Signature in the Cell
Posted October 6th, 2009 by Ken Peterson
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This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. The book set off what has been at times a ferocious argument concerning the validity and scope of his theories. A new book by Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, is not about the transmutation of species over time. Rather, it is about a much older controversy that has extended for thousands of years concerning the origin of life, something that Darwin did not really address in his book. This old controversy has often been between two essential poles: materialistic naturalism (time plus random, undirected chance) or God.
For example, we can see elements of this controversy played out in the Bible over the centuries of its development. For the sake of brevity I will only note Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”) and Psalms 14:1 (“The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”) In the 150 years since 1859 the dominant scientific establishment has, it is fair to say, fully embraced the “materialistic naturalism” model generally and specifically as applied to origins.
Signature in the Cell proposes to revisit the origins controversy particularly in light of the discovery over 50 years ago of DNA and the enormous advances in our knowledge of cellular biology and information theory since then. Meyer does this using the motif of his personal journey toward understanding what he calls “the DNA enigma.” This enigma is “the mystery of the origin of the information needed to build the first living organism.” Until such a first life exists Darwinian evolution cannot commence.
Thus, Meyer’s book, if he can successfully carry the burden of proof, is probably one of the most important books since Copernicus challenged the prevailing scientific notion 566 years ago that the Earth was the center of the universe. Here, Meyer methodically challenges the central doctrine of today’s scientific establishment that life arose from purely undirected materialistic and naturalistic forces in the absence of intelligence.
The book itself is a little over 600 pages in length, although the last 100 is made up of footnotes, bibliography and index. Meyer, currently the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, tells his story of going to Cambridge University in the mid-1980s as he earns his Ph. D. in the history and philosophy of science. He investigates various relevant questions and narrates his odyssey to marshal the evidence necessary to provide answers. His writing is lucid and straight-forward. To a non-scientist the material is not always easy given the details he presents, so it is not really bedtime reading. I especially appreciated, however, that he handled those who disagree with him respectfully and openly. The story is engaging and the fascinating history he shares is helpful to provide a context for today’s controversy.
While the book chronicles and explains a host of issues, I was fascinated by the discussion of random chance and the assembly of the minimum amount of proteins necessary for “simple” life to function. According to Meyer the “simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium — a tiny bacterium that inhabits the human urinary tract — requires ‘only’ 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions….” If, for the sake of argument, we assume the existence of the 20 biologically occurring amino acids, which form the building blocks for proteins, the amino acids have to congregate in a definite specified sequence in order to make something that “works.” First of all they have to form a “peptide” bond and this seems to only happen about half the time in experiments. Thus, the probability of building a chain of 150 amino acids containing only peptide links is about one chance in 10 to the 45th power.
In addition, another requirement for living things is that the amino acids must be the “left-handed” version. But in “abiotic amino-acid production” the right- and left-handed versions are equally created. Thus, to have only left-handed, only peptide bonds between amino acids in a chain of 150 would be about one chance in 10 to the 90th. Moreover, in order to create a functioning protein the “amino acids, like letters in a meaningful sentence, must link up in functionally specified sequential arrangements.” It turns out that the probability for this is about one in 10 to the 74th. Thus, the probability of one functional protein of 150 amino acids forming by random chance is 10 to the 164th. If we assume some minimally complex cell requires 250 different proteins then the probability of this arrangement happening purely by chance is one in 10 to the 164th multiplied by itself 250 times or one in 10 to the 41,000th power.
That sounded like a pretty big number to me, making it a very small possibility, but is there a way to judge how small? Is there some point at which we can say that such a number is essentially “impossible”? It turns out there may be. Meyer points out there are about 10 to the 80th elementary particles in our observable universe. Assuming a Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, there have been about 10 to the 16th seconds of time. Finally, if we take the time required for light to travel one Plank length we will have found “the shortest time in which any physical effect can occur.” This turns out to be 10 to the minus 43rd seconds. Or turning it around we can say that the most interactions possible in a second is 10 to the 43rd. Thus, the “probabilistic resources” of the universe would be to multiply the total number of seconds by the total number of interactions per second by the total number of particles theoretically interacting. The math turns out to be 10 to the 139th.
If Meyer stopped here and simply asserted that “since undirected, random chance cannot produce even one protein (given the entire resources of the universe) then life must be attributable to an Intelligent Designer,” he would be guilty of something that he strenuously denies: relying on a “God of the gaps” argument. Meyer does not do this. Instead, he explains “abductive reasoning” which enables one to come up with the “best explanation” of a particular unique historical event. He calls this a “historical scientific theory.” In fact, Meyer says that Darwin and his contemporary, Charles Lyell, the father of geology, used such reasoning themselves to explain their theories. In short, “God of the gaps” argues from ignorance whereas “Inference to the Best Explanation” argues from knowledge. Of course, knowledge is continually expanding so any conclusion must be continuously re-evaluated in light of such advances.
When I met Meyer shortly after the book was published and heard him describe this theory and its critics, it occurred to me that many defenders of materialistic naturalism may themselves be guilty of arguing from ignorance. Meyer agreed. The purely materialistic argument essentially appears to be:
Premise One: No materialistic cause of specified complex information is known.
Conclusion: Therefore, it must arise from an unknown materialistic cause.
On the other hand, Meyer describes the intelligent design argument as follows:
“Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
“Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
“Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell.”
Meyer devotes two chapters to discussing various arguments that have been made against intelligent design. I will only briefly mention the objection by some that intelligent design is not science because it cannot be falsified and “makes no testable predictions.” Meyer insists that this objection is completely false specifically because it indeed can be falsified by simply showing that “large amounts of functionally specified information do arise from purely chemical and physical antecedents” or that specified information “[was] not present in living systems.” As to predictions, Meyer also points out that intelligent design has been better at predicting the value of “junk” DNA than the competing materialistic evolutionary theories.
Finally I will mention that Meyer persuasively argues that intelligent design is not “religious” any more than any other scientific theory. The conclusion is not required by reference to any supposed “divine revelation.” It does not point to any religion at all to identify the designer. It uses standard lines of scientific reasoning and logic to arrive at its conclusions and it looks to the best evidence known today to determine whether there is explanatory power. Specifically, intelligent design as an explanation for the information required to build the first living organism says nothing about the age of the earth, whether Allah, Jehovah or Brahma has any relevance, whether the Bible is the Word of God or any other doctrine in a long list of “religious” topics and points of discussion. As with any theory dealing with foundational issues, such as the Big Bang, there certainly may be implications for a larger conversation, but the conclusion of either theory is not required because of any religious viewpoint or doctrine.
If intelligent design does not pretend to be able to identify the Christian God as the Intelligent Designer, why should Adventists be interested in this book? In my view Adventists generally have been among a minority in the contemporary larger church that have simultaneously emphasized the value of education yet not given up their belief in a God who specifically created life by a special act and not simply by setting up various physical laws that then were left on their own. One of the denomination’s founders wrote long ago: “All true science is in harmony with His works….We are thus led to adore the Creator and to have an intelligent trust in His word.” (Patriarchs and Prophets, 115, 116) Thus, if the theory of intelligent design is in fact the best explanation, we can more easily acquire such “intelligent trust” it seems to me.
As the controversy over intelligent design shows, the scientific establishment abhors this view and to date has pretty well succeeded in shouting down any hint of real, as opposed to apparent, design. Meyer’s tome is the first book to take the amazing discoveries in biology, mathematics and chemistry over the last 50 years and develop a theory using the acknowledged scientific reasoning of Lyell and Darwin to demonstrate why it is perfectly scientific to assert that life was designed. Adventists should be delighted to see such an ambitious attempt, and, if convinced of its veracity, support its promulgation.
For those interested in the history and philosophy of origins and in the present controversy over the “establishment” understanding, this is a helpful book. For those wishing to have a better understanding of DNA and a “simple cell,” this is an astonishing book. For those who wish to honestly consider what is the best explanation for the origin of specified complex information found in living things, this is an invaluable book. For those who have for whatever reason gravitated to the general proposition that design seems to make intuitive sense, this is an essential book so you can appreciate there is a scientific foundation for your belief. For those who disagree with intelligent design this is the crucial book you must have so as to understand your opponent’s best arguments.
One thing is for certain: Meyer has produced a forceful and comprehensive book clearly expounding the case for intelligent design and the discussion about the origin of life will never be the same.
Ken Peterson writes from Camas, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Claudia, and 17-year-old son. Their daughter is in graduate school in California. A recovering lawyer, Ken now manages a private equity investment portfolio. He is on the boards of Adventist Forum and the Washington Policy Center.
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Comments
The recent discovery and DNA analysis of Ardi conflicts with some of the ID premises. What explanation has yet been offered by those Creationists to explain how she is neither fully human, as we are today, nor is she any known species. Why haven't the Creationists introduced their ideas on this?
Why do these incredibly long books make the most elementary mistakes? Maybe because the only way you can be emotionally committed enough to write such a book is to be irrational enough to not understand the issues!
>>> According to Meyer the “simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium — a tiny bacterium that inhabits the human urinary tract — requires ‘only’ 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions…. [[long winded silly probability calculation]]”
Meyer forgets,
In short, Meyer is either stupid or dishonest.
>>> "In addition, another requirement for living things is that the amino acids must be the “left-handed” version. But in “abiotic amino-acid production” the right- and left-handed versions are equally created. "
Yes, they are. Which is one of the reasons why evolution has a more plausible explanation that YEC. God could just as easily made half the life on earth be made out of the right-handed version - one possible the reason that one form prevails is because it out-breed the other.
/Bevin
First, I admit that my understanding of this whole subject is elemental at best. But it sounds to me like this author isn't speaking to YEC at all. If we believe in both God and in seeking to understand the natural world, then it seems that we could accept both Intelligent Design and deep time. Most of all, I think this whole debate should inspire us to humility and a recognition of how little we know, both of God and Creation.
When I met Meyer shortly after the book was published and heard him describe this theory and its critics, it occurred to me that many defenders of materialistic naturalism may themselves be guilty of arguing from ignorance. Meyer agreed. The purely materialistic argument essentially appears to be:
Premise One: No materialistic cause of specified complex information is known.
Conclusion: Therefore, it must arise from an unknown materialistic cause.
This is a completely false way of portraying science's position.
The fact is that science requires that sufficient evidence be presented to make a claim. Many label the kinds of evidence that can be gathered from the "natural world" as "materialistic causes," when the entire point is not "material" but epistemology. If you have evidence of a "non-material cause," then present it. If it can pass epistemic standards, then it will be considered. If it's so much arm-waving, like ID is, then it isn't science.
Darwin took Paley's arguments quite seriously, despite the fact that Paley didn't hesitate from identifying "the Designer" as God. That's because Paley considered his Creator God to have identifiable effects, those of an "artificer or architect." One might argue about science and Paley and just how scientific he really was, but so long as entailed predictions were made within a meaningful framework, one could at least treat Paley's ideas like science. "Material causes" aren't important, nor are they really anything but constructs.
Science requires sufficient causes, that's all. Meyer has no sufficient identifiable cause, rather he avoids meaningful design principles and causation, because he knows that nature won't support any honest design predictions. The constant drumbeat about "material causation" is merely a smokescreen for the fact that Meyer doesn't in the slightest meet the challenge of providing sufficient evidence for his claims.
Glen Davidson
Meyer devotes two chapters to discussing various arguments that have been made against intelligent design. I will only briefly mention the objection by some that intelligent design is not science because it cannot be falsified and “makes no testable predictions.” Meyer insists that this objection is completely false specifically because it indeed can be falsified by simply showing that “large amounts of functionally specified information do arise from purely chemical and physical antecedents” or that specified information “[was] not present in living systems.”
How is "showing that 'large amounts of functionally specified information do arise from purely chemical and physical antecedents'" a test of ID?
The fact is that it is actually an application of the false dilemma that pseudoscientists such as IDists constantly employ. It is a fallacy. The fact is that such a "test" (practically very difficult) is really only a test of abiogenesis, not of ID at all. Meyer is being disingenous by claiming that it is a test of ID.
And the other "test" is another sham, virtually akin to saying that we can show that life wasn't created simply by showing that a creator doesn't exist. It is most dishonest by assuming that the default is the existence of "specified information" existing in living systems, when in fact the ones making the claim that it exists are supposed to come up with entailed predictions for their "hypothesis."
That is to say, if you're claiming that "specified information" existed in living organisms from the beginning, you need to come up with tests for it, which is something other than that "it exists". The "test for ID" isn't that we have to disprove claims that have no evidence for them in the first place.
As to predictions, Meyer also points out that intelligent design has been better at predicting the value of “junk” DNA than the competing materialistic evolutionary theories.
What's a "materialist evolutionary theory" other than an epistemologically sound evolutionary theory that Meyer would junk without meeting the same requirements for ID?
Beyond that, how did ID predict the value of "junk DNA"? We need theory, or at least a solid idea, that might actually provide design constraints that would predict the value of "junk DNA," and yet IDists constantly tell us that examples of "poor design" (and the point is not that "poor design" is simply not "good design," but that virtually all of it is due to predicted evolutionary constraints) or of non-functional (or at least very low functionality) organs mean nothing because we don't know the purposes behind design. So how would this differ where "junk DNA" is concerned?
Well, in fact there is "junk DNA," certainly in some dead genes (vitamin C gene in humans), and quite probably in tandem repeats and in ERVs (not understanding such DNA to have no bulk function, that is). So how do IDists account for this? Oh, they don't, most won't claim that all DNA has to be functional (well, why not?), they don't have anything that actually predicts how much would be functional and how much would not be, they just claim that because some "junk DNA" turns out to have functions (most scientists suspected that at least some did, of course) that some vague "predictions" of ID have come true.
It's a total crock, because today's ID has no theory, no meaningful constraints, and thus no ability to predict. That's because they have completely avoided using actual design to make predictions for the simple fact that life doesn't support honest ID predictions, like those that Paley made. Until IDists actually come up with a meaningful theory, they will have no honest predictions, and at present they can make no claims that ID has made any entailed predictions that have come true.
Glen Davidson
Bevin and Elaine, what a pair you are!
Elaine, Ardi is completely off the subject of intelligent design, or Stephen Meyer's book.
Bevin, if Meyer had based his probability numbers on a hypothetical simplest organism possible, you'd criticize him for not using a real organism, for making up a critter, then basing his statistical calculations on the product of his own imagination. It wouldn't matter. The numbers are so staggering that any hypothical organism can be better explained by design than by chance.
"God could just as easily made half the life on earth be made out of the right-handed version" is what passes for an argument in Bevinworld.
This is not about science, it's about religion and politics, specfically Dominionism/Reconstructionism, IMO.
Discovery Institute disavows Theocracy, but Meyers' book is listed on the "Rushdooney" page of the Tools of Dominion web site.
http://www.toolsofdominion.com/shop.php?k=stephen+c+meyer&c=1
The word "Rushdooney" doesn't give you pause? The word "Dominion" doesn't give you pause?
I would hope SDAs would be wise as serpents about getting tangled up with all this.
I can't agree more with Bevin's post where he says: The "simplest extant cell" has been evolving for the same period of time as you or I.
I also find his 500 page book to be ridiculous when the premise is faulty. There is no reason to believe that life even started as any type of organism that we know today. To extrapolate back from a modern organism doesn't raise the level of certainty in his conclusion to anything resembling even a weak level.
Just the recent published findings on the propagation of RNA makes his conclusions out of date, yet he seems comfortable publishing material based on the "latest" discoveries from the 1980's.
MaggieB, that is a terribly unfair guilt by association argument you're making. Because they list his book on their website doesn't mean he agrees with their extreme ideas.
Do you have any real evidence that Meyer agrees with Rushdoony's ideas? Or did you just want to throw a skunk in the jury box.
One could infer that they think he is a "tool of dominion," at the very least, no?
The Christian Right has not been above covert operations in pursuit of political power, in any case - do you find that arguable?
I just hope Adventism doesn't become captured by such machinations, is all.
Lawyer Phillip E. Johnson is "father" of both the Intelligent Design movement and the Discovery Institute's Wedge Strategy, which has been described as, "an aggressive public relations program to create an opening for the supernatural in the public’s understanding of science."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_E._Johnson
I am no advocate of scientism, but I somehow think doing science and doing aggressive public relations campaigns are mutually exclusive pursuits.
Given the Dominionist ambitions of many in the Christian Right, I find the Intelligent Design movement has a tainted smell to me.
IOW, a point of view I would not wish to be captured by.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/intelligent-design.p...
if it all was "designed" by a "designer", why do the end products so often seem poorly engineered?
why are there poisonous mushrooms masquerading as edible?
why does the human skeletal system look like something borrowed from animals which walk on all fours... meaning, our organs are suspended from our backbone, giving us back problams, instead of "hung" from the skeleton like the animals? Did the "designer" simply take a prior life form, and modify it to walk upright without addressing the how are they hanging (internal organs!) question?
why do we have tonsils for which Obama does not want to pay the removal cost? or the appendix...whatsup with that?
those used to cause horrible pain, followed by death before man designed surgury... so why was pain designed, what value did it have back then? just for the suffering? just as a painful warning to the victims of a badly designed appendex that they were going to die?
if everything was so well designed, why are there even mosquitoes, which spread disease and kill millions every year?
why are there randomly threatening space rocks circling around the galaxy, some NEO's possibly with our name on them? why are there stars that explode? bees that sting, snakes that have poisonous bites;
why does the whole animal kingdom appear to be dog eat dog,
shark eat seal, seal eat fish, fish eat plankton, plankton eat algae...
if everything was so well designed, what happened to the dinos? the dodos? the dugongs?
and why design lime disease spirochetes, and AIDS virus, and the Black Plague
why design sickle cells or high output melanocytes for sub saharan peoples? unless its an evolu..aah, excuse me, a local adaptation or climatalogical adjustment to maleria and intense sunlight which northern tribes didn't need as much protection against.
why SHOULD we believe in a "Designer???
does this list help?
"Why we believe in a Designer".....
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/4/part2.html
John raises some interesting questions. That's why I'm a creationist, not a mere ID advocate. With creationism, I can bring in concepts like the perfect creation, the fall, the curse, Satan's biological modifications, etc. The ID people think they're helping by stripping away any explicitly religious baggage, but by doing so they must punt on many questions of theodicy.
MaggieB, I'll just be blunt: you're completely paranoid about the religious right. There simply is not a significant number of Christians in America that want theocracy. The "dominionists" are a small and insignificant minority.
Meanwhile, the religious Left, with its agenda of same sex marriage, poses a much more realistic and present threat to religious liberty than the religious right. As Alan Reinach wrote: "There is remarkable consensus among scholars that same sex marriage poses a very grave threat to the future of religious freedom. Churches that refuse to change their doctrines and practices will likely become marginalized, forced to close their schools, hospitals and social service agencies, and stripped of property tax exemption, income tax exemption or other 'benefits.'"
But what any of this has to do with ID is a mystery buried somewhere deep within the folds of your gray matter. There's no inconsistency or contradiction between seeing design in nature and being strongly in support of separation of church and state. The SDA church has traditionally been both one of the strongest creationist churches and one of the strongest religious liberty churches. Where is the conflict???
Don't be shy, David - tell me how you really feel. :)
Oh, I believe in intelligent design down to my toes, David, make no mistake about that.
There is absolutely no contradiction between intelligent design and separation of church and state that I can detect.
Believing in intelligent design has nothing to do with an agressive, politicized public relations campaign to exert "power over" others, that I can detect, either.
It's somewhat amazing to me how SDAs have distanced themselves so much from their former beliefs that they can read the weather, but they cannot read the signs of the times.
So, here I am, this long-time ex-SDA tapping gently on the shoulder saying, er, excuse me, sir, but I think something may be, um, er, happening, you know, like you always said...oh never mind....
Really. Never mind. It doesn't have to be a certain way to be alright. It's alright the way it is, but, well, it amazes me.
There's really nothing to fight, in the end, anyway, at least not in the way we've always thought.
I think discernment could be put to good use here, but if you don't think so, I have no such doctrine.
I'm, well, I'm amazed at this turn of events, though.
MaggieB, the "aggressive public relations program" of which you speak is intended "to create an opening for the supernatural in the public's understanding of science." (At least according to your own quote above.) There's nothing wrong with pointing out that an attempt to understand origins need not necessarily be methodologically naturalistic or atheistic. I'm the first to admit that methodologically naturalist day-to-day science has served us well, but there's no conflict between that and recognizing that life might have been created in the first place.
I think what you're worried about is that if science recognizes a Designer, then that Designer can get himself into the public schools. I agree with you that many in the ID movement would very much like to see that result. But I don't believe that a mere "God" or "Designer" as an hypothesis to explain the "specified complexity" in nature (I would say the awe inspiring genius in nature) violates the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. It is well established that such content-less generalities as "in God we trust" and "one nation, under God" do not run afoul of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The same would be true of the "designer" because He/She/it doesn't have any religious content, other than a sort of minimalistic theism.
By the way, doesn't this: http://wyss.harvard.edu/ pretty much seal the case for Intelligent Design? The Wyss Institute for biologically inspired engineering? Biologically inspired engineering. That says it all.
David, you are mostly preaching to the choir here, but are misunderstanding some of what I'm thinking. No big deal.
I'm not sure how you're going to avoid an ever-receding God of the Gaps if you leap to inserting "and then a miracle occurs" into scientific equations.
http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/pages/gallery.php
There may be undiscovered laws (epigenetics comes to mind) that will rearrange evolutionary theory and leave your irreducible-complexity-Designer-God embarrassingly high and dry, I fear.
I thought we learned our lessons there, no?
You said:
There's nothing wrong with pointing out that an attempt to understand origins need not necessarily be methodologically naturalistic or atheistic.
Since science ipso facto deals with the physical world, I am at a loss to know how one "does science" with the metaphysical world. (And, yes, I read Behe & several others years ago.)
Atheism is a philosophical stance, not a scientific stance, so, as far as I can see, has nothing to do with science at all, the fulminations of Richard Dawkins, et. al., notwithstanding.
You said:
I'm the first to admit that methodologically naturalist day-to-day science has served us well, but there's no conflict between that and recognizing that life might have been created in the first place.
Plenty of scientists recognize that life might have been created, but they keep on doing science the only way it can be done - with the material world.
I'm not saying that there couldn't be a breakthough where science could deal with metaphysical phenomena, but I seriously doubt the highly politicized ID movement has reached that breakthough. It's too "power over" oriented to inspire me that they've reached the Eureka! point. I could be wrong, of course, but it just doesn't smell right to me.
I'm not hell-bent on keeping a "Designer" out of public schools if the science is science and not aggressive propaganda, and I don't like the aggressive scientism propaganda one whit better than I like the aggressive ID propaganda.
Besides, the Designer is Omnipresent anyway. Hello? :)
Both sides of this Clash of the Titans are "power over" oriented - so being captured by either point of view seems vacuous to me.
"Power Over." Have we so learned Christ?
"I'm not sure how you're going to avoid an ever-receding God of the Gaps if you leap to inserting 'and then a miracle occurs' into scientific equations."
As I understand it, ID is based upon the idea that what we do know (not what we don't know) indicates that information only comes from intelligence, not from stochastic processes. Again, this is based upon knowledge of things like DNA, information theory, etc., not a lack of knowledge.
Part of the problem here is that Darwinists, acutely aware of the gaps in their own theory, assume that ID people or creationists are invoking a miracle to fill in the gaps in Darwinian, when in fact we are rejecting that theory, gaps and all, and substituting a different theory.
"There may be undiscovered laws (epigenetics comes to mind) that will rearrange evolutionary theory and leave your irreducible-complexity-Designer-God embarrassingly high and dry, I fear."
There are undiscovered mechanisms, but they will almost certainly add complexity to the machine, making accidental self-organization less likely, not more likely. Why do you think we don't already understand how things like how "junk DNA" and epigenetics work? Because they are more complex and less obvious than things like DNA to RNA to proteins.
"Since science ipso facto deals with the physical world, I am at a loss to know how one 'does science' with the metaphysical world."
It is implicit in ID theory that the "designer" works or has worked in the physical world.
"Since science ipso facto deals with the physical world, I am at a loss to know how one "does science" with the metaphysical world."
