true false false false false true true false true true false true true true false true false true true true true true false true false false false true true true true true true true true true false false false true true false true true false false false true false false true true false false false true false true false true true true true true true false false true false true true true true true true false true true true false true false false false false false false false false false false false false false false true false false true false true true true false true true true false true true false false true true true true true false true false true false false true true false true true true true true true true false false true false false true false false true true false true true true true false false true false false false false true false false true true false false true false true true false true false true true true true true true true true true true true true true false true false false true false false false true false false true true true false false true true true false true true true false false false true false true false false true false true false true true false true false true false true false false true true true false true true false false false false true false false true false true true true true true false true true true false false false true false true false true true true false false false false false false false true true false true false true false true true false false false true false true true false true false true true true true false true false false false false true false true true true true false false true false true true true true false true true false false true false true false true true true true true false false false true true true false false false true true true false true false true true true true true true true false false true false true false false true true true false true false true true false false true true true false true true false false false true false false false false true false false true true true true false false true false false true true true true false true false false true false true true false false true true false false true true false true false true true false false false false false false false true false true true false false false true true true false false false true false true false false false true true false true false true true true true false true false false false true false true true true false false false false true false true true false true true true false true true false true false false true false true false true true false false true false true false true false false true true false false
I specified it. But you can’t tell that by looking. You have to ask me.
ETA: if you double click on the images you get a clear version.
ETA2: Here’s another one – any guesses as to the process (again entirely stochastic)? Would you reject the null of “fair coins, fairly tossed”?
Here’s a sample run:
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1
Barry? Sal? William?
ETA3: And here’s another version:
The top plot is the distribution of proportions of Heads.
The second plot is the distribution of runs of Heads
The bottom two plots represent two runs; blue bars represent Heads.
What is the algorithm? Again, it’s completely stochastic.
And one final one:
which I think is pretty awesome! Check out that bimodality!
Homochirality here we come!!!
Psst..hey WJM..for us to recognize symbols that represent “War and Peace” we’d have to have previously known additional outside information about both the symbols and the text of the book to do the identification.
IDers claim you can detect design with NO additional outside information.
Fantasize about all the Russian novels and battleships on Jupiter you want – you still have no objective way to detect “design” in biological objects.
All the other ID pushers do. That’s the whole point of the alphabet soup of bogus terms (CSI, dFSCI, FIASCO) the IDers use.
Based solely on your previous outside knowledge.
Where do you go to get previous outside knowledge of genomes and proteins?
Like the Virgin Mary’s face on the grilled cheese sandwich. Looks designed to you so it must be designed. Got it.
I mean the letters are physically spelled out by the shape of the molecules. This might shock you, but DNA normally doesn’t contain any actual English letters, not even an A, T, G or a C.
That might be germane if you were debating them.
What other IDists claim about the specific arguments they are making would be germane if you were debating those IDists about those arguments.
And now William is trying “Looks designed to me” ID over at UD. I do hope ID surrenders any claims to empiricism. Keep up the good work, William.
Then what in the world is your point? Gee, we can recognize English words when we see them based on our previous knowledge of English? Darn, you got us there.
Took you years to figure that out did it?
So? That makes no difference whatsoever to the point that some configurations of matter are known to be the product of ID regardless of where we find those configurations, and regardless of if we have any known intelligent agencies or mechanisms available to explain it.
Is your denial impenetrable? Did I not just say that I am not making an argument about biology? The molecules can be in ancient rock strata or in sand – it doesn’t make any difference.
Thorton said:
Well, so they claim, but they retreat as soon as scrutinised. You may recall the phrase “relevant chance hypothesis” being an essential part of Bill Dembski’s explanation of how to detect design. But how are we to know relevance without prior knowledge. And prior knowledge in this context makes the argument circular.
How do we know a previously unknown object is designed? Because we have prior knowledge about which “chance hypothesis” to apply to it. Which means that the object isn’t unknown after all.
Looks like William has had enough of traditional ID. Long live “looks designed to me”!
All these pages of bloviating and hot air just to get us to agree that yes, we can recognize previously known patterns like English words when we see them. Wow.
Now that you’ve rejected ID’s main premise that we can detect design just from the object itself, what’s next?
I’ve explicitly told you my point. Go and try to find it.
