Well, I just got banned again at UD, over my response to this post of Barry’s:
In a prior post I took Dr. Liddle (sorry for the misspelled name) to task for this statement:
“Darwinian hypotheses make testable predictions and ID hypotheses (so far) don’t.”
I responded that this was not true and noted that:
For years Darwinists touted “junk DNA” as not just any evidence but powerful, practically irrefutable evidence for the Darwinian hypothesis. ID proponents disagreed and argued that the evidence would ultimately demonstrate function.
Not only did both hypotheses make testable predictions, the Darwinist prediction turned out to be false and the ID prediction turned out to be confirmed
Liddle resonds:
Sorry Barry that that example simply does not work.
Darwinian theory would only predict unused sequences of DNA were it to be the case that unused sequences had no metabolic or other cost . . .
And I will be first in line to cite Darwinian hypotheses that have been falsified. But not the “junk DNA” hypothesis.
Nor will I accept that “no junk DNA” was a positive prediction of ID. It is neither positive, nor is it a prediction.
Dr. Liddle, have you no shame? All I can say is your revisionist history is stunning in its scope and audacity.
Whole books were written by ID proponents about the Darwinist myth of junk DNA. See here.
The ID position has now been largely vindicated and the Darwinist position debunked.
You know that. Therefore, I simply cannot imagine that you assert to the contrary in good faith. If I did not know better, charity would demand that I ascribe your statements to near invincible ignorance. Sadly, that option is not open to me. Therefore, I can only conclude that you are willfully and mendaciously misrepresenting the record.
You made a false statement in the prior post. I posted a second post calling you out. Instead of conceding or retracting you doubled down. Will you double down again or will you retract?
My response was:
Barry, can you cite a scientific paper that makes a prediction, derived from Darwinian theory, that large parts of the genome will be non-functional?
Can you also find an ID paper that predicts that all DNA will be functional?
Can you also find any paper that shows that all DNA is functional?
Would anyone here like to answer my questions?
Can anyone find an ID explanation of vestigial organs, or why the “broken ascorbic acid gene” exists in apes (no, at this point I don’t care about any function these may have secondarily)?
Obviously a notion like ID that has no explanation for Archaeopteryx (clearly a bird not yet highly adapted to flight) or any other evolutionarily-explained major deviation from design principles in life has nothing substantive to say about “junk DNA” one way or the other. Evolutionary processes exist that tend to reduce useless stretches of DNA, while other evolutionary processes tend to create more, hence “junk DNA” has always been a poor prediction from evolutionary theory, and in general it has been treated as a question. Which means that it’s never been much of a test for evolution, either, while a number of other predictions from evolutionary theory are robust and have been quite successful.
Glen Davidson
Exactly. There is a difference between a prediction that a theory makes, and data that it can explain.
For example, the germ theory of disease can explain why some diseases are infectious. It doesn’t predict that all diseases will be infections, or even that all transmissible diseases are caused by germs.
And in any case, I know of no a priori prediction made from Darwinian theory for “junk DNA”. Even Ohno’s original paper said that it probably served the negative but useful function of spacing out genes.
Conversely, I know I don’t see why ID predicts it will all be functional. For example, it could be there as decoration, or for the benefit of some future organism, or perhaps it has has Genesis 1 encoded it in it in some cipher we have yet to crack.
Plus, I know of know finding that it is all functional. So even if someone did derive an ID hypothesis that predicted it would all be functional, where is the evidence confirming that prediction?
Barry seems wrong on every count.
Surely ID must predict “No Junk DNA”, and if it does it presupposes (not that one can know the designer!) that a designer would not be wasteful and do things like fill 99.9% of the universe with vacuum.
Now what constitutes “junk” is of of course sloppy and even in evolutionary terms “junk” can be re-purposed, because it is genomic raw material, but “no junk” should seem to suggest a high C-value correlation and very high mortality rates from knock out studies? (look, I made an ID prediction!)
Barry does seem to have been on the warpath, over the last few days.
That UD thread seems like a rant thread. I usually avoid commenting on rant threads.
When I first heard of “junk DNA”, my initial reaction was to take “junk DNA” to a technical name, and to not assume that “junk” is intended to be descriptive. It seemed possible that, with further study, it might be found to have some role. Thus far, I have not found a reason to change that initial reaction. I’ll admit to being amused at the way that ID proponents take the very name “junk DNA” to be an insult to their imagined not-necessarily-divine intelligent designer.
The prediction of “no junk DNA” makes assumptions about the nature of the designer – that he/she/it wanted to make DNA as efficient as possible, without regions which are not functional.
