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.
Of course. The first of any real consequences was an investigation into mediumship by Sir William Crookes, who – along with Alfred Russell Wallace – concluded that the case they investigated – Florence Cook – was true mediumship.
More recently, Nobel Prize winner Brian Josephson has concluded that the evidence for the existence of psi is as conclusive as the evidence for the efficacy of aspirin in reducing one’s chances of heart attacks, and recommends the book: Parapsychology and the Skeptics: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of ESP for those that want to look over the scientific evidence for psi.
Whether or not the research supports the existence of supernatural phenomena is irrelevant, though, to the question of if scientific methods can be used to vet phenomena as non-natural in either sense – supernatural, or artificial. The answer is of course it can; only those wedded to ideological materialism would claim that the method of science cannot be used to make such determinations.
It is claimed to be unguided in the only sense that matters in the debate at hand.
I don’t even know what that “sufficiency” gobbledygook means. I don’t “assume” anything, I make models that attempt to explain datasets. I modify and discard the models depending on how well they explain the datasets. If new data doesn’t fit the predictions of the current model, I discard it or modify it and make a better model.
It’s not only not convenient, it’s simply manifestly incorrect. If the model cannot explain the dataset, it is discarded or modified accordingly.
Now along comes ID theorists and claim they have a methodology for reliably distinguishing between datasets that originated due to design and due to evolutionary processes. I look at their methodology and discover they don’t actually include the evolutionary model, but a tornado in a junkyard strawman version of it instead. I point this out to cdesignproponentsists, they complain that I don’t have a way to assign a probability to my model either.
Well shit, I’m not the one claiming to be in posession of a method that can detect design. I just have my model which explains the current dataset and makes testable predictions. I ID theorists wishes to supplant the evolutionary model, they need to make a better one that explains all the sama data but also makes testable predictions.
That it was organized by an intelligent agency, of course.
Better question: do Darwinists?
No, it is claimed we don’t have a falsifiable method for detecting the kind of guidance you allude to. It is literally fits-all. There is no concievable explanation you cannot rationalize “could have been what the designer wanted”. Therefore this kind of guidance theorizing is useless, it predicts nothing in particular and therefore explains nothing. So I have to ask, why postulate this kind of guidance in the first place? How can we reliably distinguish between this kind of guidance and not?
That admission was also made by Dawkins and other biologists – that nature and biological features give the appearance of design. That so many now are working so hard to explain that appearance of design even if they must resort to an infinite multiverse of necessary entities (including universes that would have a designing god) demonstrates that this issue is a real problem for those that would deny that the apparent design is actually design.
How, when, where? Testable explanations please. So far, your “explanation” is not a testable model, but a rationalization.
Yes. Does the predictions of the model fit with the data? If not, the model needs to be modified or discarded.
Ewert is refreshingly honest about the uselessness of CSI:
However, he’s wrong about the intent. Here’s Dembski:
Which is a perfectly good hypothesis. But to go head-to-head with an alternative, estimate the probabilities for that too – what is the probability of a bacterial flagellum, given ID? And once you’ve got P(Flagellum|Evolution) and P(Flagellum|ID) you also need P(Evolution) and P(ID). With all those you can estimate the relative likelihoods of each being the explanation for the flagellum.
But as you will readily see, there’s a problem in estimating quite a number of those values, unless you get a bit more specific about the putative ID!
Ewert:
No, the “absurdly low probability”, if it could be established, would provide the justification by itself. “Specified complexity” is completely unnecessary, as it is simply a restatement of that low probability.
That would be Dembski. See my previous comment.
ID theory has nothing to do with “what the designer wanted” per se, and thus has no need to offer such “explanations”.
The reason to postulate it is because it may be true and at least at first blush (as admitted by many if not most biologists) such features appear to be designed, and such a postulate may lead to more correct inferences and further avenues of research/investigation not available under the “no teleology/no intelligence” paradigm.
Much of biological research is already done under the ID paradigm as researchers attempt to decode DNA, reverse-engineer optimum designs for practical applications, and attempt to decipher what certain artifacts are “for”, or are supposed to do. The obvious usefulness of the design paradigm lies in what it assumes about biology, in contrast to Darwinism; instead of expecting to find junk and a hodge-podge of happenstance accumulations of errors, if one instead assumed intelligence such things as forwards and backwards coding in DNA, semiotic relationships, horizontal transfers, epigenetics and convergent evolution would be expected, not shocking, startling results that are only admitted begrudgingly as they seem to contradict current evolutionary frameworks which must then be adapted to fit the new data.
We would instead expect that we would find broad usefulness, deep coding, superior engineering, dedicated systems, and fluid, dynamic adaptive programming, etc. We would go looking for things we might expect to find if a designing intelligence had been in charge of the project. Where would I put this? How would I do that? Let’s go look here and see if we can find an X that would do Y if G condition arose.