To anyone not an anti-ID fanatic, there is a qualitative difference between finding what could pass for the virgin mary on a piece of toast and finding the verbatim text of War and Peace written out in correct sequences as you pop out one piece of toast after another.
But, keep equivocating the two. Insist there is no qualitative difference. You’re making my point crystal clear.
Moved a couple of comments to guano. There are probably others that should go there that I have missed. As I said before, it would be helpful if commenters could separate the substantive from the abusive and then not post the abusive comments.
William,
You have used “ID” several times now as if there is some coherent nub of an idea in there somewhere. Yet, when pressed to explain further, you seem reluctant to do so.
For example, you write:
in relation to some hypothetical scenario where a text of War and Peace emerges from your toaster. What is your point?
Allow, for the sake of argument, that the text of War and Peace “emerged” engraved on slices of toast from your toaster. What would that signify? Could anything useful be said at this point? Do you think a little careful observation, investigation and experiment might be fruitful before sitting back and saying “therefore ID”?
Crop circles and Stonehenge have yielded to such studies. There is no doubt all crop circles can be reproduced by simple mechanical processes carried out by humans. There is no doubt that Stonehenge was built by people. We know much about the different people involved and the many stages of construction and reconstruction.
What is your point when you write “ID”?
William
No one disputes that design (id) can be identified. Rather it’s the point that ID claims to have detected design in biology that is in dispute.
So what might be “obvious” about 500 coins and design to you is not obvious to a biologist.
Oh, but you are not making an argument about biology are you?
Oh, and “crop circles”? Really? You really do buy into all of the utter crap don’t you….
William,
Do you believe that “crop circles” are made by anything other then human beings?
If so, why?
And this illustrates the problem I have in dealing with your hypotheticals, William. You question is a bit like “if you found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, would you spend it on a world cruise, or invest it in leprechaun technology?”
The answer depends on suspending disbelief to such an extent, that any answer is more dependent on which beliefs are suspended than on what one would really do faced with an actual problem.
Molecules aren’t just bits of Lego Technix lying around without any properties other than shape and maybe mass and density. A molecule shaped like the L of Liz would have very different properties to one shaped like the i of Liz (who is this “Liz”, anyway?). And if it happened that the L molecule was constituted in such a way that it formed a strong bond with the i molecule, and the i molecule with a z shaped molecule, then I would not need to look any further than physics and chemistry to explain why Liz- shaped assemblies were quite common. Same with your other putative “words” in the message. And if all the “words” in the message were quite frequent, then every so often, some of them are going to turn up in some sequence (what, in your scenario, indicated the sequence anyway?) that makes some kind of sense.
So clearly, that null would have to be tested. But if such molecules are impossible, then one would draw the conclusion that someone was messing with your electron microscope, or possibly that you were suffering from visual hallucinations. Lots of explanations are possible, and which is the most likely depends crucially on details that you do not provide.
And, revealingly, as kairosfocus would say, examples of “obvious” cases of design put forward by ID proponents are either designs that are highly plausibly of human design (i.e. are found where humans are known to have lived, and made using techniques that those humans are likely to have possessed), or are fictional: from science fiction, typically, or simply pulled out of someone’s ass: pre cambrian rabbits, black monoliths, prime number sequences in binary from outer space, Genesis en coded in DNA, and now some message about “Liz” “spelled out by the shape of the molecules”.
And yes, in any of these bizarre scenarios, none of which have happened, it’s quite likely I would include that the object in question was the artefact of some intelligent intentional agent. But whether I leapt to that conclusions or had to investigate more carefully first would depend on many things, one of which would be corroborating evidence for such an agent – tools, for instance, or habitation, or transport, or evidence for a method of manufacture.
So, as I keep saying, but you keep posting as though I am denying it, I think it is perfectly possible to infer design from an object, even though I don’t know who might have made it, or why, and, in principle, anyway, if the evidence suggests that the designing agent cannot have been human, or even terrestrial.
But I wouldn’t simply look at it, and say “it’s obvious, innit?” That’s the reasoning that led people to conclude that tornadoes were devils, that the sun went round the earth, that the earth was flat, that two things approaching each other at the speed of light would collide at double the speed of light. If empirical science teaches us anything it’s that what you think you know ain’t necessarily so. And that careful, rigorous investigation, will tell whether it is or not.
