Scordova at UD asks a question that I find interesting.
By way of contrast, intelligent agencies, particularly those intelligent agencies which we presume have free will, cannot be counted upon to behave in predictable manners in certain domains. Even presuming some intelligent agencies (say machine “intelligence”) are deterministic, they can be an unpredictable black box to outside observers. This makes it difficult to make direct experimental confirmation of certain ID inferences.
It has long been my contention that the defining behavior of science is the search for regularity.
Some regularities can be refined into mathematical equations, which we generally call laws of nature.
Other processes are complex or chaotic, making long range predictions impossible. But chaotic systems can be seen, at small scale, to be following regular rules. Weather develops. It doesn’t simply appear. We can find regularities in its past.
Evolution is a bit like weather. we cannot predict where change is going, but we can find regularities in its past. And these regularities are what distinguishes evolution from intelligent design. They are what allows us to look in a certain place for Tiktaalik. Or hominid fossils. Or predict that genomes will form a nested hierarchy.
So I would answer Scordova that science never looks for capriciousness and always looks for regularity. That is the definition of science.
The reasons are partly historical and partly practical.
Historically, it has been a successful approach. And in practical terms, the search for capriciousness cannot fail. It is the default finding.
There are so many chaotic phenomena in our midst that the world seems to be governed by mysterious forces. The notion that one could find and potentially control these forces is a very new idea. It has little support in art and fiction, and is actively opposed by most religions. So when science started being successful and began to produce practical results, it also found itself in opposition to much of human culture. I do not find it surprising that animosity has developed.
Over to you guys…
It is quite doubtful that we have free will in Cordova’s sense, of course, and it is pretty clear that anything we’ve ever called “intelligent” used reason to cut through problems. This includes animals that are relatively intelligent.
Evolution, by contrast, does not use reason, it can only adapt what has been inherited.
If we use reason, we’ll look at life–including fossil remains–to see whether it has the hallmarks of mere adaptation of inherited information (including horizontal transfers for, mostly, prokaryotes), or if reason has cut through problems. Or, we can use our wills (which certainly have a kind of freedom) to ignore the problem in order to hang onto a preconceived notion.
We don’t have to use reason, after all, it is just an option.
Glen Davidson
I haven’t found any reference to this with a google search. Can anyone tell me what this is about?
It’s in Moonwalker, and part of it is available on Google Books, page 252. Pp. 253 and 254 aren’t available, so the story’s conclusion (wherein the girl fully recovers sight, or whatever, likely shows) doesn’t appear for free.
The father explained, “My daughter’s eyesight is failing. She has this disease and is declared legally blind. All she can make out are shadows and shades of light. The doctors say that within a month she will be totally blind.
General Ralph Haines, who had organized the breakfast, and I laid hands on this young girl and asked God to heal her eyes and restore her sight. After the prayer, they thanked us and left. Nothing seemed to have happened–no miracle–so we continued to pray for others who were waiting in line.
That’s all that I can get for free. Likely it can be borrowed through a library. I don’t suppose that Cordova’s giving us the ending especially incorrectly, though.
Well, it’s not the healed amputee, and is nicely distant from our ability to check it out, as so many miracle stories are (spontaneous remissions are hardly unknown for many, but probably not all, diseases). It’s kind of ID all over again, the less you know the better, the more one believes that intelligence is an unpredictable phenomenon, the better. You are simply supposed to gawp, not understand.
Glen Davidson
I find it odd that the story appears nowhere on the internet except in this UD post. Why the cryptic note that pages 253 to 254 are not shown (but 255 onward are shown?
There is one technical problem with your OP, Petrushka (though it’s a based on Sal’s poor verbiage and misunderstanding, so really…it’s not your problem), but technically ID is supposed to be The Scientific Explanation and not, per se, the observed phenomenon/regular event/evidence. Sal is mixing up the characteristics of the alleged science, which just goes to show how unscientific ID really is.
