asks Winston Ewert at UD. For those of us who can’t post there, this thread is for us to respond here. Winston himself is as ever, cordially invited to join us, as are any UD commenters.
What is the probability of a structure like the bacterial flagellum evolving under Darwinian processes? This is the question on which the entire debate over Darwinian evolution turns. If the bacterial flagellum’s evolution is absurdly improbable, than Darwinism is false. On the other hand, if the flagellum is reasonably probable than Darwinism looks like a perfectly plausible explanation for life.
Dembski’s development of specified complexity depends on having established that the probability of structures like the bacterial flagellum is absurdly low under Darwinian mechanisms. Specified complexity provides the justification for rejecting Darwinian evolution on the basis of the absurdly low probability. It does nothing to help establish the low probability. Anyone arguing the Darwinian evolution has a low probability of success because of CSI has put the cart before the horse. You have to show that the probability of the bacterial flagellum is low before applying CSI to show that Darwinism is a bad explanation.
So what is the probability of a bacterial flagellum under Darwinian mechanisms? Obviously, we can’t expect to know the exact probability, but can we at least determine whether or not its absurdly improbable? That’s the question on which the whole debate rests. It seems that any arguments over Darwinism should be focused on arguments about this probability. It is the key to the whole discussion.
Intelligent design proponents have long offered a number of arguments attempting to show that Darwinian evolution accords a low probability to structures such as the bacterial flagellum. Darwin’s Black Box argues that irreducible complexity is highly improbable to evolve. The Edge of Evolution argues that non-trivial constructive mutations are too improbable for Darwinian evolution. Doug Axe’s protein work argues that protein evolution is too improbable. The fact is, almost every work by intelligent design proponents has been directed towards arguing that Darwinian evolution is too improbable to work. There is no mystery about why we intelligent design proponents think that evolution is improbable.
Intelligent design critics are going to dispute all of these arguments I mention. That’s fine. But dispute those arguments. Don’t act as though we’ve never given explanations for why we think that Darwinism is an improbable account of the complexity of life. Don’t attack specified complexity for not showing that Darwinism is improbable. That was never the intent of specified complexity. It is the intent of a host of other arguments put forward by intelligent design proponents.
Arguing over who has the burden of proof might be ok if there were no arguments on the table attempting to establish that question. But there are arguments on the table. There is no need to fall back on trying to shift the burden of proof onto someone else. Its a dubious tactic at the best of times, and totally pointless in the face of the arguments developed by intelligent design proponents.
So please, discuss the actual arguments put forward about the probabilities.
Am I the only one missing the critical step: Assigning an actual probability to evolving the bacterial flagellum under natural selection and so on? There are no numbers there.
How low is the probability? The people claiming to be able to rule out evolution and infer design can’t actually tell us. They don’t know how to assign a number to the theory they’re trying to rule out. How can they honestly claim to be able to rule it out then?
I don’t think ‘we’ do. The arguments are paraded routinely; we can hardly pretend otherwise. But they are simply incoherent. Hoyle-style arguments depend upon a combinatorial analysis that conjures up UPB-busting improbability for single destinations. If there are V amino acids, and a single target of length N, the probability of assembling that target if your mechanism is random draw is 1 in V^N.
If your mechanism isn’t random draw, and there are multiple targets, and they are not homogeneously distributed through protein space, and attractors and modularity exist, then probability is a complex path through a series of contingent events.
It’s like saying ‘what’s the probability of a carrot?’. It could be massively beyond the UPB if a carrot was pre-specified at the OoL. But the probability of something different from what you started with, 4 billion years later, is much, much higher. It is the probability of not-evolving that becomes UPB-busting. The specific improbability of your final destination on a random walk is irrelevant if you had to end up somewhere. Instead of carrots, snowman noses in Parallel World #1 must be fashioned from Smurg bulbs. How improbable are they?
The probability that I would win the lottery is very low. Yet somebody wins the lottery every week (or however often).