So when the ID ,movement gets itself up to speed on careful, rigorous investigation, I will start to take an interest. And so, I guarantee you, will peer-reviewed journals, provided the results are of interest. Until then, the whining of films like “Expelled” is so much whining. The reason ID isn’t taken seriously in what Dembski pretentiously and bitterly calls “The Academy” isn’t because anyone is frightened of the implications, nor because scientific methodology is not capable of inferring intelligent origin, but because the methods are flabby, the logic flawed, and the statistics invalid.
If you look at the banner at UD you’ll see what looks like a nice, clean ratchet-esque artists impression of a flagellum.
They seem to really think that’s what it looks like. That molecules are just like bricks writ small, with similar behaviours.
And yet, with their cartoon versions of reality, they still insist a designer is required to stick the bricks together as “bricks don’t stick themselves together, duh!”.
And when this is pointed out their responses is ridicule, as if a level of understanding of the topic at hand is a bad thing to have.
And this is where I have to wonder why William has not lost interest in the whole ID thing. These “500 coins” arguments are nothing new, just look back at UD and you’ll see similar arguments made over the past years. Many similar arguments.
So, if ID’s arguments are so strong, why are they not making any progress?
William? Any ideas? I mean, what was the most significant development in ID in 2013 William?
2012?
2011?
What year will it get to before you abandon ID as unproductive William?
Why are you arguing he toss (boom!) about coins when you could be applying that logic to a real biological system and perhaps getting your Nobel acceptance speech ready?
I tell you what William, why don’t you go and ask KF why he does not publish a paper (many papers are actually shorter then some of his posts at UD already) and formalize his ideas for the benefit of future ID warriors?
And then when he makes his excuses you come back here and tell me if you found them credible or not.
The point I’m trying to make is if your arguments are strong, and your evidence is there then what is your end-game? Will you just be happy with a back-and-forth across blogs that ultimately vanishes into the bit-rot of the internet or do you want something tangible to be the result of all this?
i.e. a paper published that supports ID?
The interesting thing to me is that ID ists do in fact have their own peer-reviewed journal, Bio-Complexity.
If the only thing holding back research in ID was lack of access to biased peer-reviewed journals, why isn’t Bio-complexity groaning under the weight of submissions to the only journal that will take them?
Or is it funding? I would have thought that, if it really has the support it claims, that charitable trusts wouldn’t be so hard to set up.
Be that as it may, Bio-complexity is quite extraordinarily thin, and most of the articles it publishes are reviews and opinion pieces, not empirical research.
Vol 2013 has ONE “research article”, two “critical reviews” and one “critical focus” piece (by Granville Sewell).
And the even “research article” isn’t empirical research. Not that that matters, but if ID is going to do anything useful for the world, theory needs to be tested against actual data.
That makes no sense. No one I know ever said we can’t detect design when we have outside information of known previous designs to pattern match against.
Now that you’ve rejected ID’s main premise that we can detect design just from the object itself, what’s next?
And I’d personally go further – I think it’s quite possible to infer design as the most probable explanation, even where we don’t have “previous designs” to match against, or even a candidate designer.
But you would want to do a very thorough investigation to get further than “probable”, and your investigations might always turn up some non-design explanation you hadn’t thought of.
FWIW, I think it is abundantly clear that all but possibly the simplest crop “circles” are Intelligently Designed, and I think it is orders of magnitude more likely that the Designers are Human than not.
And that is at least partly because the patterns are in a style typical of human designs. But also because there are no obvious alternatives, and most importantly, because we have independent corroboration that human designers have the means, motive, and opportunity to make crop circles.
OMagain, snark counts as not assuming the other poster is posting in good faith by my rules, so I’ve moved your post to guano. As always, no moral judgement is implied. I can do good snark myself.
ETA: feel free to rephrase and repost. That’s one of the points of keeping all posts visible 🙂
Fair enough.
But perhaps someone can tell me what this “smoking gun” is that ID supporters think they have found that is the equivalent of denying that “War and Peace” was “designed?
As I get the impression from this and recent threads that they are convinced they’ve found “it” but all I can see is argument from analogy – coins.
Here are some fun stats:
Members of the editorial board: 34
Authors: 18
Articles: 15
Articles coauthored by members of the editorial board: 9
Research articles: 8
Impact factor: unknown (not indexed by Web of Science)
This is one weird journal.