In fact, Sal’s statement is quite odd if you take any of Dembski’s, Meyer’s, or Behe’s essays at face value. According to those guys, “the designer” can be as capricious and whimsical as imaginable, but such is irrelevant to ID because ID is not a mechanistic explanation and cares not one wit about the motives or consistency of the designer. All it focuses upon is the inherent assessment of intentional complexity and whether any given object – a leaf, acorn, eyeball, human, or caek contain sufficient complexity (as measured in informations) to be deemed intended.
Regularity, therefore is moot, but so – oddly – is Sal’s rambling. So, apparently, is science.
I think the idea that there is animosity towards “science” in any significant amount is nothing more than a psychological narrative certain groups employ to insulate themselves from admitting that the “animosity” isn’t towards science at all, but rather towards ideologies and politics masquerading as science in order to lend validity and authority to their views.
It’s nothing more than self-serving rhetoric to label those that doubt the Darwinist version of evolution, or who are creationists, as “anti-science” just because they do not adopt certain ideological interpretations of facts.
ID is indeed a search for a pattern or a regularity; that which signifies the intervention in otherwise expected and largely deterministic or stochastic patterns of natural processes by an intelligent agency. In other fields, this search for indications of intelligent intervention isn’t even controversial – forensics, archaeology, etc.
François Jacob, in 1977, pointed out that evolutionary processes were analogous to the process of tinkering, as it is used by engineers. If we don’t understand why the engine is working badly, just make different parts bigger or smaller, longer or shorter, and see what effect each of those is. This even extends to computer-aided design, if the resulting object has its behavior simulated after each change, and the effect of the change assessed that way.
ID types talk as if engineers do nothing but comprehensively understand their designs. In reality tinkering is quite common. (It is probably less common in computer hardware and software, more common in mechanical engineering).
I heard Jaçob give a talk on this when he visited our university. I even had a chance to talk with him. When he heard that I was working on evolution he rather nervously asked me whether I thought that the analogy was sound. I said yes.
Of course there are differences too. Mutations are random and may make the same mutation twice. An engineer would be unlikely to propose the same change once it had been rejected. There is no analogue to genetic drift (that I can think of). Migration, leading to disparate designs merging, would be a bad idea. Horizontal gene transfer does happen, though not so much randomly as deliberately. Although designs show descent with modification, it is far from treelike, as engineers adopt successful features from various sources.
An excellent example of this nontreelike process is the design of computers. Features like virtual memory (which first appeared on the Ferranti Atlas in Britain) and pushdown stacks (which first appeared on the Burroughs B5500 in the U.S.) have found their way into computers everywhere, computers produced by companies that are not descendants of Ferranti or of Burroughs.
In other fields, this search for indications of intelligent intervention isn’t even controversial – forensics, archaeology, etc.
This is literally true, but quite misleading. In neither forensics nor archaeology will you find any discussion of looking for “intelligent intervention” as such. Instead, what investigators of those fields might be interested in are questions like: is this just a random bit of chert, or was it worked by humans? Did this person die of what might be termed “natural causes”, or was it homicide. There is absolutely no discussion of “intelligence” as a general category; in all cases people are trying to determine whether something is an *artifact* – the characteristic product of human agency. Nobody serious in forensics or archaelogy is hypothesizing aliens as the agents, for example.
And, needless to say, nobody in forensics or archaeology uses Dembski’s methodology or the pseudomathematics of any other ID advocate. Indeed, ID advocates claim their methodology *would* be useful in such fields, but have never given a single example where this was the case. Elsberry and I challenged ID advocates to come up with a *single* example more than ten years ago, and no one has even *tried*.
William J. Murray,
Found anything yet?
“Evolution is a bit like weather. we cannot predict where change is going, but we can find regularities in its past. And these regularities are what distinguishes evolution from intelligent design. They are what allows us to look in a certain place for Tiktaalik. Or hominid fossils. Or predict that genomes will form a nested hierarchy.”