I presume that the probability of the flagellum evolving is low, though I doubt that the probability could even be estimated. If we were able to rewind the tape of reality, and let it start all over, then the flagellum in its current form might not evolve. But some other solution for providing bacterial motility might well evolve. That’s the whole point about evolution not being a directed process (in the sense of directed toward a particular result). The lottery is not a directed process, in the sense of being directed toward a particular winner (or at least we hope that it is not). Yet there are winners.
The ID folk never seem to understand this issue. Their probability arguments are mainly important for demonstrating their own misunderstanding.
I have made a similar point regarding their various metrics (FSCO/I etc) many times.
If they cannot put a figure on FSCO/I then any talk of it “increasing” or “decreasing” is nonsense.
If they claim that ‘darwinism’ cannot lead to an increase in FSCO/I yet cannot actually calculate the change in FSCO/I then what worth do their claims actually have?
KF notes that a practical way to measure FSCO/I is:
Link
I don’t see any way to, for example, measure FSCO/I before and after the ‘citrate event’ in Lenski’s experement there.
Rumraket,
Your terminology leaves much to be desired. ID isn’t opposed to “evolution” at all; what it lies in opposition to is the metaphysical claim that unintelligent, non-teleological forces are up to the task of generating complex, specified, functional, organizations of code and machinery. If there is no metric available to demonstrate ID necessary – as anti-ID advocates claim – then there is no metric that can demonstrate unintelligent, non-teleological forces sufficient.
They are two sides of the same metric. IF ID has no grounds by which to claim ID as necessary, Darwinism (non-intelligent, non-teleological) has no grounds by which to claim Darwinism sufficient.
The argument seems to be: We think the probability is low – prove that it isn’t.
Which begs the entire question of what the probability is supposed to be a probability of.
Without which, any discussion of probabilities is nonsensical.
If it’s P(T|H), what is H?
Rumraket,
I think the burden of proof has been shifted. Try and shift it back and they cry ‘foul’!
William J. Murray,
Good thing that isn’t the claim being made, then!
I’m not claiming there are no invisible fairies guiding and steering all mutations into place and imparting a kind of “artifical” selection on populations. I obviously can’t prove that there’s not such a thing. All I can state is that there’s no need to invent this hypothesis in the first place, it doesn’t explain anything in any greater detail, it doesn’t help us understand what’s going on, it doesn’t predict anything. It is, for all intents and purposes, superflous to requirements and therefore irrelevant. Useless.
This may not be the intended topic of discussion here, but to me the question about probabilities is made irrelevant by the falsity of the key premise:
This, of course, goes to the heart of the Dembski/Behe probabilistic arguments. And it is not a trivial matter: accepting the above thesis call for an epistemology that is different from that which underlies science, and ordinary reasoning as well. This point is clearly stated in a fairly obscure paper paper titled Toward a Rational Reconstruction of Design Inferences (2005) by philosopher Timothy McGrew. I think the paper provides a pretty good analysis, and it is also notable by the fact that McGrew is a theist and an ID proponent, though a critic of Dembski. McGrew compares Dembski’s theory of design inference with inference to the best explanation and Bayesian inference. Dembski’s approach fairs the worst in his analysis. But the important point to recognize is that accepting Dembski’s theory requires us to adopt a custom-designed epistemology to begin with.
Perhaps if you had a metric we could use to measure the functional organization of code and machinery we could examine the value of that metric before and after an evolutionary event such as the ‘Citrate’ event.
Do you have such a metric and details of how to calculate it?
Joe is rightfully scared of the required math, and tries move move the burden, but actually hurts ID on the way:
”
It is up to the Darwinists to provide the probabilities for their claims. THEY are making the claim that unguided evolution can produce it. THEY are the ones who need to defend that claim with actual scientific evidence.
But they cannot and they actually think that is our problem, ie ID’s problem. Strange, that.”
No – only one camp is making probability based claims – the ID camp. We’ve long understood the intractable nature of the math, the state-space is too large and imponderable. We’d need to know winning hands of games not yet devised.
Of course arguments from improbability come from ID’s creationist roots – Hoyle’s junkyard tornado, for example. I suppose they feel that science words can dress up an argument from incredulity to an argument from improbability. In this case it really hurts them, though. Without probabilities the first gate of the E.F. is impassable, and the design inference is unreachable.