But there’s nothing in the “classical” ID premise – an unknown entity did unknown things via unknown means at unknown times for unknown purposes – which requires this assumption. So ID would go along quite happily with any amount of non-coding DNA. None at all would be fine. Pounds of the stuff per cell would also be fine.
I’ve been trying to think of any observation at all which would be incompatible with “an unknown entity did unknown things via unknown means at unknown times for unknown purposes”. Nothing yet…
I think Larry Moran over on sandwalk.blogspot.com has done a commendable job of debunking the creationist gibberish on Junk DNA, including explaining all the relevant concepts and the history of the developments in molecular biology and evolution.
I’ve followed his blog for some time now and it’s definitely paid off in terms of getting me up to speed in the junk DNA debate.
As usual, Barry Arrington’s pronouncements are not congruent with the facts. The “recent findings” he refers to are the ENCODE projects sensationalistic pronouncements on the functionality of junk DNA, but those findings have been largely rebuked and the ENCODE publishers have recieved a lot of criticism from molecular biologists with exptertise and experience in the debate. In fact, to such an extend, that even Ewan Birnie of ENCODE project fame, came out and retracted some of his more sensationalistic pronouncements on junk DNA (including the 80% functionality claim). He’s now down to something like 20%-50% functionality (he’s not been very clear, his claims seem to fluctuate).
Barry,
Yet here we are, the Darwinist bulldog still bossing the ID mouse around.
If the “Darwinist position” has been debunked when do you suppose all the biologists will get to hear about it?
Whole books might have been written on the subject but I can take a walk to the bookshop and see more books then I could read in a lifetime all at once. So that’s why science is not generally done “by book”.
Now that the Darwinist position has been debunked, perhaps ID can step up to the plate and predict where we should look for some interesting fossils, and explain why? I mean, if ID is true….
What does ID predict we should find in precambrian strata?
Rumraket,
NOT EVOLUTION!
This is what I could find RE: Can you also find an ID paper that predicts that all DNA will be functional?
If we extrapolate from known sources of intelligence, we would expect the cause of less than 100% functionality to be the result of mistakes on the part of the designer. But what does “as much as possible” mean in relation to ID theory? Obviously it provides wiggle room should ID theorists have to admit some region is confirmed to be non-functional, but on what grounds would ID theorists justify such a discovery?
That “as much as possible” really is laughable, the wiggle room there is potentially infinite.
Of course, taking our clues from bacteria, we know 100% functionality is possible. Yet the evidence is that it isn’t 100% functional in large multicellular eucaryotes.
Well done Lizzie, your unflappable consistancy in the face of outright hypocracy does you proud. I have been perusing UD and as Mr Rickert points out the intolerance and jingoism of the inmates are two of its most glaring consistancies; these people are willfully ignorant, gleefully banning all those who intelligently counter their absurdities. Alan Fox and a character called Jerad have as yet not been banned, I wonder when they wiil be.
The ‘hypocracy’ I mention is of course the freedom for any one to post here versus the hurdles one must leap over to post there, and the incredible mind gymnastics these idiots go through to attempt to invalidate this incontrovertable conclusion. Actually this is a problem I have experienced on ALL (not many) right wing blogs. It is really difficult to argue against fascists Not because they have good argument, but simply because they are utterly intolerant of diverse opinion; it frightens them, they live in perpetual fear of what they don’t know, this should of course be turned in to the WONDER of what they could know.Their mentality I believe follows this line of thinking; I am largely happy, my life is generally not bad, I fear failure and the wretched, there is something wrong with the wretched and failed, my moderate success is built upon tradition, ideas questioning that tradition are counterproductive, close your ears, close your eyes, close your mind; welcome to UD and the mind of Barry.
It’s been said already but there is no theory of ID from which to make any predictions.
So even if Arrington’s claim were true that ID theorists had long been predicting functionality for ‘junk’ DNA those predictions aren’t being derived from any kind of theory – they are being derived from a ill-defined hunch.
And because of this wooliness any prediction expounded by an ID proponent is as good as any other because they’re drawn from thin air with nothing to ground them.
I want to know why a fully functional genome (for example) is evidence of intelligent design as opposed to 75% functional. Or 50%. Or only functional on Wednesdays…..or any other whimsical combination.
It doesn’t matter what percentage of ID proponents predicted it, until they put their theory on the table where everyone can see it then the success or otherwise of their predictions will remain indistinguishable from cold reading.