Well no. Evolution, intended as the origin of the diversity of life is not predictable and it is not a process where you can found regularities. You can found regularities in biology, DNA, genes, mutation rates, variations of presence of alleles within a population are all regular events measurables and verifiable. Tiktaalik is a unique event, that according to darwinist could not happened as humans could not be here, then it is not a regularity. That makes evolution not science but history. By the way Tiktaalik was found at the wrong time.
” The notion that one could find and potentially control these forces is a very new idea. It has little support in art and fiction, and is actively opposed by most religions.”
This is also untrue I think this would be enough evidence:
“God blessed them, saying: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.””
There are capricious events in evolutionary history. Several instances of endosymbiosis, the probably singular origin of eukarotic syngamy, asteroid strikes and particular developmental and biochemical innovations are very local and contingent events that have had extraordinary ramifications. Distinguishing the Hand of a Designer in such events would be a near-impossible task (though I might be convinced by a test-tube in the Cambrian).
What distinguishes biology from virtually all other phenomena is replication. We can distinguish, with a few false negatives and positives, a lump of rock from a fashioned tool. But if both rock and tool were to have histories of replication, and differential success of progeny, distinguishing non-intentional selection from intelligent agency would again be near-impossible. Not that this should discourage people from trying, but to hear some advocates talk, the endeavour has been a huge success. And the only thing that stops this being mainstream is the ideological intransigence of science. From which standpoint, being ‘anti-science’ is but a short step.
Blas,
So you can find regularities in the things that comprise the process and consequences of evolution, and yet evolution has no regularities?
Being “anti-science” is a question about attitudes and motivations. Since we don’t have easy access to the internal workings of creationists’ minds, we have to rely on things like reading their works and looking at their affiliations and behavior. Since, in North America, creationists (including ID advocates) are almost exclusively fundamentalist Christians, conservative Catholics, and others associated with the Christian Right — while evolutionary biologists of a wide variety of religious beliefs can easily be found — I think it is safe to say the motivations and attitudes for creationists are fundamentally based on religion. Pretending to do science while actually looking for confirmation of religious beliefs is, I think, pretty good evidence of being “anti-science”.
We could go on to look at the behaviors of some of the prominent creationists (including ID advocates). These behaviors include routine lying (Gish), citing references that say the opposite of what is actually said, making up fake citations ( Kouznetsov), failing to admit they make trivial errors in their calculations, for years and years (Dembski), claiming (without evidence) that prominent scientists are dishonest, associating evolutionary biology with Nazism, etc. All these strongly suggest a hatred for any kind of science that doesn’t agree with their religion.
I think this is a key point. I do not have any background in forensics or archaeology, but it seems to me that their goal is to detect “manufacture”, rather than “design”. Identifying an artifact relies on our knowledge of the techniques available (and those unavailable) to potential artificers.
ID avoids this issue.
Which regularities can you find in the origine of species? Which regularities do you found in the origine of the eucariotic cell? In the origine of a jiraffe? Why a pig become a whale and a polar bear is still a polar bear?
Which analogy? If you mean the analogy between (human) engineering and biology, then I respectfully disagree. It too easily slips into the ideology of ‘evolutionism,’ which is an exaggeration (or faulty concept transfer) of the term (biological) ‘evolution’ to (non-biological) ‘things that don’t evolve.’ And I don’t understand, Joe, why you (and quite a few others) would attempt such an analogy in a field in which you are not qualified. ‘Evolutionary theory,’ as most people mean it today, qua ‘theory,’ starts in biology (and/or cosmology), not in engineering or applied sciences; it is not properly understood as a ‘theory’ of ‘human-made’ things, just as ‘Design’ is not properly a biological theory.
I agree with shallit, when he says:
What I wonder from shallit is if he would allow for the possibility of a (lowercase) ‘design’ theory of human creativity? The psychology or anthropology of ‘design’: is that a topic worthy of study?