KF says @ UD:
KF, if you would care to explain how those values can be calculated then we can look at “blind chance and mechanical necessity” to see if it can generate increases in those values. E.G. we can calculate before and after values for the ‘Citrate’ event and see if design theory is finished, or not.
Yet, as everyone is agreed, these cannot be calculated, ID can never be “finished”, and I think you know that….
Link
Yet you continue to make the claim that these metrics represent something that can be calculated (of the billions of examples of which you claim show dFSCI you can calculate it for precisely none).
and
I’m not interested in “billions” of tests. Just two would do, pre and post-Citrate.
William,
We covered this ground on the Darwin’s Doubt thread (page 5).
Incorrect logic, and a strawman.
But I did enjoy re-reading that page. 🙂
Absolutely. Darwinism certainly has no grounds to claim Darwinism is sufficient.
Scientific methodology simply does not allow us to conclude that X is a sufficient explanation for Y.
If only ID proponents would understand this, a lot of pixels could be saved.
Nobody claims that the probability of the bacterial flagellum evolving is P.
That’s because it’s an impossible thing to calculate. In fact, it’s incoherent – a probability is either a normalised frequency, based on observation, or conceivably, theory (In how many trials of X do you get Y?), or it’s a way of quantifying confidence.
So “what is the probability of a bacterial flagellum?” is a bit like asking “what is the probability of existence?” There is no coherent answer, unless also specify: given what? As in P(T|H).
But unless you can specify H precisely, then you cannot specify P(T|H). And nobody except IDists try to.
Then, when we say: but this is voodoo math (which it is), they turn round and say: “but you can’t do it either”.
No, we can’t. It can’t be done. Which is why we don’t try, and which is why nobody claims that any explanation in science is “sufficient”.
Instead, what we do is compare the predictive power of one model with another.
And ID can’t be compared with scientific models because it has no predictive power.
Good.
Of course there isn’t – you just assume your materialistic explanatory categories are sufficient. Then deny there is any way to demonstrate them sufficient – or insufficient. Well, isn’t that convenient?
It’s superflous only if one assumes their explanatory categories sufficient. One of the best things about ID is that it challenges that assumption and draws attention to it, which is why there has been so much work lately attempting to justify that assumption. Some of the defenders of that assumption are getting on the “infinite universes from nothing” bandwagon to defend that assumption, which IMO clearly indicates that such assumptions are not justifiable – in this universe, anyway.
It’s a bad sign when your best justification is “infinite universes that came from nothing”.
Demonstrate that “Greys” exist!
You can’t? Well, isn’t that convenient?
Your goal posts have inadvertently moved, William.
Yes, we make the assumption that “materialist” explanations are sufficient – it’s the working assumption that underpins science, and boils down to the stance that when we don’t have explanation, we don’t give up looking for one.
But we never conclude that any given “materialist” explanation is sufficient. Our methodology simply does not allow us to draw such an inference.
And the working assumption that phenomena have “materialist” explanations is very different from the conclusion, or the belief, that no “non-materialist” cause is possible.
And I put “materialist” in scare-quotes, because I think it is a rather meaningless term. All explanations are “materialist” in the sense that they are mechanistic. This is made manifest in the very definition of “supernatural” – something the defies explanation.
And, of course, by ID itself – ID if all “materialist” explanations are rejected. ID explains nothing – it is merely a default if all other explanations fail.
From what, to what?
It underpins your ideologically-constrained concept of science.
The problem is your ideological commitment to a particular kind of explanation and your ideological insistence that no other type of explanations are scientific.
I didn’t say you conclude it. I said you assume it. Concluding it would require a means which you admit you do not have.
Precluding non-materialist explanations from being considered is functionally the same as holding that they are not possible.
You mean, all explanations you accept as explanations.
From what source is that the “very definition” of “supernatural”?
You’ve offered nothing here but convenient, definitional fiats.
William, you could make a better case simply by outlining a research proposal that investigates non-materialistic explanations.