This one drives me nuts. It is ingrained received wisdom in the anti-evo community that junk DNA qua junk DNA is/was viewed as powerful evidence for the Darwinian hypothesis. That’s bullshit. What is true is that the congruence of trees of noncoding and other ‘junk’ DNA upon trees from morphology and functional DNA provides powerful support for an evolutionary process of change; such differences cannot be explained away as ‘necessary for the different organisms’. (Not just junk, of course, but silent and chemically conservative substitutions provide this).
Junk contains evidence for evolution, but is not itself evidence for evolution. What of prokaryotes, or other organisms with virtually no junk? Do they suppose that we suppose that prokaryotes are unhelpful to the Darwinian ’cause’ because they don’t contain this evidence?
Up until Ohno’s paper in 1972, most people thought the genome was largely functional. He pointed out, on mutational grounds, that this could not be the case. This conclusion was resisted initially, by those very Darwinists that Barry supposes depend upon it. It still is by some. But if people have no explanation for the means by which their favoured function survives the mutational argument, or the wide variations between related species, or how the great load of transposon duplicates (>50%) constitutes a ‘function’, they are simply making an uneducated guess.
He links Wells’s book as if this is a successful debunking of the whole ‘junk’ story. Larry Moran wrote a series of articles dissecting the book chapter by chapter. Here‘s the last, with links to the rest.
Mung has offered to post a reading list of evidence that ‘Darwinists’ (sic) have indeed argued for Junk DNA as powerful confirmation of the Darwinian hypothesis. Hopefully he will do so here also. I predict that they will consist of speculation as to why a Designer would make such a messy genome. Which is not strictly powerful confirmation of ‘Darwinism’ (sic), but a question to be answered by ID. IDists are familiar with the approach of supporting one hypothesis by attacking another, so this may be why they make this claim (“For years Darwinists touted “junk DNA” as not just any evidence but powerful, practically irrefutable evidence for the Darwinian hypothesis.”). I could, equally, be totally wrong.
So as not to confuse the…ahem…slower folks in the audience, I think I would phrase your point a little differently.
Junk DNA is odd phenomenon. It was not an expected find under any perspective of life. It is, therefore, a phenomenon that must be accounted for in any explanation of how life got here. The nice thing about evolution is that as a model, it already allowed for such an anomaly and actually when scrutinized, having leftover bits of non-functional DNA made sense. ID offers no such alignment however.
Welcome aboard, Woodbine. Your post sat in the moderation queue for a while — sorry about that.
A common theme is the (frequently petulantly expressed) complaint that evolution explains both the presence and absence of a feature – more junk, less junk, somewhere in the middle. Which, of course, one would hope a successful theory would do: account for the data. It is not just the reasons for similarity, but for difference, that matter. It’s a complaint I find odd – should we expect everything to be the same if evolution were true? Some organisms, for both mechanistic and statistical reasons, would be expected to experience stronger selection against unnecessary sequence than others.
I agree, Alan.
It is true that a theory that could explain everything can explain nothing. But many theories can accommodate a number of different outcomes, but not any outcome. Evolutionary theory, broadly, could certainly account for both junk DNA (were there to be little metabolic cost of non-functional coding) and the absence of junk (were there to be a high metabolic cost).
So the fact that we appear to observe a large amount of non-functional (or at least non-critical) DNA would suggest that it carries little metabolic cost.
It doesn’t support evolutionary theory, rather it tells us that if evolutionary theory is correct, and non-functional DNA is observed, it probably doesn’t carry a metabolic cost. Alternatively it may perform some advantageous function that is not dependent on sequence, for example, as Ohno suggested, as a “spacer” between genes.
ID on the other hand does NOT predict “no non-functional DNA”.
The hypothesis that life was designed by an efficient designer who wanted to minimise redundancy in the genome might predict that, but I have never seen that stated.
In any case, falsifying that hypothesis would not falsify ID, merely that specific hypothesis.
Of course my banning, has, I assume, nothing to do with this issue at all. It was a show trial – a shibboleth – like the LNC shibboleth – to ban me on presumably the grounds that KF has been touting.
If so, Barry is being dishonest.
If not, he is being extremely dense.
Barry is more than capable of achieving both simultaneously.
I’ll see myself to Guano….
The existence of large amounts of junk DNA is, in fact, weak evidence against Darwinian evolution, and certainly wasn’t a prediction of that theory. Thus only non-Darwinian mechanisms that can explain its presence.
If ID does predict that all DNA is functional, then presumably it also predicts that the entire universe is habitable, right? If a designer is so frugal as to put only functional DNA inside organisms, then why would it create billions of pointless, nonfunctional galaxies?
My comment will mostly be about the debate.
Honesty
Folk on both sides accuse those on the other side as dishonest. We should be careful about that. The ID folk might sincerely believe what they are saying. And it isn’t dishonest unless they are saying something that they believe to be untrue.