Blas writes:
Actually, it’s quite controversial when discussed by professionals in the appropriate fields. For the sake of argument, I’ll assume you are referring to ‘artefacts,’ i.e. to ‘human-made’ things by referencing forensics and archaeology. E.g. does Victoria Nuland’s recently leaked admission of the U.S. gov’t efforts to subvert democracy and force a coup in Ukraine display an example of an ‘intelligent intervention’ (a potentially very costly one) by the US gov’t in Eastern Europe? That’s a rather controversial question at the moment, not simple and straightforward at all!
Once one actually starts directly facing WHO the supposed ‘intelligent agent(s)’ are and whether or not they are supposedly transcendent or immanent or alien or human, the so-called ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ (IDT) breaks down into ignorance, whether humbly purposeful or guileful. DNA_Jock is correct that “ID[T] avoids this issue.” And I know this having looked John G. West in the eyes and having asked him re: IDT in social sciences and humanities, just as Elsberry and Shallit asked (more mathematically-oriented) regarding forensics and archaeology. (Could you please remind me of the source for this – “more than 10 years ago?”)
Right. Nor do we have easy access to the internal workings of evolutionists’ minds, nor capitalists’ minds, nor socialists’ minds, nor pragmatists’ minds, nor altruists’ minds, etc. Ideologies are tricky customers because a wide variety of people hold them, some whom you wouldn’t expect. This is therefore where philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences, and psychology come in. It’s certainly not just about mathematics, biology, computing and/or programming.
Blas,
The origin of species, as we sexual eukaryotes would understand the term, is in the origin of eukaryote sexual interaction – syngamy and reduction. As I noted, this was probably a singular event. So, no ‘regularities’ there. But there are strong regularities within this clade, which underlies the widespread applicability of diploid population genetics.
Same again. Endosymbiosis doesn’t happen every day. It’s like I write stuff, and you don’t actually read it or something.
Did you have a particular giraffe in mind? Or are you wondering why everything isn’t a giraffe?
A pig didn’t become a whale. Both are modern descendants of a common early Artiodactyl ancestor. Polar bears didn’t stay polar bears throughout the 50+ million year divergence of this clade – similar divergences were taking place in the Carnivora, including streamlined marine versions. Though having a marine relative isn’t compulsory.
Yes it is. Similarity of environmental constraint and underlying genetic framework will regularly produce similar results (a form of convergence). A good example is the almost ubiquitous torpedo-shape of aquatic animals that spend a lot of time moving in the water, instead of just hiding on the bottom/in seaweed. This is because this shape is energetically favorable, it takes less energy to propel an organism around in water if it’s shaped like this. Natural selection will consistently favor such similarity of results.
Birds that spend most of their time flying very long distances and/or at great altitudes will on average have greater wingspans because, again, this is energetically favorable given the aerodynamics of their niche lifestyles.
I could come up with literally hundreds of such examples of regularity due to natural selection by environmental factors. So you’re simply talking demonstrable nonsense.
Says who? For all we know, there were multiple relatively contemporary fish-tetrapod transitions. We actually don’t know whether the later amphibian-like transitional forms were direct descendants of the Tiktaalik line. Chances are they are not, which is why Tiktaalik isn’t postulated to be our direct ancestor, but probably just an example of a species with morphologically transitional traits.
No it wasn’t. It was found pretty much smack in the middle (~375 million years) between Eusthenopteron(~385 mya), Panderichthys(~380 mya) and Ichthyostega(~374 mya)+Acanthostega(~365 mya).
Just because possible tetrapod-like footprints predate predate the Tiktaalik fossil doesn’t mean it doesn’t qualify both as a morphological and temporal transitional fossil, given the already established fossil record of transitional lobe-finned fish and early amphibians. It was found pretty much where expected.
Those possible tetrapod-like footprints at somewhere around 390 mya you think of merely implies such transitions happened more than once. And it’s still relatively close in timing. In fact going from the general creationist quotemining on the cambrian explosion, a 5-15 million year timeperiod can be considered “virtually overnight” or “the blink of an eye”.
blas: Why a pig become a whale and a polar bear is still a polar bear?
Perhaps a better question would be if pigs became whales,why doesn’t whale taste like bacon?