Again, the way ID "does science" is by showing that what we know about the physical world indicates that certain types of complex, information containing structures or mechanisms are the result of intelligent design every single time.
David writes > As I understand it, ID is based upon the idea that what we do know (not what we don't know) indicates that information only comes from intelligence, not from stochastic processes. Again, this is based upon knowledge of things like DNA, information theory, etc., not a lack of knowledge.
And yet the ID's have failed to come up with a single instance of something that could not come from a stochastic process, and have flooded the market with poorly done calculations that purport to show one - ones which are good enough to fool the ignorant.
/Bevin
The Wyss Institute for biologically inspired engineering?
So, the Wright brothers, inspired by birds on the seashore, copied the wings of birds, and somehow that example of "biologically inspired engineering" proves ID?
Are you a corporate attorney? A divorce attorney? Surely that kind of thinking doesn't win cases in front of a jury (or maybe it does in Texas).
So, the Wright brothers, inspired by birds on the seashore, copied the wings of birds, and somehow that example of "biologically inspired engineering" proves ID?
Or in other words, since human designers do what nature never does--actually copying structures without having to receive genes (vertically or laterally) to do so--we should believe that nature was designed.
It's the argument from a lack of analogy.
Glen Davidson
...we are rejecting that theory, gaps and all, and substituting a different theory.
Alas, I fear that theory is premature, at best, and on the trajectory of being exposed as wishful thinking.
Painful to contemplate.
I think science is more powerful than you imagine.
I also think God is more powerful than you imagine, and that those stochastic processes are just the tip of the iceberg of things yet to be understood.
Keafan, if I were a Darwinist, I'd stay away from the whole area of flight, which is full of implausible "just so" stories, starting with scales evolving into flight feathers:
"Take away the exquisite coadaptation of the components, take away the coadaptation of the hooks and barbules, take away the precisely parallel arrangement of the barbs on the shaft and all that is left is a soft pliable structure utterly unsuitable to form the basis of a stiff impervious airfoil. The stiff impervious property of the feather, which makes it so beautiful an adaptation for flight, depends basically on such a highly involved and unique system of coadapted components that it seems impossible that any transitional feather-like structure could possess even to a slight degree the crucial properties. In the worlds of Barbara Stahl, in Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, as far as feathers are concerned 'how they arose initially, presumably from reptiles scales, defies analysis.'"
One can appreciate why Darwin wrote that, “the sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”
But the flight feather is only one of the characteristics that separate birds from reptiles. The avian lung is a unique, complex mechanism, with no workable intermediate forms between it and the bellows-type lung of reptiles. Many other morphological changes must also have taken place, including changes to the skeleton, the muscle configuration, and the nervous system. New genetic information would have been necessary to bring about these changes, all of which was created, Darwinists would have us believe, by random DNA copying errors. There is also the contentious issue of how an animal could have “learned” to fly: did they glide down from the treetops, or did they run along the ground and flap their limbs? Both the “trees down” and “ground up” theories have their partisans, but neither theory is convincing.
And according to Darwinian theory, the miracle of flight evolved not once but four times, in insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats. Not likely.
By the way, I would never hope to convince a group of hardened Darwinists, like many of the folks who post here at Spectrum. I only want to give evidence to support the faith of people who are already predisposed to supernatural explanations, to seeing design in nature.
Since no Creationists have bothered to present an argument against Ardi, what do they say about the playtypus which has been known for more than 100 years: part reptile (laying eggs), part mammal (suckling its young, and with a beak, and ability to swim. Is it fish or fowl, or mammal. Does it have an ancestor, or is it in the originally created state?
And according to Darwinian theory, the miracle of flight evolved not once but four times, in insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats. Not likely.
How likely would it be for a designer to adapt terrestrial forelimbs to make wings even once, let alone every time vertebrates began to fly?
But that's what evolution requires in vertebrates, given the paucity of powered organs that could flap the air like wings must do. So the evolutionary expectations are met, honest design expectations, not at all met.
And what justification would anyone have for saying that it would be unlikely for flight to evolved four times anyway?
As far as I can tell, it's just so much more meaningless nonsense from those who have no theoretical or causal justifications for their beliefs.
Back to the more important fact, evolution is the single theory in which fulfilled entailed predictions of the theory is considered by a large portion of the public to be absolutely meaningless. Nonetheless, the same rules of evidence are relied upon for their very lives--and whenever their religious biases are considered to be supported by science. Entailed predictions which are met are simply meaningless when their prejudices are disconfirmed, however, yet not when Hindu prejudices are shown to be wrong by science. Hence it is clear that saving the bias is the only "principle" behind creationism of all stripes.
Glen Davidson
"And what justification would anyone have for saying that it would be unlikely for flight to evolved four times anyway?"
If the odds of flight evolving by random processes once, in one phylogenetic line, is 1 in 75, the odds of it evolving in four separate, independent phylogenetic lines is 1 in 31,640,625.
But I'll grant you that it is meaningless nonsense to assign a probability to an impossibility. I don't think it is possible that flight could evolve as a result of random copying errors in the DNA of a non-flying animal. If you could show me otherwise, we could then move on to the subject of the probability of such an event. But I don't think you can do much better than, "flying animals exist and we know they weren't created ex nihilo, so they must have evolved, QED."
If the odds of flight evolving by random processes once, in one phylogenetic line, is 1 in 75, the odds of it evolving in four separate, independent phylogenetic lines is 1 in 31,640,625.
Evolution isn't a random process, and your numbers reflect nothing.
Beyond that, you're ignoring the fact that all vertebrate wings evolved from terrestrial limbs, giving no "design" reason for it. I understand why--there is no design reason to give, only obfuscations and fake numbers to throw around.
But I don't think you can do much better than, "flying animals exist and we know they weren't created ex nihilo, so they must have evolved, QED."
And your strawman indicates how bankrupt your position actually is. The fact that evolutionary constraints affect all three lines of vertebrate flight is meaningful, except to nihilists like creationists.
I gave very good reasons for believing that evolution is the cause of vertebrate flight, and you just returned to your attack upon your own projections. How used to such anti-intellectual tactics we are.
Glen Davidson
I just love statistical fallacies.
"If the odds of flight evolving by random processes once, in one phylogenetic line, is 1 in 75, the odds of it evolving in four separate, independent phylogenetic lines is 1 in 31,640,625."
You are assuming that there exists only four phylogenetic lines. The correct formulation is what is the probability of evolving in at least four seperate phylogenetic lines, out of however many phylogenetic lines that exist. If we say there are 1000 phylogenetic lines than you would have flight evolve in at least 4 lines 99.9% of the time. We would expect flight to evolve 13 times under those assumptions. This is of course an illustrative example using a bunch of made up numbers.
Leonard Mlodinow spends a good deal of time talking about this particular fallacy in The Drunkard's Walk. You might enjoy it; he sprinkles in quite a few jabs at the legal profession in his discussion.
http://www.lawlaughs.com/trials/washedead.html
An attorney, cross-examining the local coroner, queried, "Before you signed the death certificate had you taken the man's pulse?"
"No," the coroner replied.
"Well, then, did you listen for a heart beat?"
The coroner answered, "No."
"Did you check for respiration? Breathing?", asked the attorney.
Again the coroner replied, "No."
"Ah," the attorney said, "So when you signed the death certificate you had not taken any steps to make sure the man was dead, had you?"
The coroner rolled his eyes, and shot back "Counselor, at the time I signed the death certificate the man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk. But I can see your point. For all I know he could be out there practicing law somewhere."
As usual, David is quoting information that is way out of date. Stahl's book is "McGraw-Hill, 1974", and is out of print.
Darwin's quote is even worse - it is so far out of context as to be ludicrous
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/world/europe/09iht-darwin.4.20058973.h...
'"The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick," Darwin wrote. But from worrying about this problem, he developed the idea of sexual selection, that females chose males with the best ornaments, and hence elegant peacocks have the most offspring.'
The whole "flight is unlikely" stuff is again a statement from ignorance. David obviously spent his years of reading, reading the wrong stuff.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/flight/evolve.html
leads to
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/flight/aves.html
Dromaeosaurs such as Deinonychus, the model for the "raptors of Jurassic Park, were fierce predators that used their forearms in a motion that was very similar in unusual ways to the flight stroke of used in birds. Professor Kevin Padian and Dr. Jacques Gauthier (then a student at Berkeley and now a professor at Yale University) first showed this in 1985. More recently, Dr. Alan Gishlick, a research associate at UCMP, explained in more detail how this stroke evolved. See "New Perspectives on the Origin and Early Evolution of Birds," edited by J.A. Gauthier and L.F. Gall (Yale Univ. Press, 2001)
"you're ignoring the fact that all vertebrate wings evolved from terrestrial limbs..."
The fact? Isn't that what you're trying to prove. It's easy to prove something if you begin by assuming it is true.
But assuming that any ol' forelimb will serve to provide the framework for a wing, the differences between reptiles and birds are much more extensive than that. The hand is shaped differently, and the fourth and fifth digits are not present in birds, nor is the fifth digit present in their feet. The limb bones are hollow with internal struts for support. The ribs have rigidity-improving structures called uncinate processes. The collarbones are fused to form a wishbone.
The musculature required to flap the wings is relatively massive compared to reptiles, and is required to be anchored to a large keel or carina that reptiles lack. Birds have a very complex unidirectional respiratory system radically different from the bellows-type lungs of reptiles. Birds are warm blooded, as opposed to cold-blooded reptiles. I've already adverted to the complex, ingenious flight feather, made of keratin, but nothing like a scale.
There are alot of differences required to make flight possible, and the idea that these are the result of DNA copying errors is a statement of faith, not much different than saying that God created them.
David, do you even understand how ribs, fingers, etc. develop in a fetus? If not, I suggest you find out, before you look even more ignorant.
/Bevin
ps: Minor detail - why are you comparing modern birds and reptiles? Talk about assuming what you are trying to prove.
Birds and reptiles have been separately evolving for over 100 million years.
Unforunately for the YEC, over the last few decades there have been some good fossil finds filling in the gap between modern birds, and ancient dinosaurs
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/dinobird/story.htm
/Bevin
It would be great if this thread could try and stay on topic for the benefit of those who read down through the comments. The book under review is not at all about transmutation of species or age of the earth. Rather it deals with the origin of the information which is associated with, and required for, life.
I am also very disappointed to see ad hominem attacks on the book's author. This does not seem to be a persuasive or civil sort of conversation. I imagine when Copernicus circulated his ideas about helio-centrism some people responded "he is stupid or dishonest" or "I hear some questionable people think he has something worthwhile to say". Of course, this is not in any way a logical argument against the substance of the argument. Thus, it seems designed to be either intimidating or obfuscating, neither of which are helpful.
On the substance side, Glen, you take issue with my own view that some advocates of a purely naturalistic/materialistic and non-intelligent origin fall into the trap of arguing from ignorance. The problem with the origin of life is that there is currently no adequate non-intelligent cause identified, according to Meyer. So while I agree it is inadequate to make the two-step premise/conclusion I set forth, nevertheless that seems to be pretty much exactly what someone like Dawkins does.
You also state that "Meyer has no sufficient identifiable cause" for the origin of life. Meyer says he does and that cause is intelligent design as compared to undirected and random events. I cannot tell whether you have read the book in its entirety or whether you are simply responding to my review of it for some of your comments, but Meyer sets out very crisply two premises and his conclusion (that I quote). If you disagree with his conclusion then you must disagree with one or both of his premises, which in the book he goes to great lengths to support. He also spends a lot of time to critique his critics in some depth.
Maybe you are complaining that Meyer does not identify who exactly the particular Designer is. This does not strike me as a serious objection at this stage. If during an archeological dig I find a box containing round gold objects about the size of penny with the remnant of what looks like the image of a person on it and perhaps some other markings that sort of look like letters, I do not think it would be necessary to identify the particular designer before I could conclude that the objects were the result of a designer.
Ken Peterson
Posted by: Ken Peterson | 08 October 2009 at 4:45
...or "I hear some questionable people think he has something worthwhile to say". Of course, this is not in any way a logical argument against the substance of the argument. Thus, it seems designed to be either intimidating or obfuscating, neither of which are helpful.
I think that would be me you are referring to, Ken. If I'd thought it would come across as intimidating or obfuscating, I would have found another way of expressing myself so as not to seem divisive, and I apologize for giving that impression.
I did attempt to deal with the substance of the argument in my other remarks.
The reference to the Dominionist connection is context for the book's message, IMO.
I still think discernment could be put to good use here, but if you don't think so, I have no such doctrine.
Thank you for the feedback.
Ken, there are three 'information' arguments against evolution - all utterly discredited
(1) The 'laws of thermodynamics' argument - blatantly false because those apply to closed systems, and life forms aren't closed systems
(2) The 'not enough time' argument - blatantly false because it is pushed by people who believe in incredibly fast evolution after the flood, and because its adherents invariably do stupid, long discredited, probability calculations
(3) The 'this specific structure can't have evolved' argument - except that they can't point to any instances of structures that can't have evolved
Failing to have a valid argument, the authors usually resort to length (obviously longer is more persuasive and expensive), chosing their audience (I'm only giving the YEC's arguments to reinforce their preconceptions, strengthening their faith), and conspiracy (the evolutionists won't publish anything that doesn't meet their preconceptions)
What they DON'T do, because they can't, is produce any valid arguments that show evolution can't work
There is a Nobel prize for the first person to do that.
It won't go to some geologist who is writing a book about biology.
/Bevin
The shadow of the Scopes Trial dims all rational discussion.
It was a publicity stunt and a trap--the ego of a political figure and orator cost America rational discourse.
Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not kill. all came out of the same text as "in the beginning God." Tom
Tom
And the same text where we find "in the beginning God" we also find the Law of Yahweh concerning how to keep leprosy (mold) from an "unclean" house. Please look up Leviticus 14. The instructions for the witch doct... I mean Priest, are quite clear:
"49 And he shall take to cleanse the house two birds, and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop: 50 And he shall kill the one of the birds in an earthen vessel over running water: 51 And he shall take the cedar wood, and the hyssop, and the scarlet, and the living bird, and dip them in the blood of the slain bird, and in the running water, and sprinkle the house seven times: 52 And he shall cleanse the house with the blood of the bird, and with the running water, and with the living bird, and with the cedar wood, and with the hyssop, and with the scarlet: 53 But he shall let go the living bird out of the city into the open fields, and make an atonement for the house: and it shall be clean."
Do you hire a priest to kill a bird over a jar over running water when you get mold in your house? I think you most likely spray the mold with some product that is the result of modern knowledge about what actually kills mold.
Same with "in the beginning God". We know better now.
Keafan
When is the last time you met a leper? Did you clean house before 409?
My issue is allowing the state rather than the person decide
which theory should be explained.
Now that I am retired, I meet more creationists than evolutionists. I would like to carry on an intelligent conversation with each without the state telling me which is intelligent and which is not on the basis of separation of church and state.
By the way, I do have mouse traps in the crawl space under the house and we do keep screens on all the windows. We use tilex in the bathroom. Too bad it was formulated so late. Tom
P.S. Keafan
It is a shame that such claptrap should show up on a thread as substantial as a reveiw of Stephen Meyer's Book.
"We know better" Does that refer to God or the cure for mold
four thousand years ago?
In the spring, the St. Joseph river would overflow into a swamp area below the campus. The swamp would slowly drain leaving behind thousands and thousands of Carp. The recipe for Carp was as complex as Moses. You catch a carp, nail it to a cedar plank that had been soaked in water over night.
You would cover the carp with horse dung and build a open pit fire with only red oak. When the wood had burned down to mere hot coals, You would shovel back some of the hot coals, bury the plank, the carp, and the house dung in the hot coals. Leave for 4- 6 hours. Rake away the coals, remove the dung and the carp and eat the cedar plank.
I think you will find the full recipe in Special Messages to Emmanuel Missionary College Vol 8.page 666 Tom
Sounds like the NZ recipe for pukeko soup
Place 1 pukeko and 1 river stone in a pot
Boil until the stone is soft
Eat the stone
/Bevin
Years ago I got an unsolicited (!) e-mail from the White Estate advising me that if I "really cared" about my family, I should read Herb Douglass' book, Messenger of the Lord.
I wish I'd saved that e-mail. Of course I immediately blabbed about it on the Internet.
I doubt they do things like that now - too much blowback.
Oops - the above post was meant for another thread - sorry.
It would be great if this thread could try and stay on topic for the benefit of those who read down through the comments. The book under review is not at all about transmutation of species or age of the earth. Rather it deals with the origin of the information which is associated with, and required for, life.
Except that it is about evolution, if without generally acknowledging that it is. Of course Meyer's attacking evolution by attacking something that's mostly different, the origin of life (which he falsely confuses with the origin of the code--at least in interviews he does), and trashing people for supposedly not considering ID, when it has been answered profusely.
And your review definitely gets into bashing evolutionary theory, and unfairly attacks ("shouting down") upon those who work to maintain integrity in science. It also accepts at face value Meyer's claim of "abduction," when science has never once accepted "an unobservable entity did it" as if it were abduction. Meyer is clearly operating on the level of equivocation on any number of issues, as top IDists normally do.
On the substance side, Glen, you take issue with my own view that some advocates of a purely naturalistic/materialistic and non-intelligent origin fall into the trap of arguing from ignorance. The problem with the origin of life is that there is currently no adequate non-intelligent cause identified, according to Meyer. So while I agree it is inadequate to make the two-step premise/conclusion I set forth, nevertheless that seems to be pretty much exactly what someone like Dawkins does.
You didn't get into the matter of dealing with identifiable causes, that is, to epistemology. Dawkins is not my concern (I'd disagree with him on several issues, including the idea that life looks designed). What we're saying is that you have to use identifiable causes, and the mere fact that we may not have adequate non-intelligent causes identified as yet for the beginning of life, that gives us no adequate reason to assume that it was an unidentifiable intelligent cause.
Meyer does not, of course, actually deal with the fact that no intelligent cause actually came up with the DNA code, or something close to it, prior to our discovery of it. For one thing, it is unlikely that the redundancies of the code would be produced by intelligence, while it is hardly surprising that non-intelligent evolutionary causes (and unlike what Meyer implies (at least), no one thinks the code originated when reproducing "life" first did) would produce the redundancies seen in the code.
Perhaps it would be worth bringing up the fact that Schroedinger's influential book on life and the then-unknown molecule of heredity utilized evolutionary reasoning to come to the conclusions about it that it did. That is, he predicted that it was a conservative molecule that nonetheless mutated infrequently, as evolution requires (in context). Crick read his book, apparently usefully. Meyer didn't exactly mention that, did he?
You also state that "Meyer has no sufficient identifiable cause" for the origin of life. Meyer says he does and that cause is intelligent design as compared to undirected and random events.
So he says that humans created life? Because that's the only sufficient (presumably in the future, anyway) identifiable intelligent cause he can produce. Einstein: "To assume the existence of an unperceivable being … does not facilitate understanding the orderliness we find in the perceivable world. – Albert Einstein, responding to an Iowa student who asked, “What is God?” July 1953; Einstein Archive 59-085". Is that statement somehow wrong?
And no, I don't care about the idea that something other than god might have been around creating the universe and life, as Meyer's most disingenuously implies. Whether it's in the book or not I don't care, it's written across the web, by the DI that Meyer heads, and by Meyer himself. I find no honesty in Meyer's disavowal that it "needn't be god," when he and the rest of them claim continuity with the views of past believers in design (like Paley) who clearly stated that it was god. Either these DI people can't think coherently, or they're dishonest (not an ad hom, a conclusion supported by numerous observations, which should cause people to question what Meyer writes).
I cannot tell whether you have read the book in its entirety or whether you are simply responding to my review of it for some of your comments, but Meyer sets out very crisply two premises and his conclusion (that I quote). If you disagree with his conclusion then you must disagree with one or both of his premises, which in the book he goes to great lengths to support. He also spends a lot of time to critique his critics in some depth.
Of course I disagree with such a disingenuous leap, and equivocation of known human designers with what is effectively God the designer.
Biologists deal with the details of life, while Meyer just calls DNA "code" and pretends that it fits neatly within the category of human-produced codes and languages. He didn't demonstrate any such thing, instead he intends for such illegitimate "argument" from (poor) analogy to take the place of honest scientific argumentation.
Maybe you are complaining that Meyer does not identify who exactly the particular Designer is. This does not strike me as a serious objection at this stage.
No, I am complaining that he equivocates "designer" and "god." You mentioned Dawkins. Well, Dawkins is on record as saying that it's a possibility that life was created by aliens. Of course it is, although why any alien would make something so really unintelligently construed, I wouldn't know, so I wouldn't give the 1% guess of probability that Dawkins gave.
See, it's important that we believe that we could detect alien designs--because aliens would presumably be rational and would design for a purpose (and DNA doesn't happen to appear like one of these things, although one couldn't fully rule it out). If they did not design using rationality and for purposes, we might very well not be able to detect their designs. So we would look for unknown alien designs looking for rational designs that exist for a purpose (the latter might not always be identifiable, the former should in the vast majority of cases). Well, Meyer isn't looking for rationality or purpose, he's conflating DNA which simply functions in apparently meaningless reproduction with human codes which are rationally made for a purpose.
If during an archeological dig I find a box containing round gold objects about the size of penny with the remnant of what looks like the image of a person on it and perhaps some other markings that sort of look like letters, I do not think it would be necessary to identify the particular designer before I could conclude that the objects were the result of a designer.
The individual designer needn't be identified, but a sufficient cause must be. In archaeology we know of such a cause, and we don't automatically state that aliens or god could have done it so we don't know that this "natural materialistic cause" isn't adequate for explanation. Nonetheless, think of Clarke and "2001," where we'd assume aliens were responsible if we found rationally-made machines.
But would we think aliens were the cause if we found unintelligent life in Europa's water that was akin to what we see here on earth? Of course we wouldn't, and Meyer's clearly arguing either unintelligently or dishonestly when he suggests that the "poorly designed" and apparently evolved life that we have was in fact designed. Sure, the orgin of life remains a problem, but no marks of humans or humanoid rationality or purpose exists in life, and there is no cause that we know of that produces seemingly-evolved organisms for some unknown purposes and reasons.
By the way, no one in science presently uses Lyell's rigid uniformitarian thinking (or if they do, they're quite out of step with the rest), and none of us is beholden to Darwin, either. Meyer quite misuses the two, of course, since by no means does using today's processes to explain the past entail the claim that thus the "DNA code" was produced by humans or humanoids, let alone God. That is Meyer's faulty reasoning, excessive reductionism, and equivocation, alone. But it remains a fact that Meyer's purported use of Darwin's and Lyell's reasoning isn't the slightest bit aimed at science adepts, rather at people who he thinks he can fool. Or, if one objects that I can't read Meyer's mind, okay, maybe he's really that ignorant, despite the fact that he's been corrected numerous times.
Of course the real point of Darwin is that presently-operating processes like evolution should be looked to in order to explain the origin of the DNA code. This is entirely within parameters of evolutionary thinking today, since reproducing molecules are all that are supposed to exist as "hereditary material" in the beginning, while the code itself came later--perhaps even needed to come later, since promiscuous RNA (or DNA)-swapping and sloppy reproduction may have facilitated evolution at an early state.
And I agree with Darwin that far, we should definitely look to evolution for the development of the DNA code. Here's a link to something that I saw a while back that looks for identifiable causes of the evolution of the genetic code:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090829091049.htm
Why do selenocysteine and pyrrolysine appear like so much later adaptation of the code that life "settled upon" at some point? Can the designer only come up with a single code (which allows us to be preyed upon by viruses, fwiw) and then has to jury-rig a couple more amino acids into it later?
Glen Davidson
P.S. P.S.
You really got me thinking. I have been speculating on how much mold one would find in in the Sinia Desert? Seemly like a requirement for the Better Homes and Gardens Seal of Approval.