Can you give an example of a non-materialist explanation and how it could be tested for validity?
If you can’t, then perhaps you could give an example of a non-materialist explanation and show how it’s a better fit for what we’re currently explaining with materialist explanations?
If you can’t do any of these things, what precisely are you complaining about?
William, think a little more about what I just said.
My point is that what you are assuming is “ideologically-constrained” is methodologically constrained.
The ideology is irrelevant. A devout catholic like Ken Miller can use exactly the same science as an atheist, and get the same answer, because it is the assumption is methodological, not ideological.
If you want to reach the conclusion that a non-natural/supernatural/non-materialist entity is behind existence, or life, or whatever, you will have to use a different methodology.
Scientific methodology is not designed to demonstrate that any one cause, or set of causes, is sufficient to explain a phenomenon, so trying to falsify a scientific explanation by showing that it is “insufficient” is pointless.
Of course it is. All scientific explanations are insufficient.
But proving that they are doesn’t lead to the conclusion that that remaining explanations must be non-natural. It just leads to the conclusion that we don’t know everything.
William,
Out of interest, who is stopping you (or, in fact, anybody at all) from considering non-materialist explanations?
If you have an idea then feel free to investigate it and come to any conclusion you like! Nobody is stopping you.
And the fact is that should you find a non-materialist explanation that is a better explanation (i.e. explains more, makes better predictions) then the current explanation then it’ll be very popular!
But, of course, I suspect you are not here to provide such. You are, as usual, simply making the point that such things in your opinion should be considered, not that you have evidence etc for them. You are a “neutral” observer in all this, right?
pah.
There have been many scientific studies into what is traditionally called the supernatural – including mediumship, psi, OOBE, past lives, NDE/nonlocal consciousness, remote viewing, etc.
Yes indeed: but if you look closely, the methodology is just as normal: you make a predictive model, and you fit that model to data.
You do not ask: what is the probability that X was caused by Y? You either ask: if Z were true, how probable is it that we would see Y; or “is X a more probable explanation for Y than Z, given what we know about the probability of X, the probability of Y given X, the probability of Z, and the probability of Y given Z?
And X and or Z can be perfectly usual things like electrical forces or human beings, or they can be weird things like ghosts or souls – it makes no difference to the methodology. The world may well be full of ghosts and souls. If it is, science can detect it.
What Winston (and Dembski) are asking us to do is something quite different, which is simply to test the probability of X given Y, and then, if that is low enough, conclude Z, where Z is “intelligence”.
This is methodological nonsense.
Only to those so blinded by their own that they mistake it for reality.
I’ll restate it in a more appropriate manner: In order to reach a conclusion that a non-natural/supernatural/non-materialist is responsible for a phenomena, one’s methodology and ideology must allow for such a conclusion in the first place. Precluding it in the first place via ideology or methodology is to precluded a potentially true set of conclusions from being reached, thus (potentially) generating a cascading effect of false conclusions because true conclusions have been precluded.
Demonstrably false. That’s why we have dark matter and dark energy theories – because the known set of causes were insufficient to account for the evidence. This is why we have had all sorts of theories that replace old theories; the old theories are insufficient to explain the evidence.
Well, it certainly cannot lead to that conclusion if that conclusion is precluded, now can it? Circular argument – preclude conclusion category X; then say “we cannot conclude X”. Yeah, no kidding.
And did the results of these scientific studies support, say, psi?
From what I’ve read the more experiments you conduct on psi, the closer the results get to the margin of error.
And anyway, it seems that you have contradicted yourself here. If these are examples of scientific studies into what is traditionally called the supernatural, then nobody stopped them doing it, did they?
In fact, they are considered and then it is concluded that they are not possible.
Unless of course you have an example of such a study into the supernatural that actually has unambiguous results that support the existence of the supernatural?
That people study such things does not mean that those things actually exist.
You seem a very credulous person William. People investigate psi, therefore psi is a real thing? Hardly…
The methodology is intended to weed out all known, possible natural source conclusions in order to vet the outcomes as being product of “the supernatural”; a conclusion they could not come to if their methodology was arranged and results interpreted in a way that precluded “the supernatural” from being a candidate explanation.