Further, we might look to see if the coding can be manipulated in some way via intention or consciousness (which some work has already progressed) and if DNA has non-materialistic/quantum properties that work to shape biological forms. Materialism is resistant (perhaps immune) to such ideas, but they are avenues of investigation opened up via a design mindset.
Not according to Liz – whom I agree with. “Darwinism” cannot predict anything without the same metric ID would require. If ID has no such metric, neither does Darwinism.
You’re simlply flat out mistaken here.
Could you cite where I said what you agree with? I may have been unclear.
No, it’s an organizational framework of how to interpret data and guide further investigation and research. The reason it qualifies as “better” than Darwinism is because if we postulate there is no metric that can formally discern which has the higher probability of being the cause of complex, biological features, then that is a wash and what we are left with is the admission by biologists that such features have the appearance of being designed. They do not have the appearance of being a hodge-podge of copy errors navigated by a survival differential. Lewontin explicitly admitted this.
It also qualifies as “better” because Darwinists are constantly being surprised and shocked by they depth and breadth of the functional complexity and innovation found in biology; instead of being shocked by it and begrudgingly admitting to it, we need a framework where we are deliberately searching for that which Darwinism is ideologically resistant to – instead of looking at feature X and issuing a narrative about how it is poorly engineered, one might rather ask – why does this appear to be poorly engineered? What purpose could this “junk” serve? Why might it be necessary to design it this way, instead of what we think would be a better design?
It’s a whole different framework of thought than materialism provides. IMO, a better framework is to assume everything was designed by a master designer, well beyond the capacity of humans, and then form investigatory avenues built around that assumption instead of the “it’s mostly junk” paradigm, which has failed repeatedly.
Dembski’s big problem (or one of them) is he often regards “intelligent” and “not natural” as interchangeable.
Many of us think that intelligence is perfectly natural. But assuming it isn’t, at the start, would mean assuming your conclusion.
Ewert is correct in implying that the flagellum is absurdly improbable. That is, if you were around 3 billion years ago it would be absurdly unlikely that you could predict what structure would evolve along with the sequences of all the proteins involved. But something had to happen and it was a fair bet it would be an increase in complexity. The answer to this argument hinges on the difference between writing out the names of the last 20 winners of the lottery and writing out the next 20 winners of the lottery.
Why so many very smart people with background in stats would continure to make crappy arguments like this is beyond me. At least Ewert gets to the valid argument on protein probability space put forward by Axe. We may not be able to predict who will win the next Powerball lottery but we can predict that someone will win…unless we happen to know that only 5 people will play the lottery this week. Then its 1 in 100 million that anyone will win. If the space of functional proteins is astronomically low compared to all protein sequences then it could be argued that you need a designer to find/predict functional proteins. This argument fails completely but at least its a valid proposition and fails for technical reasons.
Where?
And how did he (or anyone) know what “a hodge-podge of copy errors navigated by a survival differential” (lovely phrase!) would look like?
William, in non-biological contexts, what is junk?
I don’t think so. “News” at ID (and Hunter, at Darwin’s God) are constantly telling their readers that “Darwinists” are “shocked” by some new complexity. Even though those revealing the complexity are almost always “Darwinists”, and evidence of “shock” is rarely or ever forthcoming! Mostly, in my experience, the reaction from Darwinists is “cool!”
So you claim, but how in the hell can you then reason by analogy to what a designer would do when analysing features of living organisms?
A lot of things may be true. What matters is whether it’s possible to find out.
And what is not available there? That’s the point of this discussion. How to distinguish cases of “teleology”/”design” from not.
It’s all well and good to sit here now decades after the fact and declare that all these things were expected by design theory. What does ID actually predict that we can go look for?
Concrete, testable predictions please. Put some numbers on it, if you can.
I see you’re a pupil of the David “origin of life foundation department of ProtoBioCyberneticSemiotics” Abel’s school of nonsensical technobabble. It might sound really impressive to the uninitiated, but the rest of us who can decipher this kind of terminology are unimpressed.
Concrete, testable predictions please. Put some numbers on it, if you can.
… more vaguities.
Concrete, testable predictions please. Put some numbers on it, if you can.
Ahh, the “Non-materialistic/quantum properties”. Why didn’t I think of that.
Good one Bill. *facepalm*
Well, it’s not like they’re going to start with the evidence.
Glen Davidson
As, there are more ways of being more complex than ways of being less, yes. It’s so much easier to add stuff on than take stuff off.
Also, I’d say, it was fair bet it would be an increase in mobility.
I once sat through a seminar given by Josephson. It was about the “wave function of life” and it was awful.
As I and another physicist were walking out near the end of the seminar, I said to my colleague, “Whew, that was weird!” My colleague said, “One of the disadvantages of the Nobel Prize is that someone who has it can spout complete bullshit and there will be other people who will automatically believe it.”