While on the farm, our brood cow gave birth to a female calf with six tites. We searched the Bible and the Spirit of Prhphecy and found nothing on the subject. So we kept the calf until grown and milkable. Of course, we were careful only to milk four tites. It seemed a fair return on our investment. Of course, we tithed all four. In those days it amounted to 50 cents a week. The cow seemed content, we were relieved of judgment, I hope God was pleased with the 50 cents. Tom
Chapter 20, the last chapter of Meyer's book, starts with this:
At the height of the media frenzy surrounding the Dover trial in the fall of 2005, I was asked to appear on an MSNBC program called The Abrams Report. As is customary on "talking heads" shows, the host, Dan Abrams, played a short prerecorded "backgrounder" before the interview portion of the program. The report about the trial had been filed by Robert Bazell, a science correspondent for NBC News. After playin the piece and before asking his guests any questions, Abrams took the somewhat unusual step of offering his own opinion about the theory of intelligent design.
Of course there is no "theory of intelligent design," as Phillip Johnson, Paul Nelson, and Michael Medved have all admitted. So that's still another clearly false claim by Meyer.
That and other such passages are why I don't agree that Meyer's book is not about "transmutation of the species," although he conflates that with the first appearance of life, and which again he conflates with the origin of the genetic code.
I have not read the book, only the smallish preview portion, which is linked below. I do not consider it to be right to put money into the pockets of the DI and of IDists like Meyer, when they are so disingenuous, and apparently deliberately misleading. The preview itself has enough that is either ignorantly wrong or deliberately dishonest that I know it doesn't differ appreciably in that respect from the other ID books. I posted this at the Jewish Forward website, in response to a challenge that someone provide pages where Meyer's logic or facts are wrong. The challenge was not difficult, even though I had only a small part of the book to use for the purpose:
"If Dr. Meyer's conclusions and opinions are as easily disputed as implied by his detractors then it should be easy to cite page and paragraph where Dr. Meyer's facts and logic are in error."
It's trivially easy to show where he's mendacious and wrong. The biggest fraud of all is where he pretends that evolution is supposed to "mimic design," a completely dishonest (or stupid) portrayal of the vastly different results expected from evolution vs. design. The fact that it's a continual lie from the IDists changes nothing about its total falsity.
I discussed that and more a couple of weeks ago in the following(taken, and slightly modified, from blog.beliefnet.com/kingdomofpriests/2009/06/strip-clubs-v-darwinism.html):
If anyone wants to see how "very important" Meyer's rehash of old and useless "ID arguments" is, here's a preview:
http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061472787&WT...
Needless to say, it's underwhelming. It's a long dreary story of how he came up with his "new argument" (DNA's complex, so god did it) for ID, complete with the usual false claims about ID, and the false dichotomy that if evolution didn't do it, god did, never mind the lack of any indications for intelligent design. He doesn't even bring up actual evidence for "intelligent design," merely relying on the old anthropocentric fallacy of assuming that functionality is design, or at least that it "looks like" design. From p. 12:
"...Natural selection..., a purely undirected process that nevertheless mimicked the powers of a designing intelligence."
That is exactly the kind of nonsense that we're always getting from these clowns, mainly because they either are too ignorant to face the rather large differences between design, or they know better than to do so, and wish to simply conflate evolutionary effects with "design effects," the better to ignore the crucial evidence for evolution that design never has explained at all.
Evolution can't possibly mimic what design can do. It can't pick the best materials for a purpose, it can't come up with truly novel characteristics in organisms, it can't make the rational leaps that designers routinely effect, and so it can't produce a steam engine or a decent wheel. Evolution can't smelt metals, use fire, make rockets, or make vertebrate wings out of anything but terrestrial limbs.
Meyer has no interest in dealing with the real issues, in other words. Indeed, most of his polemic is aimed at the origin of life, and of the genetic code. Is the latter a largely unexplained matter in evolution? I believe it is, although there are hints in life of a time in which the code was not so rigidly followed, and in fact it may be that a number of evolutionary events needed a less rigid code. But then does Meyer explain how and why additional (apparently later evolved) amino acids, like pyrrolysine, co-opt a stop codon for coding?
No, apparently not. It's not interesting, he just wants to say that if events happening perhaps billions of years ago are not explained, then evolution falls apart. He needn't explain what evolutionary theory does, goddidit is all the "explanation" that is needed. Evidence for design isn't needed, because life "looks designed," something that even many ancients didn't believe--hence the magical and reproductive myths accounting for what was decidedly unmachinelike.
He writes very misleading junk like this (p. 396--context complicates this, but I don't want to write it all out):
"...[Critics] do not [typically] dispute that DNA contains specified information, or that this type of information always comes from a mind..."
They likely would, if Meyer wasn't simply begging the question by assuming exactly what he needs to prove. And of course many do disagree with it strenuously and use evidence to do it, but he's not going to address those matters, just the "critics" he's blabbing to usually don't know enough to do more than to invoke authorities.
And from the same paragraph (p. 397):
"Nor do they even dispute my characterization of the historical scientific method or that I followed it in formulating my case for intelligent design as the best explanation for the evidence."
Again, of course, he's still writing about critics selected for their lack of addressing the issues minutely and in detail (in talks, not in writing where his egregious claptrap is well demonstrated to be nonsense). But of course he didn't in the slightest follow proper scientific procedure of carefully matching up identifiable cause with identifiable effect, he simply used the false dilemma of "if evolution hasn't explained it, god did it."
By the way, he often uses Dembski as a reliable source, when Dembski's pseudoscientific writings have been thoroughly and appropriately skewered. Most notably, because Dembski doesn't rely upon empirical data for his calculations, and he insists upon very specific targets in evolution. The fact that he calls what is simple, "complexity," obviously is meant to conflate our often simple creations with the very complex and undesign-like structures of life, and is an egregious misuse of language.
As far as I can tell, from the limited text and the index, Meyer does not come up with even the usual ridiculous claims of "falsifiability" of ID that Cornelius Hunter promised (if not with those denotations and connotations). Apparently the naive conflation of functionality and design that many have made is enough "evidence" of design for Meyer, and he doesn't need to do the science needed to actually shore up his claims.
Well, those were the most obvious inanities, fallacies, and unsound reasoning that I saw in the preview. It's the usual bit of nonsense coming from the DI people, barely different from the worthless propaganda that we've already seen.
Meyer does actually have a list of ways in which ID is supposedly "falsifiable," a set of claims that he shows absolutely no entailment from ID (how could he?), and which largely rely upon the false dilemma of "if evolution didn't do it, the Designer did." For whatever reason, it doesn't appear under the terms I would have expected in the index. It would be okay to have the list, if elsewhere he had worked out how these supposed predictions were entailed by ID, but I have no reason to think that he has done so, for the reasons I gave against the purported "prediction" about "junk DNA" that IDists never explain in causal detail. Which means that the list of 12 "ID predictions" is just so much hearsay and nonsense that he knows he can get away with, considering his gullible audience.
I could post the "predictions," if anyone wished.
Glen Davidson
Bevin and Glen: You want to argue about “evolution”, but that is not what this book is about. I know you have protested otherwise, but you are simply wrong and anyone reading the book will be able to validate this. When you specifically refuse to read the book and then want to tell us what it is about it seems especially incredible. As I understand it Darwinian natural selection cannot start until you get a self-replicating process that we call “life” for natural selection to act upon. “Evolution”, if it means anything more interesting than “change over time”, does not act upon rocks in any Darwinian sense. The book under discussion is directed at understanding how the information we see in the genetic code, that is necessary for life we see today, came to exist at all. The book does not purport to, nor does it, deal substantively with speciation or age of the Earth.
You seem dismissive of probability analysis, Bevin, but that is all there is left for one to work with if there is no intelligent design. In its absence, the only thing to explain the appearance of life is random, non-directed stuff bumping around aimlessly (if we helpfully assume the existence of such stuff in the first place without itself requiring design). It seems totally fair and scientific to inquire as to the probability of such an explanation. Some scientists, perhaps not yourself, apparently feel enough discomfort with the results of this exercise that they feel impelled to start speculating about infinite unobservable multiverses so as to bring the odds down closer to their comfort. But to me this is simply arguing from ignorance, or, even worse, arguing from fantasy. I interpret Glen to say this would not be science and I would agree with him. Meyer’s book, by the way, discusses this point.
Meyer also explains why the origin of life was not more seriously discussed in Darwin’s time and the decades following his death. Essentially he says it was because life was assumed to be very “simple” and, thus, would not be a challenge to explain. We now have a better understanding, though far from complete, that life is enormously complex with many astonishing sub-systems that are simply awe-inspiring (whether or not you accept design). Bevin’s initial comment seems to partake of this same ideology: original life was really simple and much more so than simpler forms we see today. I believe this is an argument from ignorance, or more accurately a “just so” story, unless someone has found the original form, including all its constituent parts, intact and observable somewhere. But let us grant that instead of 400 or 300 or 200 or 100 proteins that such life only had the fantastically small number of 10 (no such life form has been discovered yet, but I grant this for the sake of the argument). The probability of this appearing from time and random chance is still astronomically small. This seems a serious problem and not at all silly.
It is revealing, Glen, that you disagree with Dawkins that “life looks designed.” As Meyer points out, the “apparent design” view is held by a wide range of very famous and notable evolutionary biologists, which you also would have to disagree with, including Darwin. I find this encouraging because you clearly are not totally captured by any group think, which in science is always a good sign historically. You write, however: “Meyer does not, of course, actually deal with the fact that no intelligent cause actually came up with the DNA code, or something close to it, prior to our discovery of it.” But you are using sleight of hand here because you presume the answer (“fact that no intelligent cause actually came up with DNA”) to what the whole book is focused on answering. His conclusion, which I appreciate you do not yet share, is that your “fact” is false. In his view the evidence supports an intelligent cause.
You also return again to apparently demanding right now a precise and full identification of the designer. After giving Darwinian evolution 150 years to grapple with many continuing mysteries it seems disingenuous and more than slightly petulant to require Meyer to know everything before saying anything about design. Whether or not the precise identity of the designer can ever be proven does not defeat whether or not something was in fact designed. There are paintings, for example, that we do not know for sure who the artist was, but we can still be confident that the painting was produced by a designer, even if unknown. Meyer may have his own view of the designer, but he is clear that this goes beyond the current limits of science, whereas determining that there is design is within the limits. We totally disagree as to whether recognizing this limitation is dishonest or incoherent. I tend to think it is admirable not be arrogant.
You also write: “Of course the real point of Darwin is that presently-operating processes like evolution should be looked to in order to explain the origin of the DNA code.” I think Meyer agrees that this is Darwin’s point. Meyer’s point is that unintelligent processes so far are inadequate as a scientific explanation. You yourself stated earlier, “Sure, the origin of life remains a problem….” The difference, then, seems to be that you are unwilling to consider another possibility such as actual design whereas Meyer is and finds it compelling. Finally, you raise the possibility of RNA as an early evolution facilitator. I still recommend you should get the book because Meyer spends one chapter exploring this specifically.
Ken Peterson
Ken,
you write "As I understand it Darwinian natural selection cannot start until you get a self-replicating process that we call 'life' for natural selection to act upon"
Already you are on shakey ground, because the MINIMUM requirements for an organism to be considered 'living' are ill-defined eye-of-the-beholder requirements.
The simplest self-replicating entity I am aware of is an ice crystal. If you take a bath of super-chilled water and drop in a single ice crystal, the crystal grows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling - however this situation doesn't bounce between two states and hence is not amenable to natural selection.
It has been pointed out that fat globules floating in water grow and divide, thus are somewhat amenable.
It is not until you get to the autocatalysts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalysis that the system is clearly capable of mutation and natural selection.
The claim that you need something as complex as the bacteria in the gut is absurd - and either (a) the author knew this, and is thus dishonest or (b) the author did not know this, and is thus incompetent.
/Bevin
Unfortunately for your argument and apparent desire to call names, Bevin, Meyer made no such claim that "you need something as complex as the bacteria in the gut". Rather, as I quoted, he said that M. genitalium is the "simplest extant cell" which I take to mean one that actually currently exists. By the way, Wikipedia (which I do not endorse as the definitive source of knowledge on a subject such as this, but it is quickly at hand) states that this cell "is the smallest known free-living bacterium". An apology would ssem in order.
Ken Peterson
The point is simple - you should not be applying pure probability calculations to that bacteria, or even a much simpler bacteria.
To use that calculation to show anything is dishonest or stupid
/Bevin
The Devil in Dover:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFcn9nGZP4Y
Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html
I'll respond with several comments. Here's #1:
Bevin and Glen: You want to argue about “evolution”, but that is not what this book is about.
It is very much what the book is about. It begins with a discussion of Dover, and it ends with it (at least the last chapter returns to it). He faults people for "not considering ID," when of course it has been discussed extensively, and shown to be nonsense. I am not unaware that the discussion of factual matters has little to do with evolution per se, but then ID really has nothing to add to either evolution or to the origin of first life.
I know you have protested otherwise, but you are simply wrong and anyone reading the book will be able to validate this.
You're the reviewer, you should be able to make a case for it. I've made the opposite case, and you have failed even to refute that (then again, how could you?). One thing you must realize, we consider (from dealing with their output--as I have here) DI fellows to be dishonest through and through, and are uninterested in taking anything they say at face value.
When you specifically refuse to read the book and then want to tell us what it is about it seems especially incredible.
No, I don't refuse to read the book, I refuse to pay money to people as dishonest as Meyer. There's a huge difference between the two, and you should know that. I tried to get the book through interlibrary loan, but usually one must wait a year or so before libraries will loan them out. If it were a serious scientific effort it would not be unavailable to people like myself who would quickly get through the book if it didn't require a reward for his writing disingenuous nonsense about science.
And I do not have to read every book of a particular pseudoscience to know how disingenuous that "field" is. I showed where he was dishonest from the review, and I have no excuse to reward his mendaciousness with a purchase.
As I understand it Darwinian natural selection cannot start until you get a self-replicating process that we call “life” for natural selection to act upon. “Evolution”, if it means anything more interesting than “change over time”, does not act upon rocks in any Darwinian sense.
And? That doesn't mean that natural selection didn't begin quite soon after the first "bio-polymers" linked together, perhaps not even reproducing themselves, but being reproduced by conditions on earth.
The book under discussion is directed at understanding how the information we see in the genetic code, that is necessary for life we see today, came to exist at all. The book does not purport to, nor does it, deal substantively with speciation or age of the Earth.
Actually, the book is directed at misunderstanding how the information in the genetic code might have arisen. He goes through a whole lot of basically irrelevant feints and failures of scientists, and pulls the magic rabbit out of the hat, without in the slightest showing that anything that made genetic codes existed three or four billion years ago. Matching up cause to effect is not his interest, rather, pretending that bad analogies make his case is his interest.
He doesn't at all shirk from whining about how "badly treated" IDists arguing against evolution have been treated, without dealing properly with how appalling their "science" was. And I didn't say that he purported to deal substantively with evolution (speciation? That's a rather specialized matter), but there's nothing unusual about IDists trashing evolution without saying anything substantive.
Glen Davidson
You seem dismissive of probability analysis, Bevin, but that is all there is left for one to work with if there is no intelligent design. In its absence, the only thing to explain the appearance of life is random, non-directed stuff bumping around aimlessly (if we helpfully assume the existence of such stuff in the first place without itself requiring design). It seems totally fair and scientific to inquire as to the probability of such an explanation.
It is, if the relevant information is known. And it is not, especially as we don't know how little information is truly needed for, say, a molecule to reproduce by acting as a template for nucleotides to attach. Dembski does "probability analysis" without knowing the probabilities, and Meyer follows suit.
Some scientists, perhaps not yourself, apparently feel enough discomfort with the results of this exercise that they feel impelled to start speculating about infinite unobservable multiverses so as to bring the odds down closer to their comfort. But to me this is simply arguing from ignorance, or, even worse, arguing from fantasy.
Meyer makes much of the single example he knows of a biologist invoking multiple universes. In the C-SPAN broadcast he manages to fault origin of life researchers in general for it before noting that it's just one biologist. That is at least on the sleazy side.
I interpret Glen to say this would not be science and I would agree with him. Meyer’s book, by the way, discusses this point.
Boltzmann brains are taken seriously as a possible problem, and multiverses are invoked because many cosmological models can't rule them out. So I do not think that speculations of this kind are fully out of the bounds of science. Nevertheless, multiverses are unfalsifiable, at least at this time, and so couldn't be the basis of, say, abiogenesis calculations (speculate if you wish, you just can't do anything more at this time).
But arguing against a crank position as if it were important to origin-of-life research isn't facing the issue properly--and it appears to me that Meyer is the culpable party here.
Meyer also explains why the origin of life was not more seriously discussed in Darwin’s time and the decades following his death. Essentially he says it was because life was assumed to be very “simple” and, thus, would not be a challenge to explain.
I find that not especially credible. I know that some argued that way, but Darwin looked for more simple forms of life to arise originally:
Excerpt: In 1871, [Darwin] outlined the problem in a letter to his friend, botanist Joseph Hooker: "But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~comdig/index.php?id_issue=2009.02
While few, if any, would look to a "protein compound" as first, Darwin apparently recognized that today's life is confronted with perils that first life would not be (namely, organisms out to devour valuable molecules), and looked for something far less complex than exists today. Meyer's feeding you a line, at least in his overall thrust, because many recognized even then that micro-organisms aren't just blobs.
We now have a better understanding, though far from complete, that life is enormously complex with many astonishing sub-systems that are simply awe-inspiring (whether or not you accept design). Bevin’s initial comment seems to partake of this same ideology: original life was really simple and much more so than simpler forms we see today. I believe this is an argument from ignorance, or more accurately a “just so” story, unless someone has found the original form, including all its constituent parts, intact and observable somewhere.
It's the result of experiments, and of the fact that we know that all of life is rather evolved at this point. Of course we have no direct evidence that life was very simple in the beginning, and you have no direct evidence that life was very complex at the beginning.
But let us grant that instead of 400 or 300 or 200 or 100 proteins that such life only had the fantastically small number of 10 (no such life form has been discovered yet, but I grant this for the sake of the argument). The probability of this appearing from time and random chance is still astronomically small. This seems a serious problem and not at all silly.
Yes, and no one is looking for first life to have 10 proteins, or in fact, any at all. There are hints (nothing conclusive) that life may have operated sans proteins at one time. That a replicating RNA (possibly bounded by a proto-cell) was "first life" is considered a possibility at this time, or anyway, perhaps something related to RNA (some think one of the nucleotides is too unstable, and that another kind would have existed earlier).
See, I don't think I'm going out on a limb here in supposing that Meyer did not at all discuss abiogenesis as it is understood by scientists in his book. Perhaps it would still look rather sad if he had (I think not so much, really), the point being that like so much "ID literature" it simply fails to address the science that is done.
Glen Davidson
It is revealing, Glen, that you disagree with Dawkins that “life looks designed.” As Meyer points out, the “apparent design” view is held by a wide range of very famous and notable evolutionary biologists, which you also would have to disagree with, including Darwin. I find this encouraging because you clearly are not totally captured by any group think, which in science is always a good sign historically.
Be that as it may, certainly enough evolutionary biologists do not say that life "looks designed." Douglas Futuyma, in fact, faults creationists for thinking like that, always looking for "design" instead of the real cause. I've read journals which warned against supposing any sort of design in life, as that's an easy mistake to make.
But why would replicating life be considered to be anything like "design"? Greeks like Aristotle didn't understand it in that way, nor is that really even the view in Genesis (it's more a story of sculpture, then life is breathed into the form of the man).
You write, however: “Meyer does not, of course, actually deal with the fact that no intelligent cause actually came up with the DNA code, or something close to it, prior to our discovery of it.” But you are using sleight of hand here because you presume the answer (“fact that no intelligent cause actually came up with DNA”) to what the whole book is focused on answering.
No, I am asking for a reasonable match of cause to effect. And a code that serves none of the purposes that intelligent beings are known to make them for, and which lacks the usual forms, recording material, or design of human codes, is not obviously a code made by humans, and even less by humanoids or gods.
Is it reasonable to suppose that life such as our own could ever exist without encoded information being used to reproduce it? I think not. If I am right, then the only legitimate conclusion from finding a code which makes life possible is that this is the code that life requires. It is thus Meyer who is begging the question, because the only conclusion we can make from life having the code it requires is that life works according to physics. At that point the proper question is, what causes existed when DNA and the code arose that could cause it to appear? Simply throwing in god or aliens, without troubling to show either that they existed then, or that they were capable of, or even that they would desire to, produce such a thing, is an irresponsible leap to a preconceived theological (certainly in Meyer's case) conclusion.
His conclusion, which I appreciate you do not yet share, is that your “fact” is false. In his view the evidence supports an intelligent cause.
That's because he feels absolutely no compulsion to make a scientific case for it. We actually already have code producing life, which he uses again and again as an "analogy," yet he never shows that DNA is the type of thing that any life extant at the origin of the genetic code either could or would produce such a genetic code.
We would not have any kind of problem with supposing that clear ancient lettering on rocks, or UFO writing, was in fact writing. That's because we understand human, and we presume humanoid, coding. The DNA code simply isn't human or humanoid coding, at least not demonstrably so, and one cannot presume from its necessity for current life that it had to be made by intelligence. The modifications of the code do not appear to be intelligently made, and evolution doesn't appear intelligently guided. Are we then supposed to believe that it was intelligently set up to evolve unintelligently, merely because Meyer makes endless analogies with unknown scripts? That is not the way to make a case in science.
Glen Davidson
You also return again to apparently demanding right now a precise and full identification of the designer.
Of course I didn't, and you ought to know better than to make such an unsupported and unsupportable claim. I actually discussed the importance of knowing intelligences and their capabilities and habits, and you simply made a false claim about what I wrote.
I want a match of up cause and effect, like honest science and our court systems require.
Meyer's god of the gaps argument is so much schlock and begging of the question. He uses a bunch of human analogies, when even he knows very well that the genetic code is nothing like what we'd expect from humans or of humanoids. He doesn't give us god, nor aliens, for he can't show that any known intelligent cause would produce something like DNA, particularly when the rest of evolution is left alone (which, of course, he otherwise argues against, and intends to deny via use of his origin of life "argument").
If he actually knew of intelligences which go around creating genetic codes for no obvious reason, then we might consider the proposition. As it is, he wants us to assume that these exist simply because humans use codes to record messages. That's just pathetic.
After giving Darwinian evolution 150 years to grapple with many continuing mysteries it seems disingenuous and more than slightly petulant to require Meyer to know everything before saying anything about design.
You've had much longer than evolutionary science has had to work it all out, but then ID has never been capable of science, has it? We have absolutely nothing of value from IDists at present.
Evolutionary science has in fact been highly successful in working things out, something that apparently escapes your analysis here. I would also contend that origin of life science has had some successes, certainly much more than ID can honestly claim.
But then I'm not even demanding that ID supply as much evolutionary and abiogenesis research has produced, I'm demanding any meaningful match up between cause and effect. The genetic code simply doesn't fit with the codes known to be made by intelligence, not in use, and not in form. Meaning that Meyer's simplistic analogies fail badly.
Whether or not the precise identity of the designer can ever be proven does not defeat whether or not something was in fact designed.
I actually discussed criteria for determining this issue. I said:
See, it's important that we believe that we could detect alien designs--because aliens would presumably be rational and would design for a purpose (and DNA doesn't happen to appear like one of these things, although one couldn't fully rule it out). If they did not design using rationality and for purposes, we might very well not be able to detect their designs. So we would look for unknown alien designs looking for rational designs that exist for a purpose (the latter might not always be identifiable, the former should in the vast majority of cases). Well, Meyer isn't looking for rationality or purpose, he's conflating DNA which simply functions in apparently meaningless reproduction with human codes which are rationally made for a purpose.
You didn't in the slightest answer such criteria as we would use in determining if an alien intelligence did something, you merely made a false charge against me.
There are paintings, for example, that we do not know for sure who the artist was, but we can still be confident that the painting was produced by a designer, even if unknown.
Yes, I didn't say that we need to know who the designer is, so it's appalling that you keep repeating such nonsense.
Meyer may have his own view of the designer, but he is clear that this goes beyond the current limits of science, whereas determining that there is design is within the limits.
Yes, it is, and Paley gave us criteria for determining this, if in a rather roundabout fashion. He said that we look for the same things that artificers and architects produce. He contrasted his testable ideas with the untestable evolutionary (non-darwinian) ideas of his time. The problem for Paley is that Darwin falsified design, certainly in the evolutionary developments that we can reasonably probe.