Evidence
There’s a lot of miscommunication about evidence. Both sides use evidence. For the ID folk, the most important most trusted evidence is what is written in their ancient holy book. We, on the evolution side, don’t consider that as evidence of anything much at all, other than of what people wrote in ancient literature.
Prediction
Most of the ID folk do not understand how we use the term “prediction”. It is standard wisdom for them, that evolution makes no predictions. They probably think that an evolutionary prediction should be something like “a purple polka dot mouse-like creature will evolve in the year 2019”.
This misunderstanding of “prediction” is probably why Lizzie was banned. She was being insistent about prediction, but they see what she said as obviously wrong. When we talk of “prediction” we should give examples to illustrate what we mean.
Rationality
Both sides accuse their opponents of being irrational. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear meaning for “rational”. But perhaps one common meaning of “rational” is that it has to do with making decisions by applying logic to beliefs and evidence.
If that is what we mean by “rational”, then conservatives are more rational than liberals. And that’s what’s wrong with conservatism.
Take an example. If you are a geocentrist, then there is no rational case for heliocentrism. As far as I can tell, there is no logic applied to geocentric beliefs and to the observational evidence, that would demonstrate heliocentrism. We prefer heliocentrism because that gives a far better explanation of the evidence. But, saying that it is a better explanation is a pragmatic conclusion, not a logical conclusion. Logic, as a means of making decisions, is conservative; pragmatism is not.
Science is very much a pragmatic enterprise. And that is part of why conservatives do not trust science.
Evolution doesn’t predict outcomes any more than economics predicts the price of a given stock a year in the future. And for the same reason.
What both sciences predict is that dynamic systems
Will respond to feedback.
In addition, common descent places constraints on genome relatedness, making possible predictions of percentages of dissimilarity among related organisms.
Well, I just got banned again at UD
That’ll free up some time for a bit of enabling, then! 😉
Barry is not a poster here. If he would like to post here, and he would be very welcome to do so, then the rules will apply to his posts here.
But it is not against TSZ rules to express the opinion that someone who does not post here has been dishonest elsewhere, and I think Barry is being dishonest. He can’t honestly think that my questions in response to his post were grounds for banning, and he doesn’t seem to have given any others.
That said, his case that I posted as fact something that was not a fact is, IMO, simply wrong, and arises, I think, from what may be a lawyer’s view of what constitutes a predictive hypothesis as against what a scientist’s view is, and it is the scientist’s view that counts here.
There is no general prediction arising from ID theory that there will be no non-functional DNA (DNA sequences remember – that was Ohno’s point, not that the stretches of DNA did not perform some function, e.g. a spacing function, not dependent on sequence), nor is a prediction of Darwinian theory that there will a large amount (although there is certainly a prediction that there will be some, because some DNA sequences will randomly break, and yet be retained in the population if they are not unduly deleterious).
And there is no finding, to my knowledge, that contradicts that expectation. The GULO gene is broken in primates, and yet is distributed in just the way we would expect under the hypothesis that human share a family tree with primates.
Barry is just wrong, on every count on this.
And yes, dishonest too, I think.
Exactly. There’s a reason that most of the time in science we insist on two-tailed tests.
I agree, hence the rules of this site. They aren’t only rules of convenience, they also reflect my belief that most people don’t post deliberate untruths.
In the case of Barry’s ban of me, I don’t think he told the truth, any more than last time he banned me – in that case, he actually gave no reasons until afterwards, and they didn’t reflect anything I’d posted at UD, nor here until after the ban (the LNC crap).
My assumption is that he banned me because my presence at UD was upsetting kairosfocus.
Actually, I have no problem in principle with blog owners banning whoever they like. Censorship is not being able to publish your views, not not being able to publish them somewhere specific.
But I do encourage anyone who wants to continue any of these discussions to come over to TSZ, and I do want to be able to assure them that the rules will in general be implemented.
Which is not to say that ideas are sacrosanct, but it is to say that we continue to make the working assumption that other posters are posting in good faith.
That matters far more to me than not using bad words.
That’s a good point, Neil. I should have read to the end of your post. It’s possible that Barry really does not understand how I could possible ask such idiotic questions in good faith.
BTW I just downloaded Well’s book on to my Kindle. Nothing I have read so far leads me to change my mind about what I claimed.
I see Barry has once again drawn his guns and is blazing away at his foot. Last time he did so more extensively and ended up driving many interesting people here.
Just a comment on ID’s “predictions” about there not being junk DNA:
1. Neither William Dembski’s arguments nor Michael Behe’s arguments make any statement about whether there will be junk DNA.