Gregory:Evolutionary theory,’ as most people mean it today, qua ‘theory,’ starts in biology (and/or cosmology), not in engineering or applied sciences; it is not properly understood as a ‘theory’ of ‘human-made’ things, just as ‘Design’ is not properly a biological theory.
Evolutionism meets definitionism
1.
any process of formation or growth; development: the evolution of a language; the evolution of the airplane.
2.
a product of such development; something evolved: The exploration of space is the evolution of decades of research.
3.
Biology . change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.
4.
a process of gradual, peaceful, progressive change or development, as in social or economic structure or institutions.
5.
a motion incomplete in itself, but combining with coordinated motions to produce a single action, as in a machine.
What I wonder from shallit is if he would allow for the possibility of a (lowercase) ‘design’ theory of human creativity? The psychology or anthropology of ‘design’: is that a topic worthy of study?
Sure, but I really doubt that truly profound conclusions can be drawn until we have a much, much deeper understanding of the brain. So much depends on contingency!
The question Dembsky and Behe ask is whether the observed processes of mutation and selection (including neutral selection) can cross what Behe calls the Edge (and what Kariosfocus calls the deep sea surrounding islands of function.
The question I’m asking in the OP is not, what is the answer to D&B’s question, but rather, how does science approach the question. In this particular case, I am not asking the jury to decide guilty or not guilty. I am asking, how do you investigate the crime scene.
My answer — which may or may not be supportable — is that science always assumes that regular processes are sufficient to get from historical state M to historical state Q. This is what the gaps argument is about. It is why tiktaalik is important, why Lenski is important, and why Thornton’s reconstruction of protein evolution is important. It is also why GAs are important.
I find it interesting that Dembsky and Behe try to abstract the argument and make it purely mathematical, but resist testing their models with GAs.
This is really where they depart from science. They are not unscientific because they are wrong. They are unscientific because they make conjectures and resist putting them to the test.
Two can play the qualifications game — I do have qualifications in evolutionary biology.
The analogy was between “tinkering” in engineering and some of the processes of evolutionary biology. I invoke my expertise in actual tinkering, being a human being who has, like all human beings, tinkered.
Evolutionary biologists are frequently asked whether there are analogies between biological evolution and various processes of cultural change. I hope that you would not take the position that they should refuse to answer.
I do want to abjectly apologize for one thing: once I figured out how to make the c-cedilla (ç) character and used it on Jacob’s given name, I forget myself, and next time used it on his family name. Oops. This might be an example of tinkering, and if so, it did not result in an improvement.
Then, I´m right “no ‘regularities’ there.”
No, I was saying that if evolution would have any regularities we would be able to predict which animal and when would try to elong his neck.
And there is no regularity.
It does. Whale tastes a lot like pork. I know, I’ve eaten it.
Much innovation is the result of tinkering. And much optimization is being turned over to evolutionary algorithms. Google “genetic algorithm circuit board design”.
And it has been demonstrated that genetic algorithms can produce novel, patentable, circuit designs. This is still in its infancy.
ETA:
I challenge Gregory or Blas or Murray or anyone to cite any human invention that is demonstrably outside the process of tinkering with known things that work.
Even great breakthroughs in scientific theory have histories of tinkering and incremental accumulation of insights. I would cite the two relativities and QM.
Yes, that are regularities that you found applying physical studies in biology. But that regularities do not explain the evolution of them.
Maybe you are right, but that do not makes that titaalik wasn´t found where it should be i.e. before the appearence of tetrapods.
That is the darwinistic relativity of the time. 5-15 My is overnight to cover an prediction error but 40 My is long enough to make a whale from a pig or produce all the cambrian fauna.
Until I had a discussion here I believed that for everybody the science can do is predict that given the initial state A lead to the final state B, every time I reach A will led to B.
But now I know people that do not believe science can do even that.
So I´m more convinved that science cannot assume that regular processes are sufficient to get from historical state M to historical state Q.
