I’ve committed the unpardonable sin several times of criticizing other ID proponents publicly, but when I think claims or methods need to be challenged, I feel obligated to speak out because I find myself contesting certain ways the ID argument is presented when I make presentations about ID and/or special creation.
The conflicts are over the relevance of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, Information Theory, Specified Complexity, Conservation of Information, Framing Probability Arguments, and whether ID is science.
Many ID proponents and creationists privately concede the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is not an argument against the evolution biological organization. If I asked sophomore chemistry, physics, and mechanical engineering students to use standard molar entropy tables, they can demonstrate a living human has MORE entropy than a frozen dead rat. Thus, it is silly to argue that somehow lowering entropy is a requirement for making complex biological systems. There are many cases the opposite is necessary! Nuff’ said…
AE Wilder-Smith in his famous debate with Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of chemicals plus information are necessary for the origin of life. Generations of ID proponents and creationists have equivocated, confused, and muddled the issue with conflicting definitions of information ever since Wilder-Smith, and the outcome has had mixed results.
Contrast Wilder-Smith’s arguments with how James Tour (620 peer-reviewed articles, 77,000+ citations) argues against natural origin of life. He doesn’t need information theory!
Worse, consider the following simple example of design in the arrangement of dominoes standing up. If I asked why is this arrangement of dominoes likely designed based on ID information theory arguments, Specified Complexity, Conservation of Information, one will quickly realize all ID information theory arguments confuse the issue at best. Simpler arguments based on expectation and law-of-large-numberESQUE arguments will suffice.
Ask yourself, if one can’t even apply Specified Complexity, Conservation of Information Arguments, to trivial designs like dominoes, how can these arguments be persuasive to much more involved designs like that in the Origin of Life, Zinc Fingers and Nuclear Localizations Signals in Eukaryotes? Eeesh! More mathematical theatrics does not make an argument better. Substance rather than theatrics is better.
The way to frame probability arguments so as to avoid the claims of after-the-fact-Texas sharpshooter fallacies needs to be addressed more. It can be done, but not enough has been done on this…
ID proponents do not serve their cause well, imho, by saying, “ID is science.” It ends up being a red herring, and opponents of ID would love ID proponents to make this claim because ID proponents will be taken to task for saying it. I get a lot of hatred from ID types for saying things like ID falsifiable, not science, not positive, not directly testable. But if I, as a card carrying creationist and card carrying Discovery Institute donor can see the problems of saying “ID is science,” how much more anyone else, especially those on the fence.
The best pro-ID talk I’ve ever heard was by someone who doesn’t even identify as an ID proponent, James Tour. His infamous talk at a Discovery Institute-sponsored event is the model that ID proponents should follow. [See the ironically titled article James Tour: Liar for Jesus]. The other model of arguing for ID AND special creation was by John Sanford at his infamous talk at the NIH. [see Famous Geneticist Tells NIH that Humans Are Going Extinct].
On my side, I’m not really concerned with the apologetics aspect of convincing others with ID to believe in God or some such. I believe Dembski has a genuine, and deep, insight with his concepts of CSI and COI. I am currently working on technological and scientific applications of these ideas. Whether or not they add muddle to some apologetics debate is beside the point, in my opinion. The main question is whether Dembski’s ideas are true, and secondarily how to apply them. Whether people get confused by the ideas, which this forum is testament, is a distant and mostly irrelevant issue.
I personally participate here because I want my ideas disproven and flaws pointed out, and I get a smiggen of helpfulness in that regard from Felsenstein, BruceS and Alan Fox. At any rate, a much better experience here than at PS, which is not saying much.
Per your main point, of course there are much better apologetic and philosophical arguments than ID. Problem of consciousness, reality of universals, first cause, etc. Most have almost nothing to do with science, and everything to do with philosophy and merely thinking about things objectively and rationally. Conversely, one can consistently be an atheist and believe in ID. Simply presuppose, as Nagel does, that there is a ‘teleological principle’ that guides the universe. It’s really no different than presupposing an eternal universe with eternal matter and energy. If atheists can presuppose that, then ID doesn’t really throw a wrench in their works.
So, in my personal opinion, the whole culture wars, apologetics, etc. aspect of ID and making a stand for or against such things is really a distraction. On the other hand, I appreciate movies such as Expelled and the DI’s new movie coming out because they ask important questions that will open up new arenas of research, technology and general human progress. ID has offered real alternative to my way of thinking that has opened my mind to worldviews other than comprehensive computationalism, which I used to believe before really understanding ID theory. E.g. everything is either determined or undetermined. Libertarian free will cannot be determined. If it is undetermined it is random, which is also not libertarian free will. Therefore, libertarian free will is logically incoherent. ID has shown the flaw in this chain of reasoning.