Demonstrate an alternative methodology then and apply it! Or is that not your job as an “observer”?
William, what has been the conclusion of the various tests of Psi? Can you outline a test that you would find satisfactory?
When the God of the gaps has to be put into one of the oldest, least-remaining-evidence, and (apparently) most difficult events in the evolution of life, you know that the anti-evolutionists (design isn’t evolution, no matter how small and numerous the interventions) are getting desperate for material.
Let’s see, what are the odds that life would exhibit the limitations of non-teleological evolution, in terms of time, (lack of) novelty, and in cross-inheritance, without non-teleological evolution being responsible?
Nice shift of “burden of proof.” IDists have no actual explanation for anything at all, but hey, if we can’t explain one of the most remote evolutionary incidents, evolution fails, despite its massive successes where evidence is far more abundant.
I suppose it’s even possible that an alien invented the bacterial flagellum. That wouldn’t change the fact that almost everything else not only shows no more evidence for design than the flagellum does, almost everything exhibits evidence against any such design.
ID can never be science until it actually cares about explanations, rather than ignoring explanations that do exist in order to pretend that any extant question in science (or anyway, in the sciences that they oppose without reason) destroys science (that they don’t like).
Glen Davidson
No. The methodology (at least in psi) is to establish that human beings are able to predict the outcome of events without access to known sources of information.
If that can be shown (and it has not been), then we can conclude that there is something about the way human beings acquire knowledge that we cannot at present explain.
It does not allow us to conclude that anything “supernatural” is involved – and I’m not even sure what that would mean.
However, it might lead to a very different understanding of the way the world works from the one we have at present.
And nothing in our current methodology prevents us from doing that.
Oh dear. Joe’s utter miscomprehension is laid bare:
“Hey Lizzie use Dawkins’ “weasel”, remove the target phrase from the program, run it and see if that phrase ever pops up, ie have the program halt when it hits it or comes within some % > 50- without also using it as a selection coefficient. That would model unguided evolution.”
The *most* basic model is RM&NS. I’m not sure why you’d offer this strawman of RM only. The environment clearly selects as evidenced by survival not being orthogonal to environmental factors.
Joe needs to go away and learn the very, very basics before complaining we won’t do math for him.
The outcome is irrelevant to the argument about whether or not scientific methods can be applied to reach supernatural conclusions.
The fact atht there are so many spoon benders in the arena of Psi does not speak well for the discipline or for the people who continue to believe.
The 20 some year experiment at Duke University suggests that as you improve the experimental design, the phenomenon disappears.
There are less theological analogies. One of my hobbies is audio, and the arena is full of people promoting magic wire and magic components, and ignoring double blind experiments.
They can’t. They can reach the conclusion: we do not currently have an explanation for this. They cannot reach the conclusion: “no natural explantion is possible”.
This is absolutely critical.
The huge problem with ID is that it is nominally about “intelligence” as a cause, but turns out to be about the supernatural as a cause, which is ultimately incoherent.
Intelligence isn’t supernatural; it’s perfectly within the domain of scientific investigation. But to investigate it as a hypothetical explanation for a phenomenon, you have to be able to derive predictions from it.
ID doesn’t do this. It simply defaults to “intelligence” in the absence of any other known explanation.
It might be a perfectly good hypothesis – but it needs testing: what are the characteristics of this putative intelligent agent? What purpose does it seem to have in mind? How did it fabricate its artefacts? Is it still active in the world?
But none of these questions are ever tackled by ID proponents – indeed, they are ruled out of its domain of enquiry.
I think Elizabeth argued pretty well that if we detect a Psi phenomenon through experiment, it becomes amenable to scientific methodology. the fact that we initially can’t explain it is irrelevant.
Gravity is as magical as anything proposed by Psi believers, and 400 years after Galileo, we still can’t account for all of its properties.
I think you misunderstand what science is and what it does.
The goal is not to disprove God, but to discover regularities in phenomena.
That only looks like atheism to someone whose earthly power and influence depend on finding capricious phenomena.