Makes me wonder how long the DI will keep it around.
I get the feeling the Tooters are having serious cash flow issues. For the last month every click on their web page brings up a huge pop-up begging for money. Even Corny Hunter has reappeared and is spewing out his anti-science nonsense at a frantic clip. I think he’s afraid his DI fellowship stipend will be slashed. The Tooters also sunk a lot of cash into Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt folly which was a major failure by anyone’s accounting.
Maybe Howard Ahmanson is getting tired of seeing no ROI for his dollars.
You think that by now KF et al would just write one definitive version and publish in Bio-complexity and instead of typing out the same comments again and again just refer readers to his published work instead.
It’s almost as if they don’t believe their own claims…
Do you have a link? I’m not sure what smoking gun you are talking about.
William wrote at UD:
Absolutely correct, William. Moreoever, we rarely, if ever, compute the probability that a hypothesis is correct. Which is what at least some IDers fail to understand, arguing that unless “evolutionists” can compute the probability of life occurring under non-design hypotheses, they have no grounds on which to argue against design.
Ironically, many more IDists claim to be able to show that the probability of life under non-design hypotheses is < 2^-500, therefore design.
But that is no easier than your calculation of the probability that a thing was designed.
The formal way of computing a probability that a hypothesis is true, given some evidence, is to use Bayes’ theorem. Unfortunately, that theorem requires prior statements of the probability that the hypothesis is true, as well as prior statements as to whether, if the hypothesis is true, how likely the evidence in question is to be observed.
So the result is highly dependent on your prior belief.
What we can do is something rather different – compute the probability of our observations given some hypothesis, which is usually cast as the null. But you can’t get from that probability to a probability that a hypothesis is true without that pesky Bayes rule, which contains some crucial unknowns.
I think that’s the point – they don’t have a “smoking gun”. Despite all this verbiage about 500 coins and battleships and Tolstoy, they still have zero evidence for the design of biological life.
Discovery Destitute?
If you found this:
http://www.ektoplazm.com/free-music/crop-circle-jerk/attachment/va-crop-circle-jerk
… or something similar engraved on a smooth stone surface in 200 million year old strata on an otherwise desolate alien planet, would you be wondering how to test the null hypothesis? Or would you start searching for other artifacts of an ancient civilization at the same strata locations around that planet?
The idea that the availability of a human designer is “the most important” factor in moving to the “design hypothesis” in consideration of the origin of such an artifact is nothing but concept blocking and bluffing due to anti-ID zealotry. It wouldn’t make one bit of difference if humans were available as the designer of such an artifact; you would immediately start looking for other artifacts of whatever intelligent species produced that design 200 million years prior in the rock on that planet.
Similarly, the idea that SETI wasn’t looking for signals that were recognizable as the product of non-human intelligence is political white-washing in service of anti-ID zealotry. We all know that is exactly what they were looking for. What does “SETI” stand for, for Pete’s sake?
This anti-ID psychopathy makes rational debate impossible when one can’t even admit that SETI is indeed searching for signals indicating non-human intelligence – that there is some way to meaningfully discern between an intelligent and a non-intelligent configuration or signal.
William,
is there any particular reason you prefer to use outlandish analogies instead of relating things more directly to the matter at hand – the design claimed to be in biology?
You are totally wrong! Who would not consider such a thing a candidate for design? I have no in-built “concept-blocking” etc.
Rather it’s that you cannot support X by supporting Y.
You cannot support Intelligent Design on planet earth by shows how design would be “obvious” on “desolate alien planet”.
If you have actual evidence you’d just use it. No need for analogy.
But the point is that you cannot automatically transfer that construct “of course it’s worth investigating” onto biology just because you want to. It does not map, you have found no such engraving.
You simply have not found anything like a “engraved smooth stone surface in 200 million year old strata on an otherwise desolate alien planet” in biology have you?
Unless you course you have?
William,
There is no point in debates. What ID scholars need to achieve is to demonstrate that their methodology is useful for anything other than Christian apologetics. Once they pull that off, people will steal their methodology and apply it themselves. I don’t have an impression that ID scholars are pursuing that goal, though.
Nobody is claiming that the signals that SETI are looking for cannot be recognized. Otherwise, why look?
But you don’t get to just say “they are looking for intelligent signals, we’ve found intelligent signals in biology so case closed” and have people accept it.