Sal,
Your OP nicely relates to 2 issues I wanted to bring up:
1. 2nd law of thermodynamics
2. Common descent supported by some or most at DI
1. Is the cell and living systems, such as human body, a closed system (s), as per 2nd Law?
2. If ID has no quarrel with common descent, what evolutionary mechanism can ID support for life forms to have evolved other than by breaking genes, as per Darwin Devolves?
I dont think there are any fractures within ID, at least among the prominent representatives of ID. Various IDers disagree on things as fundamental as the age of the earth and common descent and yet they dont debate these things with each other in the interest of presenting a unified front.
This, btw, is one of the arguments against ID being a science. Scientists are interested in understanding the natural world and not in promoting any sort of agenda. Even much more minor disagreements are the subjects of vigorous debate within science. The fact the IDers are silent on it suggests they have a different agenda
EricMH,
Hey, nice to hear from you!
Sorry to be so critical of CSI, but I defended the concept for years and then gave up in exchange for more tractable math…
As far as ID and alternatives to common descent, there is stuff brewing and a modest initiative involving several parties across the USA regarding work that started in the 1970’s by distinguished professor Andy Wong which was then revived by Kirk Durston in 2012 and will be pursued vigorously by a research team over the next two years. The team includes me, Kirk, and others we know including a professor at Vanderbilt.
This is a project which I hope re-interprets the patterns of similarity and diversity in biology as designs optomized for scientific discovery rather than products of common descent. The idea has gone by various terms such as “Hackability Hypothesis” or “Organisms as Oracles.” In any case, I’ve been recruited to write papers on the idea.
I hope you can come visit the topic sometime as it’s right down your alley of expertise.
I’m planning on making videos to describe the topic.
Are you acquainted with K-means? There is a class at the NIH I’m considering taking, and it mentions K-Means. If it is related to K-modes, then that is exactly what I need since Durston’s PhD dissertation was on K-Modes.
The cell is an OPEN thermodynamic system, otherwise we’d be dead. Some examples of why we are open systems is the simple fact we can inhale and exhale, eat, drink, and get rid of waste….
ID has no quarrel with Common Descent, but it doesn’t mean common descent is correct!
Common Descent is like GeoCentrism which was the belief the Sun and Stars Orbited the Earth. Superficially, from a naive view of things, that looked correct, but the anomalies doomed GeoCentrism. We know the Earth spins because of Centrifugal force effects at the equator, and Coriolliss force effects, etc.
Superficially common descent looks correct until one looks at the anomalies. The problem then, is why are we so similar to chimps, what is the purpose of making life look somewhat the product of common descent? The answer, I believe, is that organisms serve as oracles for scientific discovery.
The progression of transitionals is to make levels scientific discovery possible that would otherwise be inaccessible.
EricMH,
We’ve done so in your latest thread. I’m hoping you’ll take the time to respond.
Sal,
That goal seems hopeless, for all the same reasons that common design fails as an argument against common descent.
Part of the motivation for the development of CSI and the leveraging of No Free Lunch theorems was to critique natural selection and computerized “models” of biology such as Tierra and Avida.
As much as I’d like to come to the aid of my pro-CSI colleagues and friends, I feel like I’m helping them bang their head against a wall when there are easier avenues to critique Darwin’s Fantasized (not natural) selection.
Tour gave the model for Origin of Life, but it works well for certain biological systems. Tour mentioned transmembrane proteins. The Eukaryotic/Prokaryotic divide is also defined by transmembrane proteins since Eukaryotes have membrane-bound organelles.
I can only speak for myself, but emergence of Eukaryotes alone makes it hard for me to believe in common descent unless I invoke common descent + miracles.
There is no need for CSI arguments to see natural selection would fail as an explanation for evolution of eukaryotes since the intermediate steps would result in death. Dead things don’t evolve any further.
Sal is a creationist, J-Mac.
No need to settle the argument here.
The test of our success will be in the lab. We live or die on testable predictions.
Common descent does not agree with logic, starting with the evolution of Eukaryotes. Hidden Markov models do not explain the POOFs of new transmembrane proteins, and they also miss the subtlety of simultaneous reformatting of numerous proteins with nuclear localization signals. That’s why Theobald is dead wrong.
EricMH,
To the contrary. Many if not most IDers actually believe in libertarian free will, and I’ve spent a lot of time explaining to them why it is incoherent.
Dembski’s explanatory filter perpetuates the incoherence by promulgating a trichotomy of chance (randomness), necessity (determinism), and design (mind). Anything rejected by the (faulty) chance and necessity filters is presumed to be due to design — that is, to mind. So the mind is placed by Dembski into a category that is intrinsically incoherent, for the reasons you mention above.