We totally disagree as to whether recognizing this limitation is dishonest or incoherent. I tend to think it is admirable not be arrogant.
Yet you arrogantly assert that something that we've never seen a designer produce is appropriately ascribed to design. That is the height of arrogance.
Glen Davidson
Has anyone here had her DNA decoded by the National Geographic Genome Project? I just received my 9-page summary. My haplogroup is U5, begun with mitochondrial Eve as L1/L0. about 150k years ago and treking through central souther Africa, the Sinai Desert, eastern Europe, to western Eruope and to Scandinavia. Branches mutated at different stages along the way.
Guys can check either their maternal or paternal line; females can only check maternal ancestry. For a cheek swab & $100 bucks it was worth it and fun, too.
You also write: “Of course the real point of Darwin is that presently-operating processes like evolution should be looked to in order to explain the origin of the DNA code.” I think Meyer agrees that this is Darwin’s point.
If so, this destroys his claim to be using Darwin's own way of thinking in order to do science. Obviously I am interested in the lack of honesty on the part of Meyer, something that you seem quite willing to overlook.
Meyer’s point is that unintelligent processes so far are inadequate as a scientific explanation.
Wow, something that would have happened billions of years ago, leaving traces only in our genes, if that, still hasn't been worked out some 50+ years after DNA's structure was elucidated.
Perhaps not being arrogant and demanding would be appropriate. This is what ID teaches people, to demand answers to very difficult questions, for which they themselves have no meaningful answers.
And I'm not in the least willing to say that unintelligent processes are inadequate to give us any answers, while invoking an unobservable and unpredictable "being" gives us absolutely none. The finding that many of the basic units of life appear in re-creations of the "primordial soup" should not be discounted, as abiogenesis would require such production. And the fact that the first life which left any trace was "simple" (relative to later life, that is) also happens to be a prediction of evolution + abiogenesis, since we know that first life could not be complex.
So there's two meaningful answers from science, two more than ID can give us.
You yourself stated earlier, “Sure, the origin of life remains a problem….”
So does the beginning of plate tectonics. Am I really supposed to be worried that difficult problems that left few clues haven't been answered well by science yet?
The difference, then, seems to be that you are unwilling to consider another possibility such as actual design
You can only say that because you didn't comprehend what I actually wrote, unless you just don't care that you're falsely accusing me. I discussed the issues, not fully because this isn't the proper venue for it, but far more than you have, and I'll bet rather more than Meyer did (repeating bad analogies with human codes, which are in many ways unlike the genetic code, isn't a true discussion of the issues). What is it about IDists that makes blank falsehood so easy to hurl at people who actually can and do discuss the actual issues?
Are you really so incapable of considering the issues of evidence, even when you've been a lawyer? My point is a simple one, that saying that life "looks designed"--when it doesn't look like what known design has ever produced--is disingenuous at best. Paley was more honest, but today's IDists don't seem to care that no test of ID's claims are possible, and that saying "an all-sufficient cause caused life" is meaningless tripe.
whereas Meyer is and finds it compelling.
Whereas Meyer is disingenuous about just about everything touching life's origins and evolution. I showed that quite adequately.
Finally, you raise the possibility of RNA as an early evolution facilitator.
No, I did not. I mentioned RNA (or DNA) swapping sans code as a facilitator, based upon the notion that RNA may have been the molecule of inheritance at one time.
You really don't understand the science involved, do you? You have no business trying to learn the science from someone as loose with the truth as Meyer is. Then again, you need to quit make false accusations regarding my position, which isn't really excused by your lack of understanding these matters.
I still recommend you should get the book because Meyer spends one chapter exploring this specifically.
And if he cared about science, instead of misleading a lot of people with his book, I wouldn't have to buy his book to read his various libels of science and of scientists. Oh, I'll read it when I can get it through interlibrary loan, but I do not consider it appropriate to reward such mendacity.
Glen Davidson
and that saying "an all-sufficient cause caused life" is meaningless tripe.
IDists do not say that specifically, of course, it's just that they depend upon the lack of prediction possible with ID to both avoid meaningful ID predictions (as these would immediately fail), and to cover the "inscrutability" of god as cause.
That is to say, they don't bother with the predictions of humanoid aliens (which would include evidence of rational planning, and at least the chance of discovering purpose), they only make the pretense of matching up the unknowns of god to the unknowns of the origin of life, because they aren't interested in following the constraints of science--and therefore could never come up with a meaningful answer.
Which is fine with them, as they only mean for god to provide the meaning that they deny to the evidence--both the meaning of the evidence (however meager) we have for abiogenesis, and the meaning of the evidence (however abundant) we have for evolution.
Glen Davidson
Here's an interesting analogy with the "design argument" that Meyer is peddling:
Regarding aesthetic arguments, Burnet found it easier to make a case for the ugliness of mountains by comparing them with the mountains of the Moon. If we viewed the Earth from afar, "look'd upon with a good Glass [telescope]",the mountains would appear "rude and ragged". In countering this argument, there was some incredulity with the idea of being elevated to so high a vantage point , but the main objection appealed to the aesthetics of landscape painting and gardening.
"The two key pieces of terminology used by Burnet's opponents to describe the place of mountains in the landscape were 'prospect' and 'variety'. [. . .] In seventeenth-century English discourse the word 'prospect' could be used interchangeably with 'landscape painting' and referred to landscape paintings made through the formal practices of mathematical perspective. [. . .] 'Variety' was the most important aesthetic consideration in contemporary discussions of landscape art. Early English theorists of landscape art praised mountains for their contribution to landscape paintings that would otherwise lack variety and fail to stimulate onlookers. Burnet's critics put this exact argument to use in their criticism of his aesthetic."
Wragge-Morley, the author of this analysis, points out that "the difference between seeing the truth about the design of mountains, and seeing nothing at all, lay in a simple perspectival shift". One person looks at a relief map of the globe and sees lumps and scars; another brings the perspective of landscape art and sees beauty, grandeur and majesty.
"This in turn could lend weight to an argument for or against their utility, which could in turn have ramifications for one's view of their theological meaning."
The history of ideas provides much food for thought, and this "strange and surprising debate" is no exception. There appear to be at least two applications that are relevant to our own day and to contemporary debates about design. First, Wragge-Morley's comments on perspective could be applied to design thinking generally. This is the explanation why some look at the natural world and see design everywhere, whereas others witness the same objects and declare them to be design-free. These perspective differences do not reflect on people's ability to think rationally, but rather point to underlying metaphysical differences affecting both thinking and scientific practice. In his essay, Wragge-Morley does not enlarge on these aspects, but he does draw attention to Burnet's interest in Cartesian philosophy which would be a good launching point for further analysis.
Second, this case-study reveals the way design-based thinking triggered research into functionality. Making a design inference actually stimulated enquiry, because intelligent design suggests purpose and meaning. This is a principle of general application, and it is an effective response to those who claim that ID is a science-stopper. The claim is entirely polemical, unsupported by evidence. A modern-day example is Junk DNA. Darwinian biologists regarded it as garbage and it was not targeted for research. Those brave scientists who were prepared to challenge the paradigm by postulating functionality found that they were stumbling on a treasure-trove of cellular information! (Go here and here).
It is worth pointing out, in conclusion, that design thinking is not lacking in theoretical development. This debate about mountains predated natural theology and William Paley: differences in emphasis can be traced through this period. The modern resurgence of design-thinking is not a return to Paley's watchmaker arguments. Finding complexity and functionality is not enough to confirm design. We recognise that some functionality can be introduced by natural processes: a fallen tree can provide a bridge over a river, but that does not mean the functionality was designed. Today, we talk more about information, and refer to complex specified information when making design inferences.
A strange and surprising debate: mountains, original sin and 'science' in seventeenth-century England
Alexander Wragge-Morley
Endeavour, Volume 33, Issue 2, June 2009, Pages 76-80 | doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2009.05.001
It could come as a shock to learn that some seventeenth-century men of science and learning thought that mountains were bad. Even more alarmingly, some thought that God had imposed them on the earth to punish man for his sins. By the end of the seventeenth century, surprisingly many English natural philosophers and theologians were engaged in a debate about whether mountains were 'good' or 'bad', useful or useless. At stake in this debate were not just the careers of its participants, but arguments about the best ways of looking at and reckoning with 'nature' itself.
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2009/06/12/design_inferenc...
[bolding added]
Well, why not?
Let's be in the position of scientists of that day, and the fact that "unintelligent causes" hadn't been shown to be adequate to explain most mountains (volcanoes presumably could be considered an exception). So we excoriate "materialists" for ignoring facts like that mountains have functions, and that humans have made mounds, pyramids, and hanging gardens to mimic the "purposes" of mountains. And since "materialists" have had time to explain mountains, and haven't, we'll just thank God for making the beautiful mountains (remember how many "arguments for design" invoke the "beauty" of life, generally omitting the ugliness of many diseases and parasites).
Mountains weren't really explained at all well until the 1960s. Your "design theorist" would have cut off any such explanation well before that.
Yet the explanation(s) of mountains are quite obviously easier to come up with the process continuing today, and with mountains being quite prominent features of the landscape. Supposedly we're to have already explained life's origins, when most molecules of life were unknown in structure until recently, with many still not known (actually, I suspect that most aren't, I'm just playing it safe). And, as I mentioned previously, the evidence of life's origins is very difficult to come by, save the fact that life's building blocks are mostly capable of being made in simulated "primordial conditions".
Meyer's whole approach is hardly an honest treatment of the science.
Glen Davidson
I wrote up a list of 10 predictions of evolution on the spot at David Klinghoffer's blog once, beginning with the one prediction that is implicitly based upon the idea of abiogenesis:
The fact is that evolutionary theory predicts a number of things, all of which turn out to be true. Here are some I can think of quickly:
1. Life will begin with simple organisms. This is where it is in fact true that evolution and abiogenesis are intertwined, although not the same thing. For, the chance of abiogenesis producing complex, multicellular forms is fantastically against, while simple life may not be turn out to be very difficult to produce by "random trial and error." In this sense, life must begin simple, and more complex organisms will appear later. This is what we see in the geological record.
2. Older organisms will be more unlike later ones. More of the (especially higher) taxa that we see in early times will be extinct today. This is true because evolution cannot remake, say, a phylum, and, organisms will evolve, even if they are in relative stasis. This is what we see in the fossil record, of course.
3. Evident radiations will have causes, like extinctions. This was true for the mammal radiation after the Cretaceous. Extinction may have played a role in the Cambrian radiation as well, but that was almost certainly driven in part by dramatic increases in oxygen levels as well. So again, the prediction succeeds.
4. All life coming from a shared origination event will be related. Of course the prediction is not that all life will be related, but perhaps that's the most likely event, regardless, since it seems likely enough that later abiogenetic events will be eaten by extant life, or it will be so dramatically improved over earlier life that it will outcompete and drive to extinction the earlier life forms (less likely). Anyhow, we do find all life to be related, using the same genetic code and mostly the same amino acids, with a few variations. So again, another prediction succeeds.
5. Life will branch off into clades. This is a more difficult one, because it hangs upon the unrepeatability of evolution, and yet convergence can make identification from mere fossils difficult. Nonetheless, in living forms there little question that organisms whose genes are essentially vertically transferred only, there is only divergence, and no repetition of anything without substantial differences being obvious. Fossils are largely that way as well, the unrepeatability of evolution meaning that geologists can use "index fossils." This is also why evolution is now used almost exclusively for taxonomy, because analogies do occur, but there are always underlying homologies that betray evolution's unfailing divergences (apart from lateral gene transfer, of course).
6. Rationality will not be found to have been behind life. Perhaps this is more of the opposite of ID's inherent prediction, but regardless of that, in some sense evolution predicts that the expectations of design will not be found in life (save where brains have caused limited design). And of course we never find the predictions of design in life, except for things like genetically-engineered corn.
7. Transitional organisms had to exist in the past. Evolution cannot make leaps via "hopeful monsters" and the like, so a reptile has to evolve gradually into a bird, if birds are to evolve. It may be gradual evolution, yet it may occur relatively rapidly, hence transitionals are often not readily found. Nonetheless, we have found a large number, from the obvious Archaeopteryx reptile-bird transition, to transitions between dinosaurs and even a few species transitions. Some of these would have to be found by now, at least among relatively robust fossils, and they have been, another successful prediction. Evolutionary theory is what identifies transitionals, as well, since some organisms may be "intermediate" without at all being transitional--and nothing looks like the transitions among human designs.
8. Another prediction is that the DNA "clock" will work reasonably well, despite the fact that selectional pressures vary. This prediction, which might be one of the less certain ones, relies upon neutral evolution, because this is what is behind much of the "ticking" of the evolutionary clock. Anyway, it works quite well. Attendant with this is the fact that in most proteins one finds increasing numbers of changes as the taxonomic divergences increase, which, on average, is the expectation of evolution. Again, the prediction succeeds, and Behe agrees that it does, apparently without recognizing that divine intervention would not be expected to work much like neutral evolution does. So while selective and neutral evolution are not particularly in sync, they do accord rather well with each other, as expected.
9. Convergence will occur, but will betray its separate origins. I have mentioned this before, yet I wish to emphasize the importance. Sometimes the similarities of eyes in cephalopods is brought up by creationists as too difficult for evolution to effect. However, the cuttlefish eye comes about via an invagination of its skin, while our eyes come partly as an outgrowth of our brains. The receptors in the two are completely different.
10. Parts of organisms and of organs will be made up of the parts of previously existing organs. We see this voluminously in the eukaryotic flagellum, and then we see, yes, in the vertebrate eye we have the eukaryotic flagellum operating in its seemingly very unlikely manner. But how else is an eye to be made by evolution, except by co-opting other parts? And, as I've mentioned in other posts, vertebrate wings are always made from the limbs of the terrestrial antecedents to those organisms, not from other wings as a designer might do (a really good designer would probably begin from first principles).
Well, that's enough. I could probably think of some more, but these ten are an excellent list of how evolution makes predictions, and these are fulfilled. Quite unlike ID, which doesn't make predictions, and the ones that honest IDists like Paley made failed completely.
One other prediction I think I should have included is that gene-swapping organisms will have quite a different "natural" taxonomy than would those that involve almost entirely vertical transmission of genes. I asked Paul Nelson to explain why these difference are found in life, which of course he did not do.
I disagreed again with Dawkins, since I do not believe that fossil evidence for evolution is merely additional evidence, rather, given that fossils of many organisms form sporadically but not infrequently in the geological record, I believe that evolution does predict that some transitionals would be found, as they indeed have been.
#1 and #6 both relate directly to this discussion, as only evolution demands that life begin simply, assuming that abiogenesis is responsible for "first life," and #6 is important because evidence of rationality would properly be the primary criterion of falsifiability that ID would have. Meyer is not interested in actually finding evidence that would clearly indicate design, however, he simply wants to rely upon his false dilemma of "if it isn't explained, God the Designer did it."
And of course any origin of life invoking intelligence begs the question of why evolution has no indications of rationality and of purpose.
Glen Davidson
Has anyone here read the book? If so, and you disagree, why are you just using quotes from just the article? If not, then read the whole book and then come back with quotes from said book, along with your quotes from other texts to make your argument concerning the science...only.
Most of the people that are jacking their jaws here have not put there own ideas out there and won't. Why not wait until someone who actually has the mental capacity to compete in the arena of the hypothetical without bias step in and discuss the issues.
I am tired of the inane b/s here. Stop behaving as if you know it all.
Remember, Einstein had issues with quantum theories (which he openly debated)...but there they are.
Pls cool down the rhetorical tone, StevieBaby. - website editor
> in light of the discovery over 50 years ago of DNA...
This is a minor nitpick, but DNA itself was known by that name as early as 1912 (as Meyer relates in the book). Over 50 years ago the molecular structure of DNA was discovered.
> If not, then read the whole book and then come back with quotes from said book, along with your quotes from other texts to make your argument concerning the science...only
As Glen pointed out, there are a lot of authors writing in this space, producing books not worth buying.
For a book to be worth reading/buying it has to pass the 'first impressions' test - the author must not make blatant errors in the main area of his book that are discoverable in the first five minutes.
Meyers fails this test.
/Bevin
You can listen to an interview from last Thursday with Stephen Meyer, since clearly many of his critics here will never read his book, at least they can get an idea of what he is saying.
The interview start after the first 30 minutes
· download it http://icestream.bonnint.net/seattle/kiro/2009/10/p_David_Boze_Show_2009...
Ron
Hi!
First, go here http://crev.info/ for some really good reading and insight. This website analyzes current thought and ideas of evolution from all fields. The most recent (10/14/09) concerns DNA! God's timing couldn't have been better for me to post. ;)
Allow me to share some thoughts as I have dealt with evolutionists in years past.
On topic : I had told a science conference attendee that I was a creationist, to which he replied, "You better watch out. I have my Masters in Organic Chemistry." "Oh good!" I replied, "Please tell me how DNA could put itself together without the hand of God." His silence was deafening. The presenter began to speak so I wrote him a note that basically said the challenge again and that if he could not answer this, I knew that my side was right and his was wrong. I am still waiting for his answer. (over 20 years!)
What the evos don't want to deal with is the implications of the idea that we came from animals. So if so, then why is blowing your brains out such a big deal? Lions and tigers and bears (Oh My!) kill each other, so why is it wrong for us?
Oh yeah...law...something about the 5th commandment. Author...God!
Another point : most evos I know are hard core tree huggers. If evo is true, then you must know that extinction is the rule of life, not the exception. So if an asteroid wiped out huge numbers of life forms, then we are no different than an asteroid. Big deal...who cares? Oh, then we'll go extinct...like I said, "Who cares?" Someday the universe snuffs out and then what? What is the meaning of life?
Ah! Now we come to the whole crux! The issue of life and it's meaning are philosophical and NOT science! Ergo when science tries to answer questions outside its domain, problems arise! And no you don't need evolution to do science...practical science anyway. One of my ex-students earned a doctorate in Oncology and said evolution was NEVER mentioned. Hmmm? Odd as mutations cause cancer and mutations drive evolution.
I agree with intelligent design as there is never a message without an intelligence behind it. DNA has been called a code, packed with info, complex, plans, instructions, etc. by even evolution scientists. I have heard that some evos think that seismic waves are intelligently sent messages that the Earth is telling us things, but we just don't know how to interpret the messages. Hoo boy! People like that make it too easy for us rational folk.
Thanks!
Mr. G.
Hi, Mr. G.
I'll just repeat something I said earlier - I think you severely underestimate the power of science.
I also think you severely underestimate the power (and subtlety) of God.
You are leaving yourself wide open to be stranded high and dry along with your irreducible-complexity-designer-God-of-the-gaps, IMO.
Revolutionary developments in evolution theory in the next decades are likely to prove embarrassing to ID theory, I think, as if it weren't embarrassed enough now.
I believe in an intelligent Designer, but I think that ID theory is politically inspired, grossly premature and an embarrassment to Christianity.
I could be wrong.
I seem to recall that Glen Davidson doesn't think much of David Chalmers, Mr. G., but what I wanted to bring up vis a vis ID theory is that one of my pet theories is that consciousness is fundamental in the way that the laws of physics are fundamental in the universe, i.e., irreducible.
If it were ever possible to demonstrate that scientifically, there goes your ID theory, it seems to me, and your God-of-the-Gaps is pushed embarrassingly farther to the margin.
Proving that consciousness is fundamental, if that is even possible, still doesn't prove that God exists. Not anytime soon.
And, if my hunch is right about epigenetics being far more encompassing than we realize, that might be embarrassing for current neo-darwinism, but also for Christian ID theory moreso than for darwinism.
It doesn't pay to commit yourself too early in the game, I think.
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/Is-Consciousness-Fundamental-...
(Who knew David Chalmers looked like that!)
Just playing with intuition here - the others on this thread have the education and knowledge needed to grapple with the facts.
Here's David Chalmers, part 2:
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/Is-Consciousness-Fundamental-...
I always wonder why a lot of people think that "a chain of 'good chances' always guarantees a 'good final result'".
That's not true, as in any multi stage development there is a probability that a 'good chance or decision' in an earlier stage will become a 'bad chance' in a later or final stage, this is why every modern software development method do cyclic development to minimize that undesirable efect, something that evolution can't do.
Let's take a look at one illustration of how critics such as Glen Davidson completely miss the elephant in the middle of the room. Does his point #6 hold up? Emphasis added:
"6. Rationality will not be found to have been behind life. Perhaps this is more of the opposite of ID's inherent prediction, but regardless of that, in some sense evolution predicts that the expectations of design will not be found in life (save where brains have caused limited design). And of course we never find the predictions of design in life, except for things like genetically-engineered corn.
...
"#1 and #6 both relate directly to this discussion, ... #6 is important because evidence of rationality would properly be the primary criterion of falsifiability that ID would have. Meyer is not interested in actually finding evidence that would clearly indicate design, however, he simply wants to rely upon his false dilemma of "if it isn't explained, God the Designer did it." "
Consider...
1. All life depends upon stored symbolic information that is translated by complex molecular machines to drive the information-based construction of the cell's proteins.
2. Symbolic information can be created in abundance by the choices of intelligent agents. This we can observe.
3. Neither experience nor theory provides any undirected alternative cause capable of inventing symbolic information. We have no evidence of any other plausible candidate source.
4. In particular, the laws of chemistry and physics have no need for symbolic information whatsoever. All of the known laws can be fully satisfied by a universe without symbolic information. Even materialists would have to acknowledge that this universe existed for some time without life or encoded symbolic information, yet the chemical and physical laws were not violated.
5. Further, when we examine how intelligent agents create symbolic language conventions and apply them to implement and use symbolic information, we see they employ qualities such as imagination, choice, planning, and working toward distant goals for their future benefits. These are methods that we know mindless matter cannot employ, and we do not find in mindless matter any sufficient alternative approach to getting symbolic information processing.
In short, our evidence indicates the list of all plausible causes that can produce symbolic information process is short. It has only one entry, namely the choices of intelligent agents.
Conclusion -- It is scientifically reasonable to infer in general, based on the universally uniform evidence we have, that the origin of symbolic information and symbolic information processing depends upon the choices of intelligent agents.
In short, symbolic information requires design.
p.s. Notice also
a) This argument does not show "God the Designer did it." It shows that intelligent agency is needed.
and
b) This is not the "false dilemma of "if it isn't explained..." Rather it argues from the evidence that intelligent causation is an observable cause for symbolic information. And it is the only observable cause for symbolic information. Plus, we do not have even a theoretical basis for explanation by undirected chemical and physical causes. Therefore, it should be legitimate for scientists who hold evidence dear to infer that it is so far the best explanation for the symbolic information in living cells.
This inference could be challenged and perhaps overturned by coming up with evidence for an undirected material cause for symbolic information. So far, that isn't happening, and there are foundational reasons in principle to expect that it will not.
In what way is DNA symbolic as opposed to only chemically functional?
You you sure matter is mindless?
Thanks.
"Who" reads the symbols that are contained in DNA?
What good is a symbol without an intelligent agent to interpret it? Who reads and acts on the symbolic material in DNA?
Are you sure matter is mindless?
The cells themselves "read" the DNA language:
The Linguistics of DNA
Annals New York Academy of Sciences
Since the discovery of the DNA molecule in 1953, many biologists have employed language as a useful metaphor to describe certain aspects of molecular biologic phenomena.
But recently it was postulated that language is more than just a metaphor and that linguistics provides a fundamental principle to account for the structure and function of the cell.
This conclusion is supported by the facts:
1. That cells use a language called "cell language" or "cellese" defined as "a self-organizing system of molecules, some of which encode, act as signs for, or trigger gene-directed cell processes."
2. That cell language has design counterparts to 10 of the 13 design features of human language (humanese) characterized by Hockett and Lyons.
Because cellese must be transmitted from one generation to the next, it must be encoded in DNA.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3040594/The-Linguistics-of-DNA-Words-Sentences-Grammar-Phonetics-and-Semantics
It seems to me that either life is an extremely elaborate machine, or else....
Are you sure matter is mindless?
So Mr. G sits beside some random stranger at a conference, someone who is too polite or too busy to argue with a clearly opiniated stranger, and now Mr. G. is convinced YEC is right.
Tells you a lot about Mr. G's standards for being right, and nothing about YEC and evolution.