2. When opponents of ID point out cases of Bad Design, such as the giraffe recurrent laryngeal nerve, they get lectured. They are told that just because there is a Designer there is no reason to expect perfect design, or even to expect good design. That one cannot infer anything about the intentions of the Designer.
3. But when the presence of junk DNA is mentioned, the ID advocates just “lose it”. They hate the idea of junk DNA and go to great lengths to argue that most of the genome cannot be junk. Why? As far as I see, they are making a Good Design argument.
They are simply inconsistent.
Just to roil the waters, junk is good design.
I actually agree with that.
Barry has shut down comments entirely on that thread. It was clearly getting out of hand, and Barry isn’t the only one with holes in his feet.
Evolution provides and explanation for both the lack of junk in bacteria and its presence in eukaryotes; an explanation that can be supported by future observations and experiments. I don’t think it should be used as evidence for evolution. Its really an argument against ID on the assumption that no self-respecting designer would load up a genome with fragmented pseudogenes and other bits of junk
Lizzie said:
A very creative counterargument. I’ve been following the ID arguments for decades and for most of that time the standard reply to the junk DNA argument was that no one can predict what an intelligent designer would or wouldn’t do. Any such speculation was theology not science. In other words the ID explanation for junk was ‘God works in mysterious ways’ As far as I can tell, all of the ‘no-junk’ arguments starting turning up after functions started appearing for ncRNAs and pseudogenes. The first one I know of is Wells in 2004. Does anyone know any published examples of an IDer making this prediction before this period?
There seems to be an inability to distinguish between:
XYZ theory predicted…
and
One or more adherent of XYZ theory predicted…
Elizabeth Liddle:
The context, of course, is important.
Elizabeth Liddle:
Elizabeth Liddle:
Given that you are “preaching to the choir” here at TSZ, I’m going to bet on the ‘NO’ side of that question.
Well she can’t preach at UD (much to your delight) can she, Mung? She’s violated ID rules by asking questions. Are you here to gloat, “truth lover”?
Richardthughes
Of course, as a true skeptic, you have some actual evidence to establish the truthfulness of your claims. No?
Your evidence is lacking. But that hardly matters for you “true skeptics” here at “The Skeptical Zone.”
How would you know? What evidence would you offer to support that hypothesis?
Oh “skeptic.”
Those questions were asked at UD, not here.
Elizabeth Liddle:
“Barry, can you cite a scientific paper that makes a prediction, derived from Darwinian theory, that large parts of the genome will be non-functional?
Can you also find an ID paper that predicts that all DNA will be functional?
Can you also find any paper that shows that all DNA is functional?
Would anyone here like to answer my questions?”
Pretty funny with all your truth loving neither you nor the rest of the IDiots could muster an answer to the questions at UD where they were asked.
“How would you know”
By asking you. The “?” at the end means its a question. I know IDists doesn’t like those, but scientists do. You can learn stuff.
thorton:
Ignoring the ELEPHANT in the room.
“Would anyone here like to answer my questions?”
– Elizabeth Liddle
Get busy, you “skeptics.”
Elizabeth:
No? Skeptics much?
The questions were asked of you and your IDiot buddies Mung. But we all know IDiots don’t answer questions.
The question, thorton, which you seem to have missed in your willingness to miss anything not in your ability to comprehend, is as follows:
Elizabeth Liddle
HERE, in her question, is HERE at TSZ.
Elizabeth:
Please summarize and post the answers you received here a TSZ.
I didn’t miss it Mr. Truth Lover. I’m just pointing out that neither you nor any of the rest of the IDiots at UD would answer them there where they were first asked. Makes your demand that they be answered here look both hypocritical and pretty dumb.
Please summarize and post the answers provided at UD where the questions were first asked.
The answer, Mung, is of course ‘no’. That’s because it’s pretty obvious that the answer to all three of the questions Elizabeth posed at UD is also ‘no’. Unless, of course, Barry or anybody else from UD would like to come forward…
You’re here. Mung. Maybe you’d like to answer them? You might like answering questions if you start, who knows? I hear you love the truth, so you’re ideally placed…
Mung,
Anyone who registers ‘here’ is ‘here’. ‘Here’ is not restricted to the choir. You are free to respond to the questions. It may be that they are somewhat rhetorical in nature. Or they may be taken at face value but no-one ‘here’ knows the answer. In either case of course no-one opposing the ID position is likely to proffer an answer, since they may not have one.
They may conversely know it but be dishonestly holding it back. To which there is a simple remedy just a few clicks away, assuming there are answers and you know what they are.