Dang right! I’m a card-carrying member of the Creation Research Society and get a $5 discount on annual membership because not only am I a creationist, but a Young Cosmos Creationist.
Eric,
There is a third possibility, which is that the will is a mixture of the two. But in that case, it’s still not libertarian free will.
Compatibilism is the sensible alternative to libertarian free will.
Sal,
Common descent has already won that battle.
No it hasn’t.
Yes, it has. Nyaa nyaa nyaa, so there!
James Tour is, in fact, a liar for Jesus.
Most libertarian free-willists would deny this. They’d say (mostly following Van Inwagen) that it’s agent causation.
stcordova,
I’ll give you $20 off if you’ll admit right here that all that stuff is bosh and you’ve just been kidding around, Sal.
Thanks. I’m glad we got this out of the way…
What would be the mechanism to explain common descent? Darwinism is no good because it can’t build new things other than by breaking genes…
It’s not that simple Sal. Many cosmologists opposed to Geo-centrism spend most of their careers trying to disprove it, including George Ellis:
You are very kind to the supporters of common descent…lol
I have some money to give away and Nobel Prize awaiting anyone who can experimentally prove it…
Look at Lenski and LTEE… It’s an embarrassments to scientific theory that can’t be verified at the fundamental levels….
EricMH, citing an argument against libertarian free will:
walto:
I don’t see how agent causation avoids the incoherence, though I haven’t (yet) read van Inwagen on the subject.
J-Mac,
You can’t win a Nobel Prize for something that is already common scientific knowledge.
The denial of common descent is a fringe idea. Crackpot territory.
GeoCentrism is false. If it were true we would not be able to fly space craft successfully around the Solar System, because space craft are designed to fly on the assumption of a NON-geocentric universe and solar system. The Solar System is well-approximated by HelioCentrism (with some minor adjustment for the effect planetary gravitational fields). GeoCentric models are not consistent with any theory of gravity!
I’ve debated Reddit.com/r/geocentrists a lot, they lack basic physics starting with the understanding of Centrifugal and Corioliss forcess, Centripetal Acceleration, gravitational acceleration, celestial mechanics, etc.
I think you have the “scientific” wishful thinking mixed up with reality…lol
I’m not going to waste time and try to convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced…
LTEE is the living proof that an illusion has become real…for those who want it to be such…
BTW: The funniest thing of it all is the supposed “fast and furious evolution of the polar bears” from brown bears… Behe based his book on it but today, it is well known to an unbiased observer, that it was bs. But, both Darwinists and ID have their own reasons to pretend that it happened… I had predicted it in my OPs and comments months before it became obvious that polar bears have high serum cholesterol levels, no atherosclerosis despite the fact that the “beneficial mutations” are rare and every other polar bear has them at best…
Why don’t you email George Ellis?
He loves debating… I don’t care…
Even creationists need other crackpots to look down on.
stcordova,
What battle? The battle for un modeled, untested undefined theories that have been successfully sold to the public.
Person A. Do you believe in common descent?
Person B. What do you mean do I believe in common descent?
Person A. Hellava question 🙂
I’m amused I first pointed out to you how your attempts to rationalize away the evidence for common descent by coming up with completely ad-hoc and auxiliary hypotheses for why the evidence only looks like what one would expect from common descent, left you with a baroquely complex Ptolomeic epicycle-like creation model, and you’re now apparently mindlessly declaring that the opposite is the case.
Another amusing attempt at inversion here. Ironically it’s theists that presuppose their pet deity is eternal and necessary, and it’s atheists responding to this claim that theists have multiplied entities beyond requirements, and if theists can just assume this, then why can’t atheists just assume the same about the universe and then end up with a simpler model?
That’s certainly a rather grandiose claim, but what have you got to show for it? Are you saying discoveries have been made which would not have been possible if life didn’t appear as if it shared a common genealogical relationship? If that’s what you’re saying, give an example, and show how such a discovery could not have been made if the data had exhibited a different pattern.
I know you theists have recently become deeply infatuated with this claim that the universe has somehow been “set up for discovery”, but I’ve yet to see anyone even begin to seriously support that claim. It sure sounds nice, but how many universes have you seen with scientists inside them, trying to work out how those universes work? Of that set, how well did the various civilizations fare at discovery, and what where the different stumbling blocks and advantages like for them?
Do you haven even the slightest idea to what degree the universe is conducive to discovery, how do you even measure that? And in what way would a universe with different laws, or different data patterns in their hypothetical diversity of life, be more, or less friendly to scientific discovery?
This “made for discovery” assertion has been supported in no substantial way anywhere.
How do you know that?
One only concludes common descent if one cherry picks the data, just like GeoCentrists.