For YEC to be right, they must explain the apparent age of the earth, with its many manifestations - some of which have been listed in this forum repeatedly over the last year.
It is not sufficient to say "I don't understand the evolution of DNA and hence evolution is wrong".
They must explain why the God who wrote "Thou shalt not bear a false witness against thy neighbor" also wrote a planet-sized lie.
/Bevin
To MaggieB, a sequence of "symbols" has meaning -- it represents something other than itself. Sequences of bases in coding DNA represent an encoded instruction for constructing a protein from a sequence of amino acids. Cells have translation machinery (ribosomes) that translate from the symbolic information to the realized proteins according to a genetic code. (Not all organisms use the same code, by the way.)
As to whether I am sure that matter is "mindless", for the sake of the current discussion it would not change the fundamental issue.
The origin of symbolic information and symbolic processing machinery requires the choices of intelligent agency. If it turned out that matter itself is intelligent and has some kind of mind capable of inventing this, then the claim would still be true regardless.
Meyer isn't claiming to identify the intelligent agency. The point is the distinction between directed and undirected causation. Undirected causation cannot bring about symbolic information and symbolic processing. Some type of directed causation -- a type capable of understanding symbolic information and intentionally building the complex molecular machinery needed to implement it -- is required.
Unorganized molecules would never do this just as a consequence of obeying the laws of physics and chemistry. Physics and chemistry have no requirements for symbolic information and can be fully satisfied with lifeless matter.
Posted by: Sigh | 15 October 2009 at 1:16
Cells have translation machinery (ribosomes) that translate from the symbolic information to the realized proteins according to a genetic code.
Sigh, thanks for your reply. Doesn't this go way beyond just little ribosome "machines" decoding DNA protein instructions in a mechanical way?
I think that if matter is not mindless, it does affect this discussion fundamentally.
If consciousness/proto-consciousness is fundamental, it means that your God-of-the-Gaps has been pushed farther to the periphery for the foreseeable future, it seems to me.
It also means that science has a lot of retooling to do also, I think. While David Chalmers might not yet bet the farm on it, he intuitively believes that to be the case, and so do I.
More about that later.
Posted by: Sigh | 15 October 2009 at 1:16
Meyer isn't claiming to identify the intelligent agency.
It doesn't embarrass you to say that? The history of the Discovery Institute does not inspire my confidence.
Posted by: Sigh | 15 October 2009 at 1:16
The point is the distinction between directed and undirected causation. Undirected causation cannot bring about symbolic information and symbolic processing.
Some type of directed causation -- a type capable of understanding symbolic information and intentionally building the complex molecular machinery needed to implement it -- is required.
If all one needs to do is assert something to prove it, science is obsolete.
Posted by: Sigh | 15 October 2009 at 1:16
Physics and chemistry have no requirements for symbolic information and can be fully satisfied with lifeless matter.
Since we do not, and perhaps cannot ever (Stephen Hawking) have a Theory of Everything, have not reconciled quantum mechanics with general relativity, it seems premature to me to talk about what "fully satisfies" physics and chemistry.
There are too many things that we haven't begun to understand, it seems to me, to be talking so confidently.
As a computer engineer, it is absolutely clear to me that
(a) All activity we think of as 'thinking' and 'choosing' are simply the behavior of extremely complex chemical and physical interactions - brain cells or transistors makes no difference
(b) The people in general absolutely revolt at (a)
(c) That no person has yet managed to tell me a test that can be used to show that (a) is wrong
/Bevin
Reductionism is extremely powerful, Bevin, I can't argue with that.
Maybe you're right. Maybe consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of neural activity.
And you're right, no test.
Yet, David Chalmers calls qualia the "hard problem" in consciousness.
Do you think there is no hard problem in consciousness studies?
Maybe we should return to our beginning: before and after birth.
Until the study of babies began only a few years ago, there was little or nothing about their learning process, which is where all of life's actions begin.
In her seminal book "The Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik writes of the almost complete absence of studies of infants.
She writes: "The index of the thousands of pages in the 1967 'Encyclopedia of Philosophy' had no references to babies, infants, families, parents, mothers, or fathers, and only four to children at all. (There are hundreds of references to angels and the morning star."
The first few years form all our later life. We should return to our beginning here to better understand all of human life.
Yes, I think an injection of the qualia of early childhood would definitely help us to be more imaginative about the world than to supposed that we are mere machines, Elaine.
I think that reductionist view would be called a failure of the imagination.
Bevin,
As a fellow nerd, I agree, although I maintain that determinism is compatible with freewill. Also, quantum mechanics challenges our understanding of determinism.
Sigh,
It's a nice statement of faith, and I share a lot in common with you on that. Unfortunately it's not a good logic argument in my way of thinking. It seems to be built on a tautology followed by a logical non-sequitur. I'll take you through my thoughts on this one.
'Undirected causality' is an oxymoron.
'Directed causality' leads to the philosophy of determinism, which has issues that challenge the ontological existence of freewill, so this certainly doesn't necessarily infer the existence of a higher freewill.
The actual existence of symbols is a tautology about awareness - about the human mind.
Ontologically speaking, actual physical things exist before we become aware of them. Symbols are simply a part of the mechanisms of awareness. Symbols and meaning only exist as part of the cognitive processes.
In information theory, we say that data (symbols) can not exist without a medium for it to exist within.
Hierarchy of the content of the human mind can be classified into five categories:
Symbols level 1. Data:
Raw input to our perception from our physical senses.
Symbols level 2. Information:
Constructions of data into associations, things like "who", "what", "where", and sequencing like "when". Perception objects, primitive states, attributes. These are the basic constructed facts.
Symbols level 3. Knowledge:
Constructions of data and information into functional knowledge like "how". Algorithms, processes and systems. sequences, inputs and outputs, integrations.
Symbols level 4. Understanding:
Constructions of knowledge into philosophical understanding. "why". Philosophical reasonings. e.g. Determinism vs freewill. Causality. Ontology.
Symbols level 5. Wisdom:
Constructions evaluating understandings into wisdom. Prioritising algorithms against goals, resetting goals, making judgements, morality.
Symbol levels 1-5 are inter-dependant and parallel in the functioning of the mind, filtering what is processed or ignored, what is constructed and what is left for later re-constructions.
If the functions of mind did not exist, there would be no meaning, no symbols. Physical things would still exist, but to claim the actual existence of things like 'life', 'complexity', 'purpose' would be completely meaningless outside the context of a mind making these 'value statements'.
Value statements are axioms. We need good value statement, but they do not follow necessarily as corollaries in a logical format as you have laid out.
My point is that just because we see complexity, and we see design and causal purpose, it does not necessarily follow that complexity and design exist in an ontological sense that needs a cause of anything other than the observer. Even if it makes sense, it still can't be proved.
You said, "Physics and chemistry have no requirements for symbolic information"
Perhaps I have been unfair. Perhaps if I translated that statement in my mind as "Physics and chemistry have no requirements for things like 'life', 'complexity' and 'purpose'" It raises a valid question.
Framing it, say for example in a positivist perspective, "Why does 'life', 'complexity' and 'purpose' exist?"
The Vienna Circle would reduce the question to meaninglessness. But, why does the question seem to have value to me? If it's meaningless, why do people ask the question?
If one believed in pure determinism, then we could ask: what requirement determined that we should even ask these questions? On the surface, it seems easy to dismiss these questions as resulting from errors in processing from levels 1-5.
In practice, I find the thought difficult of trying and re-establish my whole morality system.
So, these thoughts have brought me on a journey that ends up at a cliff edge. One that says, hold on before we go over the edge, give ourselves time to process what is going on. Try and work out the moral and wise thing to do. Exercise symbol level 5.
> Do you think there is no hard problem in consciousness studies?
Correct. There is no intrinsically hard problem in consciousness studies.
Computers are self-aware today. So is the thermostat in your car, and it is only a piece of bent metal, and some rubber.
The big problem is persuading people to fund you to contemplate your navel. This is best achieved by baffling them with grandious ill-defined terminology, and long tedious tautological books that you can persuade people to buy by suggesting it is inappropriate to criticise them until you have read them.
Let me point you to the most obvious piece of ill-defined terminology. "Free will".
Please give me a test that can measure whether an entity has free will.
The usual definition is "an immeasurable something that makes me not a machine".
/Bevin
Bevin, the thermostat in my car experiences qualia?
To tell you the truth, I had never heard of 'qualia' until it came up above - so I promptly googled it and realized immediately that I was reading the sort of rubbish that philosophers bandy about to sound smart and get paid.
The thermostat
(1) senses its surroundings
(2) moves in reaction to those surroundings
(3) has a memory of what has happened to it in the past
If it had no memory, it wouldn't break under the same conditions it has been under before - but they do break. The memory is in the physical changes to the material, just like memory in our brains is physical changes in the brain.
They also has some kind of weird ability to perceive the events in the life of the car's human owner, otherwise they couldn't choose to break at the least convenient moment :-)
Can you give me a method of measuring whether or not something has qualia?
/Bevin
Bevin...do YOU have qualia?
Since I can't find any test that will determine whether an entity has qualia, I have no test to apply to myself to determine the answer that question...
/Bevin
Here's a test to apply to yourself: think of the first time a girl broke up with you.
What was it like to be Bevin at that moment?
Tell me exhaustively about it so that I can experience it just like you...no wait....
Ah, so since neither the thermostat nor the computer can exhaustively describe to you what it felt like to break up, they have qualia!
Now I understand!
/Bevin
No. Since YOU can't exhaustively explain to me how it felt the first time a girlfriend broke up with you, YOU have qualia. =)
Here's Michael Shermer telling us, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/Is-Consciousness-Irreducible-...
MaggieB: "If all one needs to do is assert something to prove it, science is obsolete."
Science doesn't prove in the way mathematics can prove. It draws inferences from uniform experience. Consequently, it is always tentative. Future experience and data could lead to revisions (e.g. revisions made to Newtonian physics, after we started trying to measure the speed of light, etc.).
My statement wasn't just an assertion. I was restating the conclusion of an inference that depended on several different but mutually supporting and consistent lines of evidence. (See the 5 points I listed above. Those are not exhaustive.)
Meyer's position and the definition of the ID position has been that, given the data available now, design by intelligent agency is the best scientific inference that can be drawn for certain kinds of phenomena. In some cases, such as the origin of symbolic information, it is the only candidate, i.e. the only known cause with this capability.
If we discover that matter itself has intelligence and makes choices, that would certainly lead to revisions. But as I said, it wouldn't change the point that Meyer and I are making, i.e. that a choosing intelligence is required. That may be one of the few things that wouldn't need to change.
To overturn Meyer's inference (or mine), what we would have to discover is that there is a process that operates without choice or intelligence, and yet can create symbolic information and the molecular translation machines this requires -- merely by following regular chemical and physical laws plus chance within the time and conditions available.
MaggieB: "There are too many things that we haven't begun to understand, it seems to me, to be talking so confidently."
The confidence in this case comes from the fact that our experience and the theoretical considerations all point to the same conclusion. There is no data to the contrary. We have no counter examples, and no scientific theoretical basis for expecting them. The best efforts of origin of life researchers have ultimately reinforced the position with more supporting evidence. The more we know, the stronger the case gets.
If the picture were mixed, there would be far less clarity.
MaggieB: "If consciousness/proto-consciousness is fundamental, it means that your God-of-the-Gaps has been pushed farther to the periphery for the foreseeable future, it seems to me."
I'm not making either a "God" argument, or a "gap" argument. The scientific inference only reaches as far as intelligent choice / intelligent agency. The reason it only reaches so far is because it is not based merely on a gap, but as an inference to the best explanation based on universally consistent experience, plus considerations in principle regarding how such things as symbolic information is vs. is not created. As the data has increased and the gaps in knowledge have shrunk, the inference has become stronger.
You also seemed to question whether Meyer is claiming to identify the intelligence. By this I mean that the ID inference cannot make this identification. (Do you see any way that it could? Meyer does not, nor do I. If you cannot see a way, why not believe he speaks the truth when he says what you can see for yourself?)
Correct me if I am mistaken, but it seems you are confusing his (or my) personal beliefs with what the scientific inference to ID tells us.
My beliefs are not limited to what science can tell us. I expect that the same is true for you, as it is for Meyer. I don't doubt that he has a personal opinion about who the designer ultimately is, but he also knows that this goes beyond what the scientific inference tells us. He understands the distinction between the two. If you consider your own beliefs, I would guess you can see the distinction there as well.
To Chris Plewright, I'm sorry, but I fear my wording has mislead you about my meaning. It seems I was not clear.
By directed vs. undirected causation, I was and am using them in the sense often used in these discussions to distinguish between intelligent agency and the outworking of the laws of nature apart from interference from any intelligent agents.
Perhaps that clarification (plus my other posts, including the previous one) will give a clearer picture of what I'm intending.
Sorry again if my wording gave you the wrong impression.
Sigh, thank you for your thoughtful reply.
Let me first make clear where I (tentatively and intuitively) stand right now.
I definitely believe in a designer God who created the universe(s).
I respect the Bible, but I am not a Fundamentalist.
I pretty much believe that consciousness is fundamental in the same way that we consider the laws of physics to be fundamental, i.e., irreducible.
I pretty much believe that the consciousness of God pervades the universe, and that the universe is like an organism, God's body, you might say.
I believe that the consciousness of God is compassion itself.
I pretty much believe that the universe is quantum entangled.
I pretty much believe that God's consciousness is co-extensive with ours, and that each individual expresses an aspect, a facet, of the infinity of God.
I pretty much believe that creation is infinite, because only infinity could express the vastness of God and contain the love that God has to pour out.
I pretty much believe that life evolved on this planet.
I pretty much believe that neo-Darwinism is an inadequate explanation for that, because of confounding complexity potentially bumping into the age of the universe.
I pretty much believe that, the universe being intelligent, and naturally fecund, by design, she brings forth star systems, planets and intelligent life of herself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.
I believe the universe, being the expression of the consciousness of God, works perfectly and doesn't need fixing, including the earth.
I call myself a panentheist and believe in protopanpsychism.
I am not a pantheist, because I believe that God is both transcendent and immanent.
Apart from the political maneuvering that doesn't become scientific endeavors, IMO, I think ID is simply fighting the wrong battle, i.e., against evolution.
Evolution doesn't not preclude intelligent design.
The very fact that ID needs a propaganda "wedge" to get into education demonstrates to me that it is religiously and politically motivated. That is what is leaving a bitter taste in so many mouths.
Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html
In this video it is stated that Stephen Myer was to testify in the Dover trial, but was pulled out by DI counsel, along with several others.
My inference from that is that the trial was about whether the ID introduction was religiously motivated, and Myer wouldn't have been a good witness, probably because of statements he has made.
I know you think design is a separate issue, but ID does not have to be pitted against evolution, so it just comes out walking and quacking like a religious duck.
ID doesn't have to be pitted against anything.
If its credentials were cleaner and had no political/religious baggage, it wouldn't be receiving the scorn it now does (so richly deserve), it seems to me.
But...too late now. A lot of ground has been lost by lack of foresight and wisdom, it seems to me.
Ask yourself why a line of scientific inquiry should need a planned phase of "Cultural Confrontation and Renewal."
Well, here's the Wedge:
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
What has all that got to do with science?
Origins of the Wedge Document
Drafted in 1998 by Discovery Institute staff, the Wedge Document first appeared publicly after it was posted to the World Wide Web on February 5, 1999 by Tim Rhodes,[19] having been shared with him in late January 1999 by Matt Duss, a part-time employee of a Seattle-based international human-resources firm.
There Duss had been given a document to copy titled The Wedge and marked "Top Secret" and "Not For Distribution."[20]
Though Discovery Institute co-founder and CSC Vice President Stephen C. Meyer eventually acknowledged the institute is the source of the document,[21][22] the institute still seeks to downplay its significance, saying "Conspircay [sic] theorists in the media continue to recycle the urban legend of the 'Wedge' document"[23] and portraying the scientific community's reaction to the Wedge document as driven by "Darwinist Paranoia."[24]
Despite insisting that intelligent design is not a form of creationism, the artwork chosen by the Discovery Institute for the Wedge Document's original cover is Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, depicting God reaching out to impart life from his finger into Adam.
Meyer once also claimed the Wedge Document was stolen from the Discovery Institute's offices.[21]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy
Corrections welcomed.
Survival of the Slickest: How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message
The history of ID at the Discovery Institute also shows the strong influence of some more mainstream religions.
Darwin on Trial author Philip Johnson, a retired University of California, Berkeley law professor and born-again Christian, helped prompt the founding of the Center for Science and Culture with a 1995 conference titled "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture."
Until this August, the center was called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, with obvious culture-war connotations.
The bulk of its roughly $1-million-a-year funding comes from evangelical Christian foundations including Fieldstead & Co., whose owner, Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., has long-standing ties to the theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement.
The starkest evidence yet of the center's religious bent, however, is its audience. Consider Johnson's speaking schedule for the fall of 2002: Every event was set to take place at a church or was otherwise religiously related.
Even an apparent exception -- Johnson's appearance at Texas' Foundation for Thought and Ethics in late November -- proves the rule. The foundation produces pro-ID school textbooks such as Of Pandas and People.
Its academic editor is William Dembski, a Discovery fellow and author of The Design Inference, who has written, "Christ transforms the world and pervades the scientist's domain of inquiry."
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=survival_of_the_slickest
That is true, Dembski, but perhaps Christ is more honest and respectful.
I pretty much believe that MaggieB is closer to Eastern religion than to Western, much closer to being a Buddhist or a Hindu, or even an animist, than a Christian, but is none of the above.
I pretty much believe that MaggieB finds something deeply, profoundly terrifying in the prospect of theism gaining even a shred of scientific respectability, and I wonder why she is so frightened at this prospect.
Sigh,
I apologise for being harsh in my criticism before, some of what I said was wrong and based on a misconstruction of what you were claiming. Think I understand better what you mean now. It's the old watchmaker argument.
I think it is perfectly valid to make an inference that something was designed when it appears designed. And of-course it is fair to maintain that hypothesis until it can be adequately demonstrated otherwise. This is how we all think.
But, I'm still not sure if it's falsifiable as asked for by some. Would demonstration of abiogenetic pathways falsify it? I don't think so, because even then the argument would simply change. It would become: just because it could theoretically happen in that pathway, it doesn't mean it 'necessarily' did. So, what test could ever completely falsify the base claim of intelligent design? One black swan is not sufficient for the claims in ID. ID is not a universally applicable statement. It is a statement about an event that occured in the distant past! It's an 'unfalsifiable consequence' from the observation that things appear designed.
Falsifiability is way over rated. For example, falsification requires the premise that causality exists to be falsifiable. Otherwise falsifiability does not pass its own falsifiable test. We have to take it on faith by observation that causality exists - but we don't know if it is universal, we just assume it, we infer it as an 'unfalsifiable consequence'
... Trying to think of a way to falsify causality...
... it's kind of like trying to say that the following statement is true, "that truth does not exist!"...
"As Popper put it, a decision is required on the part of the scientist to accept or reject the statements that go to make up a theory or that might falsify it. At some point, the weight of the ad hoc hypotheses and disregarded falsifying observations will become so great that it becomes unreasonable to support the base theory any longer, and a decision will be made to reject it"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Also, often falsification has the daunting challenge of proving a negative, which I think is the case for ID.
There needs to be a test for the base claim in ID:
a) the pass condition of this test would have to demonstrate without question that an intelligent causal agent was responsible,
b) the fail condition of this test would have to demonstrate without question that an intelligent agent was not responsible.
Without a time machine, we are left with speculative inference and conjecture. I think the basic inference made by ID is relatively safe, simply because I can't think of how to falsify it in a practical sense. Perhaps it becomes a question of bias. I guess, if we regularly saw examples of abiogenis occuring frequently, and at multiple locations, then we would be more likely to consider rejecting the base claim of ID. Even then, it would still be a matter of choice, because it would not actually falsify the original event, which we did not observe.
"Popper stressed that unfalsifiable statements are still very important for science and are often contained in scientific theories as unfalsifiable consequences."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Once again, I'm sorry for coming across in such a negative way earlier.
> I know you think design is a separate issue, but ID does not have to be pitted against evolution, so it just comes out walking and quacking like a religious duck.
The ID approach is
(1) Show that something can not have evolved
(2) Conclude God exists
Maggie and I have no quibble with this approach, since it does not invalidate the incredibly strong evidence that life and death have been on earth for hundreds of millions of years.
It merely would lead to a claim that God had to create the first self-replicating organisms, or that God had to guide the evolution of some particular part of the organism.
The YEC extension is to then try to claim all the evidence can also be interpreted in a YE model.
However the ID's have yet to produce a single structure that can not have evolved, the YEC have yet to produce a single model that predicts the genetic or fossil record, AND YET THEY CONSISTENTLY LIE / STUPIDLY CLAIM THAT THEY HAVE.
When/if the ID's and YEC's do valid science, then their stuff will have a valid impact, until then they are (as the book title says)
"Telling Lies For God" - an excellent book, by the way.
/Bevin
However the ID's have yet to produce a single structure that can not have evolved.
Why do you suggest that they have to do this? I don't see why it is necessary. Darwin was sly to suggest this. I don't think the base claim in ID requires it to be impossible for things to have evolved.
Of course naturalistic evolution requires to falsify irreducible complexities (ICs). They are a psuedo falsification of evolution. But ID itself does not require the negative of this.
In other words, ID may still have occured even if pathways are possible for all apparent ICs. Falsifying ICs is not the same as falsifying ID. They are distinct base claims.
ICs support ID, but ID does not require ICs.
Chris
Why debate how life started billions of years ago? Whatever deity you are arguing for is not God, nor does evolution fit into the Biblical theory of salvation. Period. Full stop.
How could a simple organism sin, resulting in its death?
How could Jesus be Paul's second Adam?
There could be no "fall" to be saved from. A series of natural events over long periods of time is in no way related to the theory in the Bible of their God, or the tribal Yahweh, or a land so holy that the dirt was necessary in order to worship Yahweh in a foreign land, or a Savior.
Accepting evolution with a "First Cause" of life god refutes the divinely led tribes of Israel and the passing of the torch to the Christians.
keafan,
huh? I have faith in creation. What did you think I was claiming?
Chris Plewright,
Thanks for your response. You said : "But, I'm still not sure if it's falsifiable as asked for by some. Would demonstration of abiogenetic pathways falsify it?"
A key point is to realize that ID is not one monolithic proposition. Each inference to design must stand or fall on its own. The general concept of ID is arguing in favor of recognizing the legitimacy of inferring intelligent agency. But for each such inference, it certainly can be overturned by observing that undirected processes are capable without the intervention of intelligent agents.
If you are aware of Dembski's explanatory filter, it explicitly states that natural explanations due to combinations of law or chance have priority. We can legitimately infer intelligent agency only if and when there is a case that those undirected processes cannot account for the observed effect.
Chris Plewright: "Without a time machine, we are left with speculative inference and conjecture."
Actually, it is not so bad as that. We operate on the assumption that the laws of physics and chemistry that existed at the time of first life are the same as they are today. Today we can and do experiment to see how chemicals do behave, and how they do not behave. To understand something is not only to see what it can do but also to begin to see the limits of its behavior. If we thought about chemicals nothing more than "perhaps they can do anything", we wouldn't really have an understanding of chemicals.
We infer the need for intelligent agency in part by observing the consistent limitations of undirected processes. That inadequacy and those limitations, shown consistently over and over in a repeatable fashion, is the basis for inferring that intelligent agents must have intervened.
To be more particular, symbolic information processing requires building toward a future function, not merely present considerations. We do not ever find in matter a determined effort to build toward a future goal of something that will have value then, but not now. Where do we see evidence of matter having imagination or pursuing future value?
Now, if we did begin to find this, that would change the data we have to work with in science. But science must work from the data it has.
(Gotta go for now.)
Sigh,
I'll have to look into what IDs various claims are a bit further, and Dembski's explanatory filter.
"We do not ever find in matter a determined effort to build toward a future goal of something that will have value then, but not now."
Examples of irreducible complexities, things that appear to have been built for purpose, that appear to have meaning, have later been demonstrated that a possible naturalistic pathway could have been the causal agent (theoretically at least). Thereby proving that the symbolism was subjectively apparent, but was not necessarily correct or real.