It’s only misleading in the sense that it leads to honest debate about the core concepts of ID, which is somewhere anti-ID advocates refuse to go. They’d rather use terminology blocks to obfuscate the core concept of intelligence as the fundamental, recognizable difference between artifice and nature/chance.
The first known thing that worked.
That doesn’t make anyone anti-science. It just makes them pro-religion.
Attempt to demean followed by a logical non-sequitur. “Pretending” is a word meant to belittle. Science is a general methodology people use in service of various goals. This doesn’t make them anti-science at all, even if it may affect how they interpret facts. Just because the religious interpret facts differently than, say, an atheist or a materialist doesn’t mean that interpretation is “anti-science”. Materialists and atheists do not own a copyright on how scientific data can be interpreted.
That’s what I just did. All organisms expend energy to live and reproduce, organisms that find strategies that minimize their expenditure in their niche will fare better overall.
It is manifestly therefore explained.
I agree with that. However, the use of the word “evolution” does not necessarily imply evolutionary theory.
Societies evolve, cultures evolve, languages evolve, games evolve, operating systems evolve, toys evolve.
There are many quite appropriate ways to use “evolve” and “evolution” which are not tied to biological evolution.
Count me a skeptical.
For example, I was quite prepared to accept that the different phyla may have originated independently, and that evolution only occurred within phyla. There was no necessity of a single evolutionary tree.
The evidence from genome mapping is what pretty much shows that it is a single tree.
Blas,
Oh, for Christ’s sake! No. Not regularities. I said they were singularities, you challenged me to say what the regularity was in those arenas, I repeated no, no, they were singularities, so you declare yourself the victor in some uncontested dispute. Do you think the singularity of those two (or any other given) phenomena means that there are no regularities?
So if evolution cannot predict the animal that would lengthen its neck there are no regularities anywhere in evolution? You can’t see me, but I’m wearing a puzzled expression.
What, none?
Do you think ‘Darwinism’ predicts that every clade should have a marine representative?
Continue…
If it’s known, you can name it.
The first steam engine that used a piston, then the steam turbine, the first transistor, Fermi’s nuclear pile, Flower’s electronic decoder (during WWII).
I know that there was tinkering involved in these, that many parts were taken from other things, of course. But the whole of each of these is quite new at its time, largely conceived from first principles, although the steam turbine had antecedents in windmills, etc. (yet it’s hardly a windmill stuck in a steam stream), and I don’t get where engineering is reduced nearly to the level of biologic evolution, when it’s very different in many ways, from the easy transfer of concepts in thought to, yes, things that are dreamed up largely from first principles, regardless of what parts are “borrowed” because it’s too much work to do everything that’s already been done. The much tinkering that does go on is still not exactly like biologic evolution, given that whatever we do has a certain telic component, while evolution simply doesn’t.
Evolution will never come up with metallurgy and a whole lot of organic and inorganic chemistry as well. It’s far more limited than is intelligence.
Glen Davidson
I’m not sure what you are saying.
What I’m saying is that science looks for regular processes to account for phenomena. It also looks for regular processes to account for the current configuration of things.
In geology this was called uniformitarianism. Darwin apparently adopted this model for his model of evolution.
Both models have had to be amended to include punctuation. Geology has had to include asteroid impacts and supervolcanoes. Evolution has had to include things like whole genome duplication, lateral transfer, and such.
Blas conflates regularity with predictability. This is nonsense.
There is regularity in the toss of dice or the pick of lotto numbers. but no predictability in the specific outcome. From this we do not infer magical intervention. We have an entire branch of mathematics devoted to stochastic processes.
The other thing Blas ignores is that we cannot predict the properties of combinations of things from the properties of the things in isolation. The phenomenon of emergence occurs at all scales. It is why we cannot design biology without tinkering and trying. In fact, it affects nearly every innovation in technology. It is why the general concept of evolution, tinker and test, applies to nearly everything. Even in art and music.
Cams and camshafts can be traced at least as far back as the 12th century. I’m looking for something that is not a combination of borrowed concepts.
I see lots of tinkering involved in the invention of the transistor.