Has such a scientific investigation resulted in a supernatural conclusion?
Even once?
It’s clear that the requirement for the designer to be non-natural is driving this. IDists know that the “designer” is god therefore supernatural conclusions have to be allowed in science for ID to be science. Simples!
Good. Then your entire argument based on an idiosyncratic definition of the term “supernatural” has been shown to be false. Scientific methods can be used to reach positive conclusions concerning what is commonly and traditionally termed “the supernatural”.
Regardless of whether or not any current formulations of the ID argument are valid, there is no reason why intelligent teleology cannot be quantified as a detectable characteristic in various artifacts (which is now done informally).
Furthermore, the metaphysical insistence of Darwinists that Darwinism is sufficient is not supportable unless a formal means of vetting such artifacts is found. IOW, if ID is not “scientific” because it has no valid metric and cannot make predictions, then Darwinism is not scientific for the same reasons.
The problem for Darwinists, though, is that we know that ID exists (as a human capacity) and we know the kinds of things it makes that are distinguishable from things normally considered to be natural (as opposed to artificial). At the least, Darwinism appears to be well insufficient to produce the kinds of functionality found in a living cell, and ID appears to be abetter suited explanation.
Which is why the materialist assumptions are being challenged, just as they are challenged (albeit in a different way) when it comes to other research.
Examples of spooky phenomena that have been investigated (some of which are still elusive) are quantum phenomena, bird and insect migration, bee dances, dark matter and dark energy.
Yes, there are assumptions that there are regular and that our understanding of them will improve.
What stance is better?
Psi with its failure at attempts to corroborate it raise a good question–why doesn’t biology have radio communication, or some such thing? After all, that was sort of the idea for a lot of its proponents, that through technology we have radio–it wasn’t that hard to invent–so why can’t fields or waves of some sort provide us with ESP?
Not bad thinking if you suppose we were designed. After all, we’d make robots with radio communication or its equivalent, not sticking with the limits of audible communication. Yes, but evolving radio communication isn’t at all straightforward, and apparently no organism ever managed to get up to the plate there, hence no ESP. At least none is demonstrable.
No, design does not provide us with insight into life’s possibilities and limitations. Evolution does, because it’s based on the evidence. Yet somehow we’re unwilling to accord similar status to the utter failures of this world, like ID.
Glen Davidson
And we can do this precisely because we know a lot about the motives and capabilities of humans and nest builders and web builders.
Do snowflakes (absent mechanism) have less FSCI than spider webs? Can you demonstrate this mathematically without reference to knowledge of how they are formed?
Soooo, somehow this is now a discussion about “ideology” underpinning science, instead of trying to assign probabilities to evolutionary explanations. I take it this is functionally equivalent to an admission that no ID theorist actually has a method for assigning such probabilities.
Instead we now have to hear about how science is biased against god and similar invisible garage dragons.
His question is consistent with the observation, discussed here recently, that all of the CSI-related alphabet soup of “metrics” proposed by the intelligent design creationists at UD boil down to Hoyle’s tornado in a junkyard fallacy.
Nonetheless, after participating in these discussions for so long, even someone with JoeG’s demonstrated unwillingness and inability to learn should realize the flaw in his suggestion. My personal suspicion is that his goal is to say anything at all to derail any risk that an IDC prediction might be made testable.
I’m not giving traffic to UD, but I would be interested to know if any IDCist corrects him. This sounds like a job for Kairosfocus and Mr. Leathers.
Appears like that to you, and by your own admission you are not a scientist nor have you studied biology.
So what value does this conclusion have? None whatsoever. Unless, of course, you can provide some.
Tell me William, do you have a list of what Darwinism can and cannot do?
Evolution is not unguided in any sense that matters.
It may not be guided by a purposeful agent, but it is most certainly guided in the sense that the paths it can take are highly constrained.
A serious question William on that I’d appreciate you answering.
What is that better explanation that you claim ID can provide for the functionality in the cell?
Even neutral drift is highly constrained. It’s still natural selection, just not preferential to one successful variant over another.