Take for example the 'arch' principal - that just because it looks complicated and acts a certain way now, it doesn't necessarily mean that it started out with 'that in mind'. An arch starts out with a center support, which then is removed after the arch is set up. Leaving something that appears to be irreducible. This happens in nature, and fools us sometimes - we can attribute wrong causal agency.
"We can legitimately infer intelligent agency only if and when there is a case that those undirected processes cannot account for the observed effect."
If this is true, then we are left to prove that something is impossible in nature. Proving a negative is not so easy. The watchmaker argument says that it might be reasonable to assume - a case can only be made about the probability. It can never be said in an absolute sense, that undirected processes could never account for the observed effect. It can only be said that undirected processes cannot 'easily' account for the observed effect.
Is that a fair analysis?
Dear Maggie and Bevin,
How apprropriate to avoid the BIG questions and deal with trivial matters. When push comes to shove you guys always back off. (purpose in life when it arose from purposeless process!)
Maggie - have you eatered and fed your Pet Rock today? Why not? It may be conscious!
Bevin - if you are right and I am wrong, we both die and end of story. If I am right and you aer wrong, I win and you lose. Are you willing to bet your soul...yes you have one...that you are right?
Become a Christian and you cannot lose. You can even still do practical science. You just may have to give up useless evolution which gives us NOTHING practical like our standard of living!
Posted by: David Read | 16 October 2009 at 10:04
I pretty much believe that MaggieB is closer to Eastern religion than to Western, much closer to being a Buddhist or a Hindu, or even an animist, than a Christian, but is none of the above.
David, I understand why you would define me out of Christianity, and I don't blame you, as your belief system demands that. I accept that reality, and you.
Posted by: David Read | 16 October 2009 at 10:04
I pretty much believe that MaggieB finds something deeply, profoundly terrifying in the prospect of theism gaining even a shred of scientific respectability, and I wonder why she is so frightened at this prospect.
That's interesting. I wonder why you believe I'm afraid.
I believe in a Designer God. I believe that faith and science are completely reconcilable.
Why do you believe I am afraid, David?
Posted by: bevin | 16 October 2009 at 11:13
The ID approach is
(1) Show that something can not have evolved
(2) Conclude God exists
Maggie and I have no quibble with this approach, since it does not invalidate the incredibly strong evidence that life and death have been on earth for hundreds of millions of years.
It merely would lead to a claim that God had to create the first self-replicating organisms, or that God had to guide the evolution of some particular part of the organism.
Well, actually that's not exactly how I see it, Bevin.
I see the universe as a fecund organism that brings forth life, of itself, in a way analogous to what we understand of reproduction. First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.
IOW, the universe is fractal at its heart. (If true, wouldn't that be elegant, and so worthy of the Intellect behind all this?)
That's my intuitive self speaking. (Is it OK for visionaries to talk on scientific threads?)
Posted by: Mr. G. | 16 October 2009 at 5:17
Dear Maggie and Bevin,
How appropriate to avoid the BIG questions and deal with trivial matters. When push comes to shove you guys always back off. (purpose in life when it arose from purposeless process!)
Maggie - have you watered and fed your Pet Rock today? Why not? It may be conscious!
Dear Mr. G., the purpose of life is to enjoy the ever-flowing love of God and share in God's ever-new creativity, as I see it.
If you reread what I said above, you will note that I don't believe in purposeless process.
Oh, I do love my rocks. Sometimes I sleep with them under my pillow.
I am a strange woman, no?
Cheers.
>> Bevin - if you are right and I am wrong, we both die and end of story. If I am right and you aer wrong, I win and you lose. Are you willing to bet your soul...yes you have one...that you are right? Become a Christian and you cannot lose.
No, I don't believe I have a 'soul' in the sense of something separate to my physical being. I do believe God is capable of transfering my memories, thinking characteristics, etc. into a completely new body at the resurrection, and that the resulting entity is still "me".
Pascal's wager is wrong. The simple reason it is wrong is because there is also a possibility that "the deity" is an obscure African God known only to an isolated village in Zambia, and that by worshipping our God we are annoying the real God so much that...
I live my life as though God is coming, and I also live it as if He is not coming. I do what I believe, after deep thought, is acceptable along both paths - and any God worth worshipping will respect that.
/Bevin
I *am* scared of irrational religions. Religions have a long and distressing history of reaching conclusions later shown to be false, and foisting them on everyone "because the holy book tells me to"
MaggieB, I think that you do not want belief in a deity to be taken out of the realm of the purely subjective, the purely personal. I think you are so frightened of organized religion that you do not want any god to have any part of objective reality. I think you feel that, as long as god is removed from the realm of reality, you have less to fear from the (often malign) power of religion.
That, I think, is why you oppose intelligent design. If it could really be shown that some designer or deity was necessary in order to bring life into being in the first place, even that seemingly modest fact would, in your mind, place far too much power in the hands of the preists and pastors.
In a couple of threads, you have raised the Discovery Institute's political ambitions and "wedge strategy" as a reason to reject intelligent design. You're obviously smart enough to see that the science of ID must stand or fall on its own merits, yet you keep rasing this extraneous issue of the political goals of of the Discovery Institute. In your mind, admitting that science has shown that there must have been a designer god has horrific consequences that you want no part of, so you keep mentioning the consequences as though they had relevance to the scientific arguments.
Am I close?
David, it is obvious that you are launching yet another ad hominem attack
The only thing that ID and YEC needs to do is TO DO SCIENCE - and the objection is that they pretend they do to fool the ignorant, but that any probing quickly reveals their failings. The practioneers caught in this pretense show either their ignorance or their dishonesty - and, since they repeatedly make the claims after being shown why they are wrong, one must conclude that they are ...
"Telling Lies For God" - a great book, by the way...
Why are you so scared to admit that maybe your literal understanding of Genesis is wrong? Perhaps you are too scared to live in the real world, and need the security of your fairytale palace?
/Bevin
MaggieB,
Sorry I could not respond sooner. I welcome your participation and your inquiries. That said, I do wonder, perhaps along with David, why it seems so important to try to bring accusations of political intrigue into what should be a question about scientific evidence and the inferences that can (or else cannot) be made from it. Surely you would want your own ideas to be considered on their own merits, wouldn't you? And to treat others the same way is part of wisdom and a generous heart, is it not?
In the interest of clarifying some common misconceptions, I will add a couple points that you probably were not aware of for the sake of the record.
MaggieB: "Evolution doesn't not preclude intelligent design. ... ID does not have to be pitted against evolution"
You write that as though Meyer and other ID advocates entirely disagree. Have you ever looked at the ID FAQ?
http://www.intelligentdesign.org/faq.php
The only point at which there is necessary conflict (and it is necessary) is when the claim is made that undirected processes are sufficient to accomplish effects where the scientific evidence says otherwise and where intelligent agency becomes the better explanation. The specific case I've highlighted (and that Meyer highlights) is the origin of the symbolic information and symbolic translation machinery in all living cells.
MaggieB: "The very fact that ID needs a propaganda "wedge" to get into education demonstrates to me... In this video it is stated that Stephen Myer was to testify in the Dover trial... "
It appears that you are not aware that Discovery Institute opposed the policy that was attempted at Dover, and they tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade Dover against it. If you included that very relevant fact, sorry but I missed it. Their policy has been to oppose forcing ID into schools by policy requirements. They have been very explicit and consistent about this.
"Don’t Require The Teaching of Intelligent Design
All of the major pro-intelligent design organizations oppose any efforts to require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education. The mainstream ID movement agrees that attempts to mandate teaching about intelligent design only politicize the theory and will hinder fair and open discussion of the merits of the theory among scientists and within the scientific community."
from http://www.intelligentdesign.org/education.php
Yet when you express the same type of concerns, you seem to write as though you were trying to tell DI something they did not agree with. It seems you are reacting against a false caricature that some love to promote.
If Meyer were to testify, it would be in support of the scientific legitimacy of inferences to intelligent agency, but it would not have been to defend the school policy that was taken in Dover.
What DI does maintain is that when evolution is taught, more should be taught, not less, so that students have a full understanding of both the strengths and the weak points of that theory. Students should be fully knowledgeable on the subject. This is not the same as being indoctrinated, or being shielded from points where the evidence runs counter to the theory, or being told false information that has been debunked for decades or longer in the scientific literature but is still used in textbooks because it makes evolution look more persuasive.
I find that to be a reasonable and laudable educational position.
The main point I'd like you to consider is that, even if DI had never existed, the scientific issues that created the need for a design inference were already forcing the issue. This was happening long before Phillip Johnson succeeded in making it better known.
In 1984, The Mystery of Life's Origin was an early textbook that surveyed scientific origin of life research and looked at these matters explicitly. That textbook quoted from even earlier writings that recognized that intelligence was required based on the scientific evidence. Meyer's new book could be considered an updated and more accessible sequel to that early and highly technical textbook.
When people or organizations are being demonized, you might find that they actually agree with you more than you thought and more than their detractors wanted you to think. That is what detractors tend to do -- get you to react on a prejudgment rather than to think.
So I would invite you to focus your attention on the scientific question at hand.
I would also ask you to extend to them the same kind of treatment and consideration that you would want others to extend to you and your ideas and positions. Fair enough?
Bevin,
You've asked for an example of structures that could not have evolved. Just one example is the stored symbolic information and symbolic translation machinery (ribosomes and much more) that drive structure construction.
Notice that you can't explain the origin of such information processing by assuming they can evolve in a system that already has such systems. That is a logical error that can never be solved through any amount of chemistry.
In general, until you have such mechanisms to support reproduction, Darwinian evolution cannot get underway. So Darwinian evolution isn't going to provide the explanation of their origin.
If you think there is an explanation that does not involve intelligent agency, please explain why undirected processes would create information translation machinery in a universe before symbolic information existed. Or else, how they would have created symbolic information encoded according to a convention that had not yet been implemented. Or how the machinery and information specific to creating proteins could have developed prior to the origin of proteins. Or else how proteins could have developed without the help of the preexistence of such information and machinery.
There really is not coherent explanation that does not involve intelligent agents that can imagine, choose, and build toward a future goal.
keafan,
huh? I have faith in creation. What did you think I was claiming?
You seem to have faith in Intelligent Design which IS creation. I have not read everything you have posted on various threads in the past that would lead me to believe that you believed in the Young Earth Theory.
As Klinghoffer, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, wrote a few weeks ago:
When we stand up in our homes on Friday night to say Kiddush in testimony to God's intelligent design of the heavens and the earth, when we read the opening chapters of Genesis the next day, there could hardly be a more powerful time to meditate on our calling as God's witnesses not only to ourselves and our families but to the world.
There are thousands of theories of "creation", a designer, an Intelligent Designer, etc, but only ONE Biblical Creation. David Read is a creationist. All the other beliefs/speculations/theories are ad hoc apologetics in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary.
Am I wrong to have concluded that you are not a Biblical Creationist? If not, might you offer a short description of what your theory is about ID?
Posted by: David C. Read | 17 October 2009 at 12:37
MaggieB, I think that you do not want belief in a deity to be taken out of the realm of the purely subjective, the purely personal.
I thought beliefs were ipso facto subjective, David. No two people believe exactly the same things, true? Even scientists disagree vociferously about pretty basic things - Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind come to mind, as well as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.
Nobody has a God's-eye view of anything, it seems to me, even scientists.
Posted by: David C. Read | 17 October 2009 at 12:37
I think you are so frightened of organized religion that you do not want any god to have any part of objective reality. I think you feel that, as long as god is removed from the realm of reality, you have less to fear from the (often malign) power of religion.
Actually, David, being a panentheist and a protopanpsychist, I think what you call "objective reality" is exactly the realm where God is, omnipresent and eternal. In Him we live and move and have our being, and yes, that includes inside SDA & Catholic churches, Buddhist and Hindu shrines, Muslim Mosques, and Gitmo.
Psalm 139: Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
Posted by: David C. Read | 17 October 2009 at 12:37
That, I think, is why you oppose intelligent design. If it could really be shown that some designer or deity was necessary in order to bring life into being in the first place, even that seemingly modest fact would, in your mind, place far too much power in the hands of the preists and pastors.
That's interesting. But David, I don't oppose intelligent design, and I do believe in God the creator and designer of the universe. Please reread what I said above, as you seem to have missed that. I said it several times.
It never occurred to me that priests and pastors would have more power if ID were accepted. They, and many or most conservative Christian parishioners accept ID, so I don't see what difference it would make power-wise. Maybe I'm missing something?
Posted by: David C. Read | 17 October 2009 at 12:37
In a couple of threads, you have raised the Discovery Institute's political ambitions and "wedge strategy" as a reason to reject intelligent design.
Let's make a distinction:
I don't reject intelligent design as a reality, i.e., I subjectively believe God designed the universe.
The ID movement isn't the same thing as the reality that God designed the universe.
Posted by: David C. Read | 17 October 2009 at 12:37
You're obviously smart enough to see that the science of ID must stand or fall on its own merits, yet you keep rasing this extraneous issue of the political goals of of the Discovery Institute.
If the science of ID must stand or fall on its own merits, why do we need a Wedge Strategy to "confront and renew the culture?" Why not just let the science do it's work, as you said?
Posted by: David C. Read | 17 October 2009 at 12:37
In your mind, admitting that science has shown that there must have been a designer god has horrific consequences that you want no part of, so you keep mentioning the consequences as though they had relevance to the scientific arguments.
Am I close?
Did I mention some kind of horrific consequences? I can't imagine what they'd be. Please refresh my memory.
Actually, I think science can never prove a designer God. An inference of design will always be just that - an inference of design - unless God decides to intervene in history.
Otherwise, the earth might have been seeded and manipulated by an advanced alien race or something, for all science knows. Science doesn't deal in metaphysics.
Apart from being unable to distinguish between an advanced alien race manipulation of the planet and a creator God creating life by fiat, the problem with Dembski's "explanatory filter" (if the thing being examined cannot be explained by a law, and it is too statistically unlikely to be explained by chance, then it must be attributed to design), as I see it, is that our knowledge of natural law is woefully incomplete.
As I said earlier, we do not have a Theory of Everything, the Standard Model of particle physics is "ugly and ad hoc" according to Stephen Hawking, and we haven't got a quantum gravity theory - that is huge.
Stephen Hawking: "Gödel and the end of physics"
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strings02/dirac/hawking/
Of course, there is the Holographic Principle way of looking at things, if you really want to blow your mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
My point being that I believe that studying inferences of design in nature is wonderful, but I believe the ID movement has framed the issue in far too limited terms (because of an undeniable and very public cultural agenda) that will not stand the test of time, and will prove an embarrassment in the end.
IOW, the ID movement has defined itself as opposed to evolutionary science, and I think that was poor vision and strategy, at best, and agenda-driven at worst.
I don't believe there will ultimately be a conflict between evolution and design, so I think it's a pity that the ID movement is joined at the hip to anti-Darwinism and is therefore merely a reaction rather than an innovation.
No, I don't think natural selection/mutation are sufficient to explain the biosphere we see around us, but I think science will discover higher teleological laws to explain the profusion and depth we see, and then ID theory will wish they had worked on that instead of positioning against Darwinism.
Yes, I think there is value in putting pressure on existing theories, but I think there is more value in cutting new ground, and I think that would have been a better, less polarizing strategy.
I think the results will be merely disappointing to Christians, but I don't see any "horrifying results."
Subjective Logic
A fundamental aspect of the human condition is that nobody can ever determine with absolute certainty whether a proposition about the world is true or false.
In addition, whenever the truth of a proposition is expressed, it is always done by an individual, and it can never be considered to represent a general and objective belief.
These philosophical ideas are directly reflected in the mathematical formalism of subjective logic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_logic
MaggieB, it looks like we're about to get lost in some epistemological tall grass that is of no interest to me.
But before I give up on this, I would make a couple of points. First, I don't know that it is correct to assert that the ID movement "defined itself against Darwinism." Many of them are on record as believing in common descent and long ages geology. ID theorists say that science does not support life from non-life, the accidental self-organization of the first living organism. But many Darwinists, Stephen Jay Gould among them, have said that they do not consider origin-of-life studies to be part of Darwinism or evolution proper. IOW, origin-of-life studies are separated from normal evolutionary theory. So I don't think it is correct that the ID movement has defined itself against evolution.
It is more accurate to say that the ID movement has defined itself against naturalism as an ironclad commitment of science, and this is why they are so hated: because they want to "allow a divine foot in the door." It is the commitment to naturalism that causes scientist to insist on abiogenesis, despite overwhelming evidence that abiogenesis is impossible. And you should be on the side of the ID crowd in this connection, because you do not seem to be a strict naturalist.
"I don't believe there will ultimately be a conflict between evolution and design, . . . I think science will discover higher teleological laws to explain the profusion and depth we see, and then ID theory will wish they had worked on that instead of positioning against Darwinism."
Most Darwinists would insist that evolution is not a purposive process, so by saying that you believe science will discover higher purposive laws, you're saying that you think we will eventually discover that evolution is a purposive process. And by doing so, you are defining your beliefs as just as much against Darwinism as the ID people ever did.
Finally, I think you're just toying with me with regard to the subjectivity of beliefs, but I'm sure you appreciate that all I want, all any reasonable creationist wants, is for everyone to admit that beliefs about origins are just that: beliefs. I would be more than happy with that concession. But, as you know, Darwinists insist that my beliefs are just subjective beliefs, and their beliefs are objective facts. If ID is "reacting" to anything about Darwinism, it is this attitude. The ID people are saying, "no, the objective facts don't support your beliefs."
Bevin - if you are right and I am wrong, we both die and end of story. If I am right and you are wrong, I win and you lose. Are you willing to bet your soul...yes you have one...that you are right?
Mr. G
The Apostle Paul disagrees with you. He wrote that if the hope of salvation is false then "we are to be pitied more than all men." (1st Corinthians 15:19f)
In addition to the fact that Pascal's Wager contradicts the Christian Testament there are many other reasons why Pascal's Wager is not a cost-free choice as your conclusion implies.
First, you write checks to keep preachers reading an old book and talking about it to their members, churches built, pamphlets/books printed, websites maintained, jet fuel for administrators to fly around pumping up the troops, missions in developing countries which just teach a different set of superstitions than the superstitions they already believed, etc, ad infinitum.
Second, you will spend a substantial portion of your life praying to, bowing down to, thinking about, and unsuccessfully attempting to follow do's and do not's of ancient gurus that claimed to have a secret, special mental connection to their tribal god.
Third, this supposedly simple, cost-free decision to believe in the particular theory promoted by the early Literalist Christians (Jesus literally lived ON this earth and was literally God and literally had a virgin mother inseminated by El Elyon) instead of the competing theory of the Gnostic Christians or the Marcionite Christians or Adoptionists or Arians or Ebionites or the Montanists has no more claim to actually being true than if you and I were sitting at a table debating, you took my copy of GOD: The Failed Hypothesis, burned it, and then killed me.
(What would you say if a Muslim applied Pascal's Wager to the decision to believe Muhamad? If Muhamad was truly The Prophet and you chose to be a Muslim you could blow yourself up to kill as many infidels as possible and the next second be serviced by 72 virgins. Christians don't even believe you get to sleep with your own WIFE in heaven.)
So, your claim to Become a Christian and you cannot lose is false.
You can even still do practical science. You just may have to give up useless evolution which gives us NOTHING practical like our standard of living!
The annual saving of hundreds of thousands, if not MILLIONS, of lives just through immunizations and vaccines is useless?
Hey keafan,
Christians don't even believe you get to sleep with your own WIFE in heaven? They never told me that before I signed up!
Nice to see some humour from you.
You know, I was surprised by your question of me before. I didn't realise it was a debate of 'us vs them'. I was engaging in questioning ID proponents to learn more about ID. I do have a belief in ID, so was not arguing against what I had understand its central claim is. And that is part of the problem - that I'm now unsure of what the centrals claims are.
I am trying to understand how it can be formulated as scientific. That does confuse me - I think the criterion of falsifiablity is probably what my issue is. There are many theories in science that are not falsifiable, perhaps ID does not need to be either. Depending which claim in ID we are talking about at the time!
Some of the associated claims seem falsifiable, but the central, or base claim as I understand it is not.
If examples supposedly demonstrating ID are actually falsified, then that is seriously problematic to the theory - as a scientific theory, it certainly doesn't help the theory in general. But, the interesting point is that the examples that supposedly demonstrate it, actually don't falsify it even when the examples are shown to be potentially erroneous. This is I think because the central claims are not actually falsifiable, but are tautological axioms.
Having said that. All axioms are inferred with reason, inferred from actual observation. That can not be denied as part of scientifically valid methodology either. Even when sometimes the claims are so abstract to the point of not being able to be falsified in a practical sense.
There are many theories in science that are not falsifiable....
Chris
That's a major allegation. Could you precisely explain an example of a SCIENTIFIC theory that is not falsifiable?
Also, if you reject the young earth, six day creation account of Genesis why do you believe in a salvation theory that is built on the introduction of sin by the newly minted humans in the perfect garden containing the two special trees?
Chris
Concerning this bit of our dialog:
[keafan] Christians don't even believe you get to sleep with your own WIFE in heaven?
[Chris] They never told me that before I signed up!
Well, the Gospel of Mark has Jesus saying "for when they may rise out of the dead, they neither marry nor are they given in marriage, but are as messengers who are in the heavens." (Mark 12:25, YLT)
Genesis 6 has the "fallen sons of God" (debatable whether they are angels or some of the 70 actual sons of God, one being Yahweh/Jehovah/Jesus that was believed in the Torah) mating with the daughters of men. Their offspring were the Men of Renown, or heroes of old.
Genesis 6:1-6 (Young's Literal Translation)
1 And it cometh to pass that mankind have begun to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters have been born to them,
2 and sons of God see the daughters of men that they [are] fair, and they take to themselves women of all whom they have chosen.
3 And Jehovah saith, `My Spirit doth not strive in man -- to the age; in their erring they [are] flesh:' and his days have been an hundred and twenty years.
4 The fallen ones were in the earth in those days, and even afterwards when sons of God come in unto daughters of men, and they have borne to them -- they [are] the heroes, who, from of old, [are] the men of name.
5 And Jehovah seeth that abundant [is] the wickedness of man in the earth, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart only evil all the day;
6 and Jehovah repenteth that He hath made man in the earth, and He grieveth Himself -- unto His heart.
So... .... ... Maybe there is hope for some scheming to get around the statement in Mark. Maybe God will also "repent" that He decided to chemically castrate the saved and let them get it on. Like he "repented" that he had created man, wiping out humanity 4,350 years ago.
... ;-)
keafan,
You asked me, "Could you precisely explain an example of a SCIENTIFIC theory that is not falsifiable?"
From wikipedia, links previously provided:
The Popperian criterion excludes from the domain of science not unfalsifiable statements but only whole theories that contain no falsifiable statements
And, it goes on to talk about demarcation, which is kind of what I was asking about with ID. Which statements of ID are directly testable and scientifically falsifiable, vs which are axiomatic?
Likewise, the generic theory of evolution is not specifically falsifiable. It is not adequately described with a single base claim that is practically falsifiable in a single test. While some of it's associated statements are falsifiable, overall it is a conglomeration of statements, a paradigm if you will.
Evolution requires premises that are assumed. Assumptions that are not testable, although neither do I jump up and down about the fact that they don't seem unreasonable either - I just point out that the assumptions required in long term evolution are not directly testable.
Feasibility of abiogensis is still a question in my mind. And this does fit into the general theory of evolution, although is not yet part of the 'scientific' theory of evolution.
So, perhaps semantics about the meaning of the word 'theory' have come into play.
You also asked me a question based on a couple of false premises. You asked me the following question, "Also, if you reject the young earth, six day creation account of Genesis why do you believe in a salvation theory that is built on the introduction of sin by the newly minted humans in the perfect garden containing the two special trees?"
Your first false premise was that I reject six day creationism. I do not reject it. As a personal belief, I still maintain faith in the possibility that God could have done what the Bible says. The supernatural claims are not scientifically verifiable with current knowledge. That means it is not falsifiable. So, I have no reason to reject the central claims. I would accept perhaps some error some of the minor claims, some of the minor statement may be incorrect - but the major claims are axioms rather than testable statements. Anyway, this is a separate topic to ID.