If one looks at ALL the data, one realizes for common descent to be true, it requires the equivalent of miracles of special creation, starting with the emergence of membrane bound organelles in Eukaryotes and the global reformatting of all common genes with appropriate localization and export signals, some which would entail overlaping codes — not to mention localization mechanisms and appropriate transmembrane proteins.
Common Descent Without Miracles is the modern day version of GeoCentrism, built on cherry picked data.
The alternative is to accept Common Descent with Miracles or ID (like Behe), which is only then slightly different than special creation.
You mean speciation? What explains how one species becomes two separate species that share a common genealogical relationship? Lack of geneflow between subpopulations, and independent accumulation of mutations.
Here is a conceptual picture of a fish anatomy from which we supposedly evolved (even in Sarcopterigiians). If one follows the arrows the sequence of organs is:
1. Head
2. Heart
3. Stomach
4. Anus
5. Urogenital Opening (analogous to Vagina)
6. Tail
7. Back
colewd:
From the Wikipedia article on common descent:
So much for undefined, unmodeled and untested.
In contrast here is a female human sequence of organs
1. Head
2. Heart
3. Stomach
4. Vagina
5. Anus
6. Tail
7. Back
According to common descent, the female human has her private parts (#4 and #5) wired bass-ackwards compared to the fish! Oh well.
A saavy evolutionary biologist will argue humans undergo a cloacal stage of embryonic development that recapitulates a little bit of the fish anatomy, but that is ad hoc, and has problems of its own.
That doesn’t make sense.
What’s miraculous about that? In any case, you’re quite confused. Common descent is not supposed to be the explanation for novel cellular or organismal features. Common descent is the explanation for the nesting hiearchical patterns in the distribution of genetic and morphological characters across the diversity of life.
The explanation for novel genetic, cellular, and organismal attributes is all that stuff about molecular evolution, natural selection, evo-devo and so on.
That’s like saying it’s cherrypicking to use common descent to only explain the genes shared between me and my siblings(or morphological characters we have in common because we inherited them from our shared parents), but ignoring certain scars we have.
Sal,
If God is willing to go out of his way to make scientific discovery possible, why isn’t he willing to give us the answers to important scientific questions? God presumably knows how cancer can be cured or prevented, for instance. Why doesn’t he tell us?
Most IDers aren’t even honest with themselves. On one hand they keep saying that ID isn’t about God, but can anybody believe that KairosFocus, bornagain77, Barry or Denys would accept any designer other than their God?
But do they in fact undergo such a stage during embryonic development? If they do then it isn’t ad-hoc, but an observed fact.
Embryological migration of organs and tissues is nothing unusual. You know that hilarious set of bottom dwelling fish, the flounders? Guess where that eye starts out during flatfish embryological development. That’s right, on the other side of it’s head. Somehow, for reasons that only make sense in light of evolution, that eye starts out on the one side of the head and migrates around next to the other.
(Side note: Flatfish are intrinsically comical)
I also don’t buy for even a second that ID isn’t motivated essentially by evangelism and apologetics.
We have not forgotten the Wedge strategy document.
Here is the protein sequence of Human Type1 alpha1 collagen with highlights to show important structural considerations:
Here is Zebrafish Type 1 alpha 1 collagen, structurally it is very similar to the human collagen counter part, even though it is 75% similar.
Getting more sequences from other species, one could then build a “phylogeny” on this (including paralogs like Col2, Col3, etc.). The phylogeny might look something like:
Looks persuasive enough, but aahhhh, the illusion of common descent by natural means is due to cherry picking, much like GeoCentrism is rooted in cherry picking.
What do we do with other proteins that don’t have collagen structure? Their ancestors sort of just POOF onto the scene, and the hidden markov models are known to fail for the ultimate common ancestor of all proteins. Here is a sample protein, ZNF136 below. What would the common ancestor of COL1A1 (above) and ZNF136 be.
One can’t use the COl1A1 phylogenetic trees to explain the emergence of radically different architectures like ZNF136 (KRAB zinc finger proteins). It’s a non-sequitur that evolutionary biologists get away with.
If Theobald were being fair with the data, he’d cite all the instances where Hidden Markov Models are known and are predicted to fail as a matter of principle. But he won’t do that since he follows the same non-sequitur reasoning common in the evolutionary industry.
There is no difference but it sounds more scientific…
If Behe means common descent within properly defined kinds, i.e. dog evolution from wolf, he doesn’t need God/ID miraculous intervention. All he needs to do is come to my neck of the woods and see coywolves, coydogs, woyotes, and such interbreeding. Within one or few generations one can see drastic changes within kind but it he will never see coywolves on their way into the ocean to become a few ton whales…