It’s not anti-ID psychopathy, it’s an unwillingness to let you bypass the normal path to knowledge. You don’t get to bypass peer review because you really really *know* you are right.
So, once more, I believe that there is some way to meaningfully discern between an intelligent and a non-intelligent configuration or signal, I just don’t believe the ID community has done so, nor found any such signal in biology!.
Is that clear? All you have to do is show me where they have found such and how it’s been shown to be the case.
I don’t understand what WJM’s constant fantasies about Tolstoy in the genome or battleships on Jupiter or pornographic crop circles in the early Jurassic do to establish an Intelligent Designer for biological life.
I don’t think WJM understands either.
olegt said:
You may not have a point when you debate; I always do.
OMagain said:
It would be an analogy if I was making an argument about biology. This will be the third time I’ve explicitly stated in this thread that I’m not making an argument about biology. Crop circles, War and Peace, Stonehenge, Easter Island statues, etc. are not analogies; they are examples of design that we would know as such whether or not there were humans available for their explanation.
Yes this. It’s as if William et all just have to convince us to accept their “design detection” methodology (definitions really ) by getting us to say whatever it is they want us to say about the coins etc, and then there is no possible next step other then to accept their argument about biology.
They have their “smoking gun” but it’s invisible to us it seems until we repeat the mantra. Not sure what happens then.
Once I accept “chance” as defined in “ID Foundations, 1a: What is “Chance”? (a rough “definition”)” then ID is obviously true because, hey, chance can’t do anything like what we see about us!
So William, once I’ve remove my zealot goggles by accepting your definition of “chance” and accepted it’s possible to detect design in SETI signals and carved shapes on old rocks, what will you show me of a similar nature to demonstrate the truth of biological ID?
I know. And for the N’th time I ask how this any of this relates to Intelligent Design.
What example of design is it that you have in mind that is not currently being recognized as Intelligent Design but should be?
That wasn’t about you, William. You are not an ID scholar, just a fan cheering from the sideline.
Actually the first thing I’d look for is to discover the identity of the “designer” intelligent species itself. But maybe that’s just me. No one from the ID camp here on Earth cares about the identity of the Designer, or so I’m told.
Then I have to ask for further details of your argument. If you’ve already covered this then feel free to link or point to relevant thread.
Regarding crop circles. There are flowers, e.g. the passionfruit flower that appear to be an order of magnitude more complex then your average crop circle, yet nobody appears to be talking about human (or any other) designer for those.
If you would assign design to the crop circle in absence of any other artifact, would you also ascribe it to that particular flower? If not, why not?
And for the third time I’ll point out you only identify those as ‘designed’ because you have additional outside information, previous knowledge of those things being ‘designed’ to compare to.
You keep harping on a point no one is disputing. Why you do so is a mystery.
I think that William denies that, saying we’d identify them as designed regardless.
I made a point some time ago about a caveman walking into a modern city. Would that caveman assume “this was all designed”? What about when he walked from the jungle to the desert to the city to the crystalline cave?
No prior knowledge = no recognition of design.
It’s so pervasive I think they really don’t see that the level of unspoken prior knowledge needed is the real “smoking gun” here.
Is this a picture of a rock?
http://www.ease.com/~randyj/zoo_m.jpg
Or is it an rock that looks like an elephant?
How would you know that if you’ve never seen an elephant?
William, care to share?
And for the third time, that is entirely irrelevant to the point.
Actually it’s the whole point. But it kills your silly “design by analogy” argument deader than dead so of course you can’t acknowledge it.
But why? How would an alien tell the Easter island heads from the elephant looking rock from a design POV?
OMagain,
That there are things that exist as gray areas as to whether or not they were designed, and that there are naturally-occurring things that have been mistaken for designed things in the past, is not an argument against the fact that there are some configurations of matter that all of us – if were were honest about it – would immediately recognize as designed by intelligence whether or not any humans were available to explain the origin of the design.
I’m not making an argument by analogy.
More to the point, it is the ID claim to have detected non-human design in biology that is in dispute. That claim just cannot be justified in anyway.
We concede there are some configurations of matter that are immediately recognize as designed by intelligence because they match previously known to be designed by intelligence configurations of matter.
There.
Now will you please get on with whatever point you’re stumbling towards?