The second false premise is when you said, "introduction of sin by the newly minted humans." I do understand that war broke out in heaven before humans sinned. I'm not sure if this is getting off topic now of your question to me?
Sorry if I misdirected you before, it was not intentional. I don't think I made claims contrary to my beliefs? Perhaps my phrasing is poor from time to time, and my thoughts don't often translate well into words, as I am a very visual thinker. It's one of the things I look forward to is people responding to me on this spectrum site, it gives me opportunities to develop my communication skills. And I do appreciate your thoughts and challenges.
At this stage, I am unsure if your question was rhetorical or I actually misdirected you. I am at your mercy to explain.
Thanks.
keafan,
I'll respond to your last post later, higher authority (wife) calling me right now.
Posted by: David Read | 17 October 2009 at 7:48
MaggieB, it looks like we're about to get lost in some epistemological tall grass that is of no interest to me.
Well, let's don't do that. :)
Posted by: David Read | 17 October 2009 at 7:48
So I don't think it is correct that the ID movement has defined itself against evolution.
It is more accurate to say that the ID movement has defined itself against naturalism as an ironclad commitment of science, and this is why they are so hated: because they want to "allow a divine foot in the door."
Point taken. That is probably a more accurate way to state it.
Posted by: David Read | 17 October 2009 at 7:48
It is the commitment to naturalism that causes scientist to insist on abiogenesis, despite overwhelming evidence that abiogenesis is impossible.
Scientists are hardly in a position to insist on abiogenesis, as there isn't even a standard model yet. I think it's a valid area of research and modelling, though.
As far as there being "overwhelming evidence that abiogenesis is impossible," please refer back to what I said in my last post about how abysmally incomplete our understanding of natural law is, and therefore how inadvisable it is to argue that abiogenesis is impossible, IMO.
Posted by: David Read | 17 October 2009 at 7:48
And you should be on the side of the ID crowd in this connection, because you do not seem to be a strict naturalist.
Well, for the purposes of science, I would say that methodological naturalism is a valid process and that postulating a deity could interrupt that process unnecessarily.
And let me add, I think methodological naturalism will take us everywhere we need to go scientifically and spiritually, if we but have patience with the process.
God is subtle, but He is not malicious.
Posted by: David Read | 17 October 2009 at 7:48
Maggie said: "I don't believe there will ultimately be a conflict between evolution and design, . . . I think science will discover higher teleological laws to explain the profusion and depth we see, and then ID theory will wish they had worked on that instead of positioning against Darwinism."
Most Darwinists would insist that evolution is not a purposive process, so by saying that you believe science will discover higher purposive laws, you're saying that you think we will eventually discover that evolution is a purposive process. And by doing so, you are defining your beliefs as just as much against Darwinism as the ID people ever did.
I think the theory of evolution will go through countless permutations, but I think it will stand. I could be wrong of course. The seed idea of Darwinism is common ancestry, and I am not defining my beliefs as against that, at present.
Posted by: David Read | 17 October 2009 at 7:48
Finally, I think you're just toying with me with regard to the subjectivity of beliefs....
Oh, actually, I'm not. I think it is a fundamental feature of human thought, the existential condition, if you will - not that that's a bad thing, you understand.
Emerson: The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star.
Stephen Hawking: But we are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. Instead, we and our models, are both part of the universe we are describing. Thus a physical theory is self referencing, like in Gödel's theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent, or incomplete. The theories we have so far, are both inconsistent, and incomplete.
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strings02/dirac/hawking/
I believe science and faith work together to drive the engine of human evolution/understanding of God.
Einstein: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
When we really start getting this, it will take off, I think!
Posted by: David Read | 17 October 2009 at 7:48
...but I'm sure you appreciate that all I want, all any reasonable creationist wants, is for everyone to admit that beliefs about origins are just that: beliefs. I would be more than happy with that concession.
But, as you know, Darwinists insist that my beliefs are just subjective beliefs, and their beliefs are objective facts.
Granted, people like Hitchens and Dawkins overstep the boundaries of science. A concession from them will not be forthcoming, I trow.
I think reasonable naturalist scientists don't make sweeping statements about metaphysics, as scientists, because that is not in their purview.
I think the situation has gotten unnecessarily polemical because of the campaign to stamp out materialism and "renew the culture," the "five-year plan," and all the other things that seem to go hand-in-glove with ID.
Well, here's the thing, David, here's where my faith takes me: I think fighting methodological naturalism is misguided, at best. I think science will get us where we need to go. I counsel patience.
I think demanding concessions and all that creates a lot of heat but not a lot of light.
I really (subjectively, of course) believe that God made the universe in such a way that we can continue learning about Him in an open-ended way forever. I think that should be good enough for us.
Mixing up science with a culture war insures a stalemate for the foreseeable future.
It was that miscalculated move that got us in this impasse, and I think the only way out is to do the science quietly and circumspectly and let go of the cultural thrust.
A lot of prejudice (and I admit it is prejudice) has been unnecessarily generated against the Christians by their trying to control the culture with science, and that bell can't be unrung. Trust has been lost and it is hard to regain.
But, if you've lost interest, no need to reply.
Happy Sabbath.
Emerson: Circles
We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world.
We can never see christianity from the catechism:—from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of woodbirds we possibly may.
Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.
Christianity is rightly dear to the best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the christian church by whom that brave text of Paul’s was not specially prized,
“Then shall also the Son be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”
Let the claims and virtues of persons be never so great and welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots with this generous word out of the book itself.
Maggie
Your Einstein quote, Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind, was written in 1941 for the "Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium".
Thirteen years later, and only 15 months before his death, he wrote about the Bible and belief in its "God" using the terms primitive, legends, childish, and superstition. He also assertively stated that no interpretation can change his mind.
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. ... For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition.
http://tinyurl.com/y8tza4q
keafan,
I first thought you were being funny. My second thought was, why are you making straw man arguments? But, now I wonder, perhaps you actually think those are the 'correct' interpretations. Are you aware that there is a range of different understandings of what those verses mean.
In Genesis, sons of God vs sons of man, I understand simply means believers vs non-believers. So, I don't think that relates to Mark.
I certainly don't think that Christ was saying that we wouldn't be with our loved ones in Heaven. I think He was refuting the childish ideas that were posed to Him. He was refuting the idea that in Heaven there would be the troubles caused by relationships that we have here on Earth. He was saying that Heaven is not like the we night think it is.
If you follow the conversation in Mark 12:18-27 - you will see that Jesus was actually responding to a straw man argument, that was designed to trick Him. Actually, a very similar straw man argument to the one you appear to be employing.
Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. "Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"
Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!"
Thanks, Keafan. I think Einstein's religious views were sophisticated early on, and your later quote does not deny that, IMO. My early quote is more nuanced than it might appear on the surface, I think.
Einstein: 1948
The interpretation of religion, as here advanced, implies a dependence of science on the religious attitude, a relation which, in our predominantly materialistic age, is only too easily overlooked.
While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge.
If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
... I wonder, perhaps you actually think those are the 'correct' interpretations.
I have approached my study of the Bible, and "interpretations" of the points the Bible makes, with the desire to understand what the likely beliefs were of the writers at the time it was originally written. Consequently, I have learned a reasonable amount about the cosmology, history, laws, and culture of the Ancient Near East. The findings by archeologists at places such as Ugarit and Elephantine Island have shed a lot of light onto the correct understanding of many "problem passages".
There are hundreds of known "problem passages" in the Old & New Testament (mainly from the OT). These are studied by preachers-in-training. When they get out into a church they can recite from rote memory the canned answer that was taught them. Preachers in denominations such as SDA have much more to remember due to the emphasis on the OT than preachers of denominations that pretty much skip over the OT (save the passages which have been twisted into "prophecies" about Jesus). Unfortunately, the apologetics developed by christianity over the last 2000 years are still being taught even though the primitive beliefs of the day in the OT, corroborated by archeology, contradict the long standing rote answers.
I recently read an article by somebody from the Discovery Institute who criticized Dawkins for arguing against Young Earth Creationism. He claimed Dawkins was attacking a strawman since only the fringe of christianity still believes in a literal Genesis. You seem to be doing the same thing with some of my points. Just because the biblical-era belief that the fallen angels (sons of God) were roaming the earth after having been cast down from God's abode on the dome, and these sons of God were mating with the daughters of men creating super-hero offspring, does not imply a strawman. After 2000 years of apologetic refinement not many people today believe what the 1st 1/3rd of the Bible plainly says; what the common belief of the day was; what the archeologists have shown was also the same or similar beliefs in other religions of that area, etc. The Bible, both testaments combined, suddenly have a negligible number of "problem passages" when you cut through the apologetics and discover what the writers actually believed and were trying to put into their books now found bound up in the Bible.
Since this area is WAY off-topic I would be willing to correspond with you privately on this over a period of time. If you care to, you can reach me at sitcpu570 at comcast dot net.
Are you aware that there is a range of different understandings of what those verses mean.
Nah. Really? ;-)
In Genesis, sons of God vs sons of man, I understand simply means believers vs non-believers.
Right. Like the word wine in the OT means fermented and in the NT means fresh grape juice. Got it.
If you follow the conversation in Mark 12:18-27 - you will see that Jesus was actually responding to a straw man argument, that was designed to trick Him.
If you could point out Jesus' original proposition which they have slightly twisted it would be a great help to me in seeing the straw man. Since Jesus claimed there would be a resurrection and a woman could only be married to 1 man at a time she would legally have 7 husbands. Note that Jesus did not say the Mosaic Law would be done away with at his resurrection but instead claimed that marriage itself would be done away with in Heaven. That response refutes Paul's assertion that the Mosaic Law was obsolete, and confirms the "not one jot or tittle" statement. But Paul never once appealed to the authority of any sayings of Jesus to prove his points. Instead, he seemed completely ignorant that any man Jesus had lived a few years before and instead appealed to the OT to prove his Jesus. Hmmmm.
Actually, a very similar straw man argument to the one you appear to be employing.
Which proposition are you referring to? You are confusing me with your claims of straw men on every corner.
Chris Plewright,
I mentioned earlier that ID is not one monolithic theory, but rather that inferences to design each stand or fall on their own. Yet you seem to still be laboring under a misconception.
Chris Plewright (emphasis added): "If examples supposedly demonstrating ID are actually falsified, then that is seriously problematic to the theory - as a scientific theory, it certainly doesn't help the theory in general. But, the interesting point is that the examples that supposedly demonstrate it, actually don't falsify it even when the examples are shown to be potentially erroneous."
I don't intend this to come across as harsh, but I must ask -- what is this "it" that inferences to design are only "examples" meant to "demonstrate" "it"? Please consider the possibility that you are laboring under a misconception. I think some of your difficulty will evaporate once you can get clear of the misconception.
Every instance of inferring design is a design inference, but they are not examples within one theory called "ID".
If a Mars rover were to discover arrowheads or stone tools and implements, most people would infer that these objects were designed by intelligent agents, not the product of undirected processes such as rock formation plus erosion. That is another example of ID. That is a design inference. It isn't connected to whether cells are designed or not, as though all design inferences make up one theory.
We make design inferences all the time. Most of the time, they are not controversial. We see a note carrying a message. We do not infer that ink and paper have the ability to write the message. Rather we infer design. Someone wrote it intentionally.
It is only in some areas where design inferences are excluded without regard to considering the evidence. Typically, these are areas where philosophical materialism insists that something must have been possible without the aid of intelligence, regardless of what the evidence says.
That is where the clash comes. Some people want to maintain a policy that defines science according to an a priori commitment to philosophical materialism, whereas those in the ID movement would say that science needs to be empirical to be healthy and that science should follow the evidence where it leads in each case.
The ID movement aims to remove these exceptional restrictions from the definition of "science" so that science is free to follow the evidence available to science. That issue is about defining the playing rules for doing science.
Each claim to infer the necessity of intelligent agency for some effect is its own claim. It isn't an "example" illustrating one monolithic claim.
You can see from the above, that not all inferences to design point to the same designer. It isn't simply about making a God-proof. The ID paradigm shift is about removing an ideological bias from science that says "You can infer design, provided God could not be the designer. At all times you are obligated to assume philosophical materialism is true as an axiom that must not be brought into question, regardless of any evidence."
The new paradigm says, "Follow the evidence where it goes in each case. If the evidence indicates that the best inference for effect X is to the involvement of design/intelligent agency, follow the evidence. If the evidence changes, listen to the evidence."
Thus, each design inference is as falsifiable as any other inference science makes.
Does that help to give a different understanding? Does it give you a different perspective on your questions about falsifiability?
"In the final analysis our compass must be our relationship with a central order . . . "
--Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, 1971
Science and spiritual life can proceed from that foundation, I believe.
Heisenberg, unfortunately, sided with the Nazis and didn't live out this ideal, but still think it is a position from which science and spirituality can cooperate.
MaggieB wrote:
"I think the situation has gotten unnecessarily polemical because of the campaign to stamp out materialism and "renew the culture," the "five-year plan," and all the other things that seem to go hand-in-glove with ID. . . . Mixing up science with a culture war insures a stalemate for the foreseeable future. . . . A lot of prejudice . . . has been unnecessarily generated against the Christians by their trying to control the culture with science . . ."
Questions:
1. What is wrong with trying to renew the culture?
2. How is trying to show that life was designed "trying to control the culture with science"?
3. If saying that there was a creator has cultural consequences, how does saying that there was not a creator not have cultural consequences?
4. Why do you find the cultural consequences of atheism preferable to the cultural consequences of theism?
5. Obviously things like evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are Darwinian attempts to shape the culture. Why are these acceptable to you, whereas you find the prospect of theistic attempts to shape the culture so controversial?
David you told me I was "smart enough to see that the science stands or falls on its own merits."
MaggieB: "The seed idea of Darwinism is common ancestry, and I am not defining my beliefs as against that, at present."
That is not quite correct. The core position of Darwinism is that an undirected process of inherited variations combined with natural selection explains the origin of the diversity of species. That is why his book was On the Origin of Species. He claimed to explain how that happened.
Yet you also said "No, I don't think natural selection/mutation are sufficient to explain the biosphere we see around us, ..."
Well then, when ID proponents such as Dr. Michael Behe take the position you describe (accepts common descent, does not think the Darwinian mechanism is sufficient to explain the biosphere we see around us), why do you seem to take the view that it is right when you advocate it but that those ID advocates are still wrong even if they hold the same position?
Sorry, but I don't understand the way you seem determined to fault them as though they disagree with you, even on points where there is no necessary disagreement.
Did you read the link I provided for you above to the ID FAQ where they discussed the issue that ID does not inherently imply a position on evolution (as distinct from the sufficiency of undirected natural selection/mutation)?
Better yet, have you ever read Dr. Behe's book, The Edge of Evolution?
On the one hand, you seem in favor of listening to what science can tell us. On the other hand, when scientists tell us that the data indicates intelligent intervention, you seem to want to fault them, as though they are doing something regrettable.
How do you reconcile these two divergent positions?
Why is a scientist in the wrong if he speaks on the implications of the data, if it strongly indicates that natural selection/mutation are not sufficient to explain the biosphere we see around us -- a position you have affirmed?
p.s. I will add for clarification that there is a diversity of positions with the ID movement, but young earth and old earth, both accepting of common descent and rejecting of it or at least highly skeptical (and for scientific reasons). I didn't mean to portray Dr. Behe as having the only viewpoint in the ID movement (though on a second read, it could have been mistaken that way), or even that his viewpoint is identical with my own.
The general point in common is that a blind allegiance to the sufficiency of undirected processes, regardless of evidence, hurts science. Scientists should follow the evidence, not be required to effectively take a loyalty oath to philosophical naturalism (or else risk their careers as scientists).
To MaggieB, the additional point I was trying to make is that it would be ungenerous to react to a caricature or a stereotype, rather than to treat others as you would want to be treated. There is value in listening to understand vs. keeping someone in a pigeon hole or box that may not reflect their true position.
Sigh,
I see, I did not explain clearly regarding my thoughts on falsifications of irreducible complexities being problematic for ID. I still maintain that they are problematic, but I realise now that the scope of the problems that I was mentioning was misunderstood.
I think I understand what you have been saying, but I obviously aren't putting it in language very well to show you. So, this is good practice for me. I have a picture in mind that ID is a major whole theory at a similar level to Evolution as a major whole theory.
If ID is not a theory, then what is it? Why can't I call it a theory? If you read through to the end, you might see why I think it is a theory.
Both ID and Evolution are complex major theories, and both are made up of many simpler theories and observations. Many of the simpler theories are testable, the major theories house the simpler theories, but do not necessarily fall when examples of the simpler theories fall. The falsification tests are bricks. Sometimes, some of the bricks are bad, but the whole structure is not necessarily bad.
So, I guess ID is falsifiable if sufficient of the simpler testable statements are. If there are sufficiently enough bricks falsifiable - then the inference to ID could be shown to be wrong. Is that what is being claimed, how it is falsifiable? Like I mentioned earlier, there comes a decision point, when there are sufficient reason to reject the major claims.
Let me repeat that statement from wikipedia,
The Popperian criterion excludes from the domain of science not unfalsifiable statements but only whole theories that contain no falsifiable statements
There are double negatives in that statement that may be confusing. But I think that statement agrees with both what you and I are saying. Let me break that down:
In this context, I do understand that ID is a 'whole theory' just as evolution is a 'whole theory'. ID does contain some unfalsifiable statements, and so does evolution. But that is OK according to the Popperian criterion. As long as they also contain some falsifiable statements, then it passes the test to be considered in the domain of science.
Therefore ID is a scientific theory - as long as it maintains some testable statements (that haven't all been falsified) and the inferences remain reasonable and rational.
So, can you see the reason for me including that statement from wikipedia, I think it supports what you are saying.
Sigh, the "scientific question at hand" you would like me to focus on is deeply and inextricably immersed in a religio-political movement. That is the matrix in which it exists.
The Wedge: Breaking the Modernist Monopoly on Science
Phillip E. Johnson
The movement we now call the Wedge made its public debut at a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University in March 1992, following the publication of my book Darwin on Trial.
The conference brought together as speakers some key Wedge figures, particularly Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and myself.
http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/le_wedge.htm
Posted by: Sigh | 17 October 2009 at 4:01
"Don’t Require The Teaching of Intelligent Design
All of the major pro-intelligent design organizations oppose any efforts to require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education. The mainstream ID movement agrees that attempts to mandate teaching about intelligent design only politicize the theory and will hinder fair and open discussion of the merits of the theory among scientists and within the scientific community."
from http://www.intelligentdesign.org/education.php
Yet when you express the same type of concerns, you seem to write as though you were trying to tell DI something they did not agree with. It seems you are reacting against a false caricature that some love to promote.
Here is a link to the Wedge Strategy. Correction welcomed.
THE WEDGE STRATEGY
CENTER FOR THE RENEWAL OF SCIENCE & CULTURE
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. (...)
The Center is directed by Discovery Senior Fellow Dr. Stephen Meyer. (...)
Phase III. Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings.
We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
False caricature? Ungenerous?
MaggieB, four or five posts ago, I said that what was driving your opposition to ID was the cultural consequences, like design in the public schools. You kinda sorta denied that, but you keep bringing it up, over and over and over, and now it is way beyond obvious that I was right. Why won't you answer my questions? What is so terrifying about the prospect of "cultural renewal," or of theism having just as much hold on reality as atheism?
I've suggested an out for you: organized religion has done an enormous amount of evil--it is certainly okay for you not to want theism to have any support whatsoever in science. Just please don't insult everyone's intelligence any longer by objecting that this is not what is primarily motivating you.
keafan,
Sorry for the confusion. I'll try to clarify what I meant about the straw man. Please be aware that I don't know if you were intentionally making a straw man, or if this was just one way to translate what you were saying. That is what I am leaving you to explain.
The Sadducees posed statement X plus statement Y has the corollary of statement Z. And, because statement Z was absurd, this is meant to show that statement Y is in error - because it's corollaries are absurd.
Statement X was the quotations from Moses, about widows and husbands.
Statement Y was the belief that the wife and all previous husbands they could all be resurrected.
The Sadducees didn't actually believe this premise, they were actually aiming to show error in this belief - as per the introduction to the conversation first highlights."Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question."
And so Z was the inferred statement that in resurrection/Heaven, there would be multiple husbands to the one wife - and that they thought that was an issue for Heaven, showing Heaven to be not so, well Heavenly! So, because they thought that Heaven was not really Heavenly, then it followed that the idea of resurrection/Heaven was absurd. Thereby, they thought they were disproving the concept of resurrection. i.e. trying to prove their own position.
And, also as a consequence of this process, they are portrayed as hoping to show that Jesus had erroneous doctrine. Effectively trying to attack Jesus. Well, that's the impression I get when I read it.
I understand that they were attempting a reductio ad-absurdum about resurrection/Heaven.
Jesus kindly explained why their reductio ad-absurdum was false. A reductio ad-absurdum that's shown to be false is basically a straw man.
Jesus' response started out by telling them that their scriptural exegesis failed to look for the power of God. Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?" Highlighting the foundational difference in their hermeneutic.
And then He went on to explain that there is no such problem in Heaven. Consequences of gender are meaningless in Heaven.
In this case, it appeared to me that you attempted a reductio ad-absurdum, that I interpret as being false - hence, the possible appearance of a straw man.
You posed X+Y=Z where Z is a statement that reduces heaven to something less heavenly. It follows a similar pattern as to the Sadducees argument. Your X was a Biblical interpretation about marriage, Your Y was a statement about marriage in Heaven. Your Z was a statement aimed towards reducing Heaven to something less than it is all cracked up to be.
See the similar pattern?
What is quite sophisticated about your argument, is that you are actually trying to use Jesus' own response to the Sadducees, against what He was actually meaning! But, sophistry will only get you so far when it is shown that your interpretation doesn't actually fit in context.
So, we have here two competing ideas about what Jesus' actual claim was. You asked me which claim I was disagreeing with. I think the claim that you made towards Mr G was that the Bible teaches us that we would not be with our spouses in Heaven.
Whereas, my interpretation of that same passage was NOT that Jesus said that we wouldn't be with our spouses in heaven, but rather He was saying that consequences of gender are not issues in Heaven.
My main problem is that your interpretation actually supports the Saducees' argument. But, then that would make the whole conversation absolutely meaningless! The interpretation that I take makes more sense to me, because Jesus response was refuting the Sadducees, not supporting them. The flow of the conversation was that Jesus was refuting them, not supporting them!
I believe that consequences of gender are not issues in Heaven. Jesus' statement, in context, I believe was primarily directed towards the negative consequences of gender, and was not necessarily said towards any positive consequences of gender. I think you over-reach to take it out of context - you over simplify it to the point of the conversation making no sense.
If that is what you were claiming, i.e. that we won't be with our spouses in Heaven, then I can not see how Jesus or the Bible makes that claim. Actually I believe the opposite, that the Bible supports that we will be re-united with our loved ones in Heaven. So, if I have mistaken what you were really claiming, then I will take back what I said, and I will humbly apologise. And, I am open to you correcting me on that.
So, summarising, I understand that you don't actually believe in resurrection/Heaven, so I think you were using a premise that you know to be false in order to build an argument against that actual premise. i.e. a classical attempt at a reductio ad-absurdum - to show why the particular belief in Heaven is a problem. I think that your claim was that the Bible teaches we won't be with our spouses in Heaven. Am I mistaken about your claim?
Sigh wrote >>> Bevin, You've asked for an example of structures that could not have evolved. Just one example is the stored symbolic information and symbolic translation machinery (ribosomes and much more) that drive structure construction.
Sigh, your personal opinion that it could not have evolved carries no weight.
There is no known reason why these structures could not have evolved, despite the stupid/lying miscalculations of the ID advocates.
/Bevin
David, I beeeleeeeeeve in intelligent design. Remember? =)
I think this is where I came in.
Blessings, all.
Bevin, the argument in your last post is so complete and persuasive, I hardly know where to begin.
But I do notice that you dodged my questions, and did not address the logic of my argument. I pointed out that you have an impossible catch-22 that you cannot resolve. You did not resolve it.