RodW,
Of course, ID proponents would argue that the specification is much more general than that — for example, “a propulsion device with certain capabilities”.
The problem is that they can’t even quantify the probability of a flagellum, much less a generic propulsion device, under the hypothesis of “natural causes”.
This is a prediction of the ToE according to Darwin?
Could you give an example not related to life?
I’m not sure they’d be that generous. I think they are specifically looking for a flagellum, as if the flagellum was pre-ordained…was ‘fate’
This is related to question #7 (?) on the Quiz for Critics of ID…ie. could the designer design by merely controlling the enviroment that organisms evolve in. The answer is a resounding ‘NO’ because you cant predict ( with some exceptions) how an organism will evolve. If you want creature X to evolve hair you need to genetically engineer in all of the genes to make hair. But putting a few million of creature X in a cold enviroment for a few million years wont do the trick. There are many ways creature X can evolve cold tolerance…or they can just become extinct, but hair is extremely unlikely.
No. Life (self-replication capacity essentially) is a prerequisite.
Off course!, Then they say:
“Here I have a good probability of get grants and found a good story to make the data fit in ToE.”
Given bacteria, yes.
This is the point – “probability”, naked, is meaningless. Probability given what?
No its an observation about the natural world. Natural laws work on simple objects to produce more complex objects. Laws operate again to produce slighly more complex objects by an iterative process. When the ‘object’ has been transformed enough that it can interact with a differnt natural law we’d call that ’emergence’ and the increase in complexity continues. The origin and evolution of life is just this process on steriods.
Here’s some peer reviewed articles on Ecological Selection for our evolution-challenged friends at Uncommon Descent:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ecological+selection&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C44&as_sdtp=
Clearly the environment selects.
Can you explain what makes “life” so different from “non life”?
Yes – I put it in brackets: self-replication, essentially.
Although I would probably want to add: “self-replication with variation”.
Once you have that, the probability that the population of self-replicators will evolve neat tricks for surviving and reproducing in their current environment becomes very high, and if the environment means that increased mobility increases reproductive rate, things that increase mobility will probably evolve.
No, they don’t.
The second law of termodinamics was falsified then?
Amen.
I should say that if a “materialist” or “materialist science” involves rejection of quantum mechanics, I am not a materialist and I don’t do materialist science.
What is a self replicator? Is it “live”? What makes it increase complexity? What makes it self replicate?
So what you are saying is that for decades the classic “scientist in a lab coat” image of someone honestly trying to progress the sum of human knowledge should have been more like a venal, grasping, liar who is solely out for themselves and what they can get and has no problems twisting and distorting whatever needs lying about just so they can get their next fix of grant money?
And furthermore, they have found each other and entered into a worldwide conspiracy to keep their story straight to keep the funds coming in?
I tell you what Blas, find a grant that was given out to something which you believe it should not have been and explain why. There are plenty of grant search engines out there, use one. Explain in detail why the grant you’ve chosen should not have been given. For bonus points, explain how it could be re-written from an ID perspective and then become acceptable to you.
If you want to play a scientist, play one! Provide some evidence for your claim! Or apologise for smearing thousands of people.
No.
If you claim that they do, give an example and explain your reasoning. Or withdraw your claim!
As a creationist, you should be aware that any claim you are likely to make has already been repeatedly addressed over the years and your error documented in the Index of Creationist Claims.
Please read the explanation of how evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, then go forth and sin no more (assuming you subscribe to the idea that bearing false witness is a sin).
The clue is in the name
Define alive. Do you think viri are alive?
There are more ways to become complex then to become simple.
What ‘makes’ water flow downhill?
Something that gives rise to copies of itself. Replicates itself.
Depends how you want to define “life”, but self-replication with variation is the prerequisite for evolution, and all living things do it.
A population of individuals that self-replicate with variation will tend to end up with more complex individuals over time, because there are more ways in which a think can be complex than simple, and unless complexity is disadvantageous, it will tend to accumulate. It even happens in very simple self-replicating systems that we don’t normally call “live”, such as crystals.
Physics and chemistry is the proximal answer. More distally, we don’t yet know how the first self-replicators got going, but there are some promising leads.
And this idea that scientists are motivated solely to get grant money, regardless of whether they believe their results, is ludicrous.
Scientists do science because they want to find things out. To do that, grant money is useful. But you wouldn’t choose science as a way of getting grant money, and you don’t get to spend it on yourself anyway.
I guess it helps pay your salary, but there are one heck of a lot of easier ways to get a salary.
No. lol
You don’t understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Freud smiles.
I do not said that “evolution” or “life” violates the second law of termodinamics. But the second law of termodinamics implies “that” things tend to less complex, less ordered structures.