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/
I think you are invoking god of the gaps here. I would assert that the more detail you know about the history of inventions, the more they involve tinkering.
So, let’s see, I wrote:
I didn’t say that inventions don’t involve tinkering, I said that they involve something else as well. The claim that revolutions are simply evolution because they involve tinkering is absurd. With design there is indeed much evolution, most of it really is a kind of evolution, but revolutions make huge differences from time to time.
Of course you can focus on the tinkering and pretend that I denied it. That doesn’t change the fact that something quite different has happened with a number of discoveries and inventions.
Glen Davidson
Iffy. Piston pumps, Norse wheels, germanium diodes, cats-whisker and quartz diodes. The others I bet I could criticize but not off the top of my head.
Of course part of the problem was that the challenge was a red herring in the first place:
False dilemma. There are revolutions, but they generally involve tinkering. And I don’t care that they do. Does metallurgy have to be developed over and over again? Of course not. That doesn’t change the fact that new things come about that are hardly just the sum of further tinkering.
Glen Davidson
Oh, so there can’t be antecedents? I wasn’t falling for the false dilemma, I was dealing with the fact that design does things that evolutionary methods do not.
Why do we rarely have problems differentiating between life and technology? Because the two are vastly different, evolution is vastly different from design, in fact, despite largely superficial similarities (gee, what a shock, generally both have to build upon past successes to gain complexity and function).
Glen Davidson
And I haven’t tried to assert that human invention is blind.
Humans draw from vast libraries of working concepts and do massive horizontal transfer. Call it first principles if you wish, but what I see with human inventors is the ability imagine combinations of things.
In the case of steam engines, you have the known principle that steam can push things. You have the concept of crank and connecting rod that goes back at least to Roman times. Humans can combine inventions in ways that biological evolution cannot. the final product is going to involve a lot of tinkering.
Someone at UD once tried to assert the light bulb did not evolve. But incandescence was known a century or two before Edison. What Edison did was to formalize tinkering and build organizations devoted to managed tinkering.
I haven’t tried to assert that inventions are just the sum of tinkering. Actually, just the reverse.
Inventions are often emergent phenomena. Things that, in the words of the patent office, are not obvious. But humans can tinker in their imaginations. that is not available to populations of reproducing organisms.
Humans are much faster at innovating because we can see further.
One of my favorite books is Flatland. Everyone should read it. From it I derive my image of evolution proceeding by Braille. Only able to feel its way, because it can only try changes that are nearby.
Human vision is multidimensional. We can look down (from above) on the landscape of things that work and try combinations from many lineages. this, by the way is the central point of dispute between evolutionists and intelligent design advocates. Whether the current configuration of living things could have been reached by Braille, or whether there are features that could only be reached by being able to see outside the immediate vicinity.
It’s only misleading in the sense that it leads to honest debate about the core concepts of ID
This an example of exactly what I referred to. Creationists love to claim that their opponents are dishonest, but here (as usual) you have not given a single example of this dishonesty. In fact, I’ve written and published an article in a philosophy journal on the “core concept of ID” in which I showed they are a lot of nonsense. You might try reading it.
We don’t discuss this? Really?
Where is the recognizable part?
Materialists and atheists do not own a copyright on how scientific data can be interpreted.
When creationists have a long, long, long track record of citing results that don’t exist, or pretending that real scientists have concluded the opposite of what they actually did conclude, or dismissing strong evidence as not evidence, then their “interpretations” can be fairly viewed with extreme suspicion.
It’s worth quoting more of Murray’s comment:
Honest debate about the core concepts of ID (to paraphrase Ghandi) would be a very good thing. That requires some ID proponent proposing some core concepts. I suggest that if Murray or anyone else could produce a coherent, testable concept of ID there would be no refusal “to go there”. And that is a testable hypothesis, William. Produce your core concepts and we can observe whether there is any refusal to go there.
BTW any chance you can get round to correcting your misquote of Hawking and Mlodinow?
I hope that wan’t recently, Joe. It surely can’t be available in the US.