So it seems that neither you nor anyone else can even form a coherent proposal on how a symbolic information translation system could first appear by evolution -- especially since Darwinian evolution needs such a system to function in the first place. I didn't even ask for a proof. The first hurdle of forming a plausible scenario seems by itself to be insurmountable.
As long as no one can even form a scenario that is at least believable on the face of it, to repeatedly claim that no can prove (to you) that these structures could not have evolved is equivalent to demanding a blind leap of faith in a proposal that, so far, cannot even be stated clearly in a believable way.
Sorry, but ignoring/denying the issues is not a refutation.
MarggieB,
If you will humor me just for a moment, perhaps a concrete case would provide an opportunity for some clarification.
Here are links to a three-part blog post series by Dr. Michael Behe in which he discusses how recent research results support and even go beyond points he made in his book, The Edge of Evolution, concerning the extremely limited nature of what Darwinian processes are able to accomplish. (first, second, and third)
As I mentioned, you have expressed support for the value of science and to listening to what science can tell us about the world. Well then, consider the above results of science and please help me understand your thoughts about a few questions.
1. Is it good or regrettable when scientists point out scientific results that show the weakness and severe limitations of Darwinian mechanisms of change?
2. Should the answer to question #1 depend on whether those scientists
a) remain loyal to Darwin's claim to explain the diverse biosphere, or
b) find that the total weight of the scientific evidence strongly compels the conclusion that an undirected process, such as Darwin's theory or neo-Darwinism, is insufficient to explain the origin of the diverse biosphere we see and that intelligent agency is required?
3. If any of these scientific assessments are regrettable in your view, why is that?
4. Is there a right way to make known the scientific inadequacy of undirected explanations for the biosphere, if that is what the results of scientific research tells?
Sigh,
do you know what a catalyst is?
/Bevin
In case that is too cryptic for you, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalysis
In short, they cause the high-probably formation of an otherwise low probability material. In other words all catalysts meet the definition of a "symbolic information translation system" - especially if you remember that "symbol" is ID slang for two atoms side by side. Water is a "symbol".
Now look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biocatalysis
Yet another ID claim hits the floor when just a small breath of knowledge passes over its feebleness.
But wait - my reply is not new. It has been around for at least 30 years.
Let's throw your question at Google "evolution symbolic information translation system"
What do we find?
A directly on-topic paper...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WMD-4HC77B4-4...
http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/97/3/307
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/13/8742.full
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2K-42VV88V-5...
Oh No, Don't tell me, the ID's have been forgetting to do their main-stream science yet again. Maybe this is why I have such little regard for their honesty and intelligence
/Bevin
/Bevin
Chris Plewright: "I have a picture in mind that ID is a major whole theory at a similar level to Evolution as a major whole theory."
Although you are by no means alone in supposing this, I would say that this picture in your mind is incorrect. ID is not what you imagine, not does it aim to be that. It does not "fail" in the goal of being an alternative to evolution because it is not aiming to be that "major whole theory" alternative to evolution. That is not the nature of the situation.
On many points, the ID perspective would be neutral, i.e. would not imply any claims for or against. If you want an indication of this, see the ID FAQ.
Chris Plewright: "If ID is not a theory, then what is it? Why can't I call it a theory?"
It is not a single, monolithic proposition, i.e. not one over-arching theory. Rather, it addresses the procedure of science -- how we do science and what can be called science.
One of the earliest points at which the modern scientific ID perspective came into view was within the topic of origin of life research. The more research was done, the more it became evident that undirected chemical processes were completely inadequate to accounting for the origin of life. (For example, see the questions I posed above to Bevin, which he could not answer. No fault of his. No one can.)
For instance, Dean Kenyon originally co-authored a popular text on the undirected origin of life. But later, the weight of evidence compelled him to change his position. When The Mystery of Life's Origin explicitly discussed the need for intelligent agency in the origin of life, in light of the scientific results, Dean Kenyon wrote the forward to that textbook.
It is no surprise that this type of inference is highly objectionable to some -- particularly those who think scientists may only entertain hypotheses that are loyal to philosophical naturalism/materialism.
When a pro-ID article by Dr. Stephan Meyer, one that passed peer-review, was published in a scientific journal, the outrage was so great that efforts were made to effectively trample the career of the editor who allowed this to happen. Congressional investigations confirmed the transgressions.
The ID movement is a movement to object to and overturn this prohibition on being able to infer intelligent agency where the scientific evidence warrants it. Whenever the scientific evidence indicates that intelligent agency is the best inference to make, scientists should be free to follow the evidence. It is also a discussion on how to distinguish and identify intelligent agency in cases where it may show its influence by the evidence.
At the core, this is a debate about the rules of the game for science. If a scientist infers intelligent agency is needed as the best explanation for X, is the scientist still doing science? In particular, is the scientist still doing science even if that inference, supported by evidence, raises doubts about the adequacy of the religion/ideology of philosophical naturalism/materialism?
Phillip Johnson summarized the core issue excellently with this succinct question.
"What should we do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions?"
For emphasis, I would would ask the more specific question, "What should the scientist do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions?"
Should philosophical materialism be an axiom of science that may not be brought into doubt by any scientific result, regardless of the evidence?
Sigh, I think I just demonstrated how the Discovery Institute agenda works.
I am signing off this thread with malice toward none and good wishes toward all.
And...I still believe in intelligent design. =)
> One of the earliest points at which the modern scientific ID perspective came into view was within the topic of origin of life research. The more research was done, the more it became evident that undirected chemical processes were completely inadequate to accounting for the origin of life. (For example, see the questions I posed above to Bevin, which he could not answer. No fault of his. No one can.)
Hilarious, given that I posted a reply apparently at the same time you were composing yours
/Bevin
MarggieB: "I think I just demonstrated how the Discovery Institute agenda works."
Sorry, but no. You've only described how you expect it to work, but when I pointed out what actually happened (e.g. regarding Dover), you still held onto to your preconceptions.
What matters is what people actually do, not what you expect or what you gather from an earlier document.
But mostly, I'm sorry you were unwilling to move past those preexisting expectations and engage on the questions asked about how to do science. Please consider them, even if you do not continue the dialogue.
Best to you.
The Dover trial was unfortunate for DI because, among other things, they didn't initiate it, and it started out as "standing up for Jesus."
DI didn't want to touch that with a ten-foot pole, understandably.
My "preexisting expectations" are that DI WILL DO EXACTLY WHAT IT SAID IT WILL DO, to the extent that it can, and as soon as it can.
The Wedge Document
Phase III
Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings.
We will also pursue possible LEGAL assistance in response to RESISTANCE to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula.
Governing Goals
To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
To replace materialistic explanations with the THEISTIC UNDERSTANDING that nature and HUMAN BEINGS ARE CREATED BY GOD.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
Posted by: Sigh | 18 October 2009 at 8:55
What matters is what people actually do, not what you expect or what you gather from an earlier document.
A very damning earlier document, I might add, and a bell that hasn't been, and can't be, unrung.
DI has religious aims, according to the Wedge. "THEISTIC UNDERSTANDING." "HUMAN BEINGS ARE CREATED BY GOD."
That's pure, unvarnished religion.
Are supposed to believe that suddenly DI has changed their mind about all that?
The expectation of naivete is high, apparently.
I'm sorry I can't meet that expectation, but no hard feelings.
As I said earlier, discernment could be put to good use here, if anyone wants to consider that option.
I'm gone now.
Wm. Dembski: “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”
Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools
--Phillip Johnson, "father" of ID
Sorry...one more from The Wedge:
FIVE YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN SUMMARY
We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID).
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to REPLACE it with a SCIENCE consonant with CHRISTIAN and theistic convictions.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
If that does not give one pause....
No wonder there is so much resistance!
Sigh,
You misunderstand me.
You said, "ID is not what you imagine, not does it aim to be that. It does not "fail" in the goal of being an alternative to evolution because it is not aiming to be that "major whole theory" alternative to evolution. That is not the nature of the situation."
Just to clarify, weather or not these are in opposition, is completely irrelevant to what I was saying. I simply claimed that they are both major theories.
Also, I did not claim them as monolithic. Actually, the opposite, I tried to explain that neither theory is monolithic, did you read when I said that they are composed of many simpler theories?
The question of overarching is separate to monolithic. Maybe you'll have to expand on what you mean by combining them. I do believe that ID, at it's top, overarching level does contains a single inherent statement. Do you deny that?
Intelligent has a specific meaning.
Design has a specific meaning.
Intelligent Design has another specific meaning.
i.e. The single, overarching claim in Intelligent Design is that it is legitimate to find objects and infer that they came from an intelligent causal agent. This is more or less exactly what you told me! No? I suggest that this is the overarching theory of ID. Not monolithic, but overarching.
It doesn't 'aim' to be that, it just IS that, by the nature of what it means! Each and every single statement about reality makes a claim about reality - and every statement is a theory about reality. (OK, some statements are called observations and some become laws, but they all still require 'theory' in them.) And, I do believe ID is legitimate as a theory, as the watchmaker argument very clearly demonstrates already.
It does cause an interesting question. Why isn't it OK to infer design with DNA, when it is OK to infer design for a watch found on the beach? What is the difference? Neither can observe the causal agency, but both are inferences about the causal agency. There are a couple of answers that I have heard. One is to rule out intelligent agency a-priori - which contradicts the watchmaker argument. Another answer is to not accept that it is a reasonable causal agency for DNA but it is reasonable for a watchmaker. Personal choice.
BUT then, perhaps the question is a false dichotomy. Because some forms of intelligent agency have never been ruled out. An intelligent agency defined as the law giver still qualifies for intelligent design, and would fit naturalistic mechanisms.
Furthermore, not all scientists rule out special creation either. So, it really does come down to choice - the rules of science do not dictate that it must be ruled out. Rather, people choose based on what seems reasonable to them.
So, there is a range of ways of looking at that.
I pause here and agree that some scientists suggest that it should be ruled out a-priori as a rule in science, and agree that is an issue.
You don't like my use of the word theory, that is up to you - I think you misunderstand my use of the word theory! I pointed out that there are different levels of theories.
You point out that ID is about an argument, a disagreement amongst scientists, when you said, "The ID movement is a movement to object to and overturn this prohibition on being able to infer intelligent agency where the scientific evidence warrants it."
You basically confirm MaggieB's point, and I agree it is a fair point too. The fact that ID has a movement, is kind of looked at negatively towards what ID means itself. So, I also agree with you that it is important to distinguish that the argument is a consequence of the theory of ID only when the theory of ID is in opposition to other theories. And, the argument is not the core of what the theory of ID means itself. That's a fair point too.
Am I getting warmer? I don't think that I am disagreeing with the main ideas of what you are saying, but you seem to be disagreeing with how I am saying it. And, I am not sure why. Perhaps it is simply semantics about the word theory?
[Sorry in advance for the length of this response to Bevin. Those who aren't interested in all the details can skim to the last paragraph.]
Bevin: [Catalysts] "cause the high-probably formation of an otherwise low probability material. In other words all catalysts meet the definition of a "symbolic information translation system" - especially if you remember that "symbol" is ID slang for two atoms side by side. Water is a "symbol"."
Incorrect on multiple counts. A catalyst is not "symbolic information translation system". "Symbol" is not slang for two atoms side by side. A water molecule is not of itself a symbol.
It is obvious to everyone that I'm referring to the symbolic information translation system needed by cells to function. That is the example system whose origin cannot be explained by evolution (in part because evolution, so far as it can happen at all, depends on that system already existing and working).
The DNA base sequences are symbolic information because they represent something other than themselves by being an encoded recipe for constructing functional proteins. The translation from bases to functional structures shows that they hold symbolic information.
Regarding your references, they don't solve the questions I challenged you with. A recurring problem is that any paper that begins with cells and active translation systems has already bypassed the core of the issues I am raising.
For example, the subtitle of the book in the third reference is Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. But I'm not asking about variations of the system after cellular life has begun.
The fourth reference article focuses more so on topics such as "horizontal gene transfer (HGT)", which of course presumes the existence of genes. It does have a very brief section of three paragraphs on "The Evolution of Translation", but the content is of the vaguest hand waving kind.
"This simple RNA-based primitive translation process was highly imprecise (in matching anticodon to codon, in maintaining reading frame). Therefore, only small proteins and/or proteins imprecise in sequence (and therefore simple and general in function) could at first evolve (24, 25)."
Reference 24 is freely downloadable, but it too takes as a starting point the assumption that translation is already occurring in a primitive cell.
"Discussion and Summary.-The TE model for evolution of the genetic code starts with a primitive cell possessing random, ambiguous codon assignments, and a very error-ridden translation process, and shows how such cells, from the "necessity" of minimizing the effects of translation errors, can evolve the highly ordered codon catalogue we observe today."
A secondary problem I'll note briefly in passing is that there does not seem to be a serious examination of the actual feasibility of success for a system with such a high error rate. A common logical error made by evolutionists is to assume that because X would be necessary in order for their model to succeed, therefore it is necessary that X could have happened by undirected processes. Consequently, skeptical scrutiny can be lacking on key weak points. (I don't have a copy of Meyer's book on hand, but IIRC the impact of error rates may be discussed.)
Another secondary issue is what "cell" is taken to mean. That in itself can present serious problems of either failing to protect the delicate structures it supposedly contains from destructive interactions, and/or excluding desirable interactions between the interior and all that is on the outside. A true cell depends on much complexity to work correctly and effectively, both in what it allows and what it denies.
The primary problem is that this is already too late and assuming too much. It starts with a primitive cell and this cell is already employing a translation process. How do we get to even a primitive cell without first having a reliable translation process? We cannot suppose information based reproduction, so that supporting prop is excluded. How does such a cell reproduce itself entirely and accurately, so that evolving improvements (the basis of this TE model) are preserved rather than degraded and lost entirely? More could be said, but I will not belabor this further.
Bevin, if you still think these references answer the questions I raised, there is an obvious and simple way to show that. Take each of my questions, quote it, and then give the answer that is provided by one or more of your references. I'm looking forward to seeing each of those answers.
Chris Plewright,
I'm sorry if I'm being slow about this. I am interested in what you have to say, and in understanding your questions. I will also stop using "monolithic." Sorry about that.
Chris Plewright: "The single, overarching claim in Intelligent Design is that it is legitimate to find objects and infer that they came from an intelligent causal agent."
Yes, but I would want to make sure we understand this does not mean that the intelligent causal agent is always the same agent. We are speaking generally of the legitimacy of the process of distinguishing artifacts of any kind from the undirected products of purely natural processes.
Chris Plewright: "Perhaps it is simply semantics about the word theory?"
Yes, I believe what threw me is the use of the word "theory". That word can have a wide range of meanings, but according to some of them, ID would not properly be called a "theory," if one is being particular. (It is a charged word and this can be a touchy subject with scientists, so there is a reason to avoid seeming to claim something one does not. Also, like it or not, people do tend to suppose ID is claiming to be a one-for-one complete replacement / alternative to evolution when the "theory" terminology comes in.)
But I'll qualify that. There is some work being done on the nature of information and information flow and transformation. For example, there are the No Free Lunch theorems (cf. Dembski's book). Some are beginning to propose that it may be legitimate to pose fundamental laws concerning information. Now that could be an area where ID related work becomes an overarching theory, potentially on a level similar to the laws of thermodynamics. Time will tell.
Chris Plewright: "It does cause an interesting question. Why isn't it OK to infer design with DNA, when it is OK to infer design for a watch found on the beach? What is the difference?"
That is an excellent question -- possibly the pivotal question.
Tell me if you can think of any counter examples to this possible answer. If the intelligent agency might be God, then the inference is not OK. If the intelligent agency is clearly not God, then it can be OK depending on the evidence.
I suspect you know of the opposition of Dawkins to ID (and to God). Yet in the movie Expelled, he is quite comfortable with and open to the possibility that biological life on Earth could be the product of aliens. To infer that is to infer intelligent agency.
I will put it further. From a materialistic perspective, an atheist cannot logically exclude the possibility that life on Earth is the product of an alien species. In principle, humans might be able to do something of the kind eventually, if opportunity were to allow. Yet when ID advocates attempt to infer intelligent agency for biological life, it is met with forceful derision and resistance, even seeking to trash people's careers. There is no logical coherence to such a violent reaction -- except that one must not allow room for the divine foot to get in the door.
Chris Plewright: "I pause here and agree that some scientist suggest that it should be ruled out a-priori as a rule in science, and agree that is an issue."
To be clear, it is not possible to rule out inferences to intelligent agency a priori or in general. No one does that. Besides the Dawkins & aliens angle, science regularly infers intelligent agency. We see an arrow head or stone tools or ancient writing and infer intelligent agency, even if we cannot translate the writing or do not know what the tools are used for. That is OK and routine. The same would be true for anything of the kind found on Mars. So ruling out all ID inferences is impossible.
In practice, what is required a priori is that philosophical naturalism must never be brought into question or doubt. Only supernatural intelligent agency is excluded a priori by the current dominant culture within science, especially regarding biology.
Sigh,
Please, call me Chris. It seems so formal always using my surname.
Also, thanks, I think we understand each other better now.
"I would want to make sure we understand this does not mean that the intelligent causal agent is always the same agent."
Yep, I understand that one.
"ID would not properly be called a "theory," if one is being particular."
hehehe. I could argue that one for a while. Evolution may not pass the strictest rules either! Sticklers for the rules have been known to call evolution more of a paradigm than a theory. But, actually the 'rules' have a-priori assumptions that can be challenged philosophically. It does boil down to consensus, methinks. Anyways, that is a totally different topic. But just out of interest, do you accept that evolution is a valid scientific theory? I do. I just don't necessarily accept it's untestable assumptions.
A theory is only invalidated as a scientific theory, if it has been falsified, or if it contains no testable statements (and of course if it was valid before that!) Just like flat earth used to be a valid theory, but these days it is not! As I mentioned, theories that include some testable statements about reality are in the scientific domain. Hence my repeating the Popperian criteria, I think ID does pass the Popperian criteria. Which rule does ID fail to be called a scientific theory?
"To be clear, it is not possible to rule out inferences to intelligent agency a priori or in general." Good, we are in agreement.
The reasonable counter point to that goes something like this: incredible claims require incredible proof. So, although it is not necessarily ruled out a-priori, it does not have to be accepted or ruled in either, if there is not sufficient reason to accept it. Therein lies the challenge to ID. It needs to seem reasonable in order to rule it in.
You said of the interesting question, "That is an excellent question -- possibly the pivotal question."
Yeah, but I also provided a few different possible responses to the question. I'm also trying to point out that it may be a false dichotomy. We need to accept that there are other ways of looking at it too. If 'naturalistic laws' are the result of an intelligent design, then the question contains a false premise! This would still fit the basic definition of intelligent design, wouldn't it?
Therefore, in order for the question to remain pivotal, you are raising the definition of the intelligent agency to something more specific! This therefore is NOT about ruling out a-priori intelligence as defined by the fundamental definition of intelligent design, but it now contains a new claim of special intervention as well.
Actually, you bring two extra claims to the argument.
The specific claim in ID towards biology is no longer about generically inferring intelligent agency when it is merited, it becomes more specifically about it being merited in this case. Sorry if that part is painfully obvious. Now, the first extra claim the way you are posing it specifies a special intervention above naturalistic laws. But also, you go further still than simply suggesting that special intervention is merited, because you also make a second extra claim, that naturalistic laws are insufficient to explain the appearance of biology. Thereby leaving naturalistic intervention as the ONLY logical choice!
I am not convinced about this second extra claim (that naturalistic laws are insufficient to explain it). I am happy with the first claim, to believe that special intervention may be merited, and I am comfortable without needing to prove that naturalistic laws are insufficient. But you seem to insist that naturalistic laws can not explain it.
Now, I am interested to talk about this second extra claim - that naturalistic forces are not sufficient. I don't think it is necessary for the argument, but I am interested to know why you hold to it.
I am not convinced about the argument to do with symbols. Information theory is near and dear to me. And I think it's taken too far to call symbols as ontologically real objects. It's too tautological. I kind of agree with Bevin about the symbols. Symbols are imposed onto things by an observer, and only have meaning because we say so. If we didn't say so, then they would not have meaning. If you have been in software, you might know where we are coming from with that.
Chris
Your claim that my argument was similar to the Biblical argument against Jesus- being a reductio ad absurdum- is false. Jesus would have been using that type of logical fallacy if he had been teaching that the Law of heaven was the same as the Law of Moses. The priests were leading to a conclusion that the situation in heaven would break the Mosaic Law. Under Mosaic Law, if a man has a married brother that dies childless the man is REQUIRED to marry the childless widow and have sex with her until a male heir for the deceased brother is born. Jesus got around it by claiming that there was no marriage in heaven.
Then, you mis-paraphrase, and claim that I was concluding that we would not be reunited with loved ones in heaven when I was claiming that there would be no sex in heaven. Having a family reunion does not imply sex. Having a marriage does at least IMPLY sexual activity.
On top of that, in my response to Mr G, I claimed, in response to his casual insertion of Pascal's Wager into the conversation, that not only does being a christian have costs (prayer, bowing, money, etc) but that if he wanted a better religion to believe in he might choose Islam as they believe in sex in Paradise. There is a better payoff if somebody is looking for a bet, or wager along the lines of Pascal's Wager.
Chris,
Don't have time for a long reply right now. A couple quick points, and more later.
First, I do know software, and it is because of this that the point about meaningful symbolic information (not just "symbols" in any vague sense) is vivid to me. If you have doubts about the reality of symbolic information, try playing a DVD disk made for one convention on a player for a different convention. How well will it work to try to persuade it to impose the competing symbolism onto the data?
(There is much more that could be said, but that is a thought experiment to chew on. If you want another, try feeding a program in one language to a compiler for another language. Consider what is happening and why it cannot work.)
Symbolic information translation systems require four coordinated components.
1. Symbolic information (e.g. meaningful base sequences in DNA or RNA, or the data on a DVD, or characters in a program).
2. A defined language convention by which the symbolic information was encoded and which maps between the symbol sequences and the realized meaning (e.g. player formats, or one of the various genetic codes that organisms use -- there is more than one, or a programming language).
3. Translation mechanisms that can decode according to the same convention (e.g. the corresponding DVD player, or ribosomes in living cells, or a compiler that implements a programming language)
4. The meaning, i.e. the correctly translated and functional output of the decoding (e.g. the viewable movie, or functional proteins, or an executable program).
Undirected chemical reactions will never create such a system, no matter how long you wait.
And remember Garbage In Garbage Out. To get functional output, one must have encoded meaningful symbolic information. Random sequences give static or noise, because they are oblivious to any concerns or commitments of the convention or realized meaning. It is an important detail that abiogenesis people tend to gloss over or ignore altogether.
One characteristic of many ID proponents, like Sigh, is they never do their own research and they hope others don't either. Instead they stumble upon some ID book, assume that the questions and statements in it are true, and try the ideas out in public hoping that their audience is also incapable of looking up answers.
The summary of the situation here is
(a) rna is a self-assembling self-copying chemical
(b) we are still learning a lot about the many possible paths from a simple chemical soup to a simple soup containing replicating rna
(c) Sigh's claim above, "The primary problem is that this is already too late and assuming too much. It starts with a primitive cell and this cell is already employing a translation process" is simply and utterly false. Cells are not essential for the original replication reproduction processes. Indeed cells as we know them today are the product of as much evolution as the rest of the world around us. It is simply sloppy thinking that cells are simple and big animals are complex.
http://www.news-medical.net/news/2008/12/18/44398.aspx#
http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/Agricultures/past/spring2008/Spotlight...
http://www.scientific.net/SSP.97-98.27
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/denis036/thisweekinevolution/2009/03/experimenta...
Sigh, if you were actually doing science, instead of simply trying to raise doubts about its results, you would be trying to invalidate your own arguments rather than believing them because they lead to the conclusion you want.
Science is about trying to disprove something by doing research, not by trying to get others to believe it by spewing out false claims in the hope one of them will strike home.
/Bevin
keafan,
Please forgive me for the mis-paraphrase. Sorry that I was not clear. Please understand that when I said 'with our spouses', I did mean in every best possible way. I think in ways that are more intimate than we can imagine in a sinless environment, with sinless bodies.
As to the reductio ad-absurdam. Your argument DID seek to reduce the Christian concept of Heaven! Do you deny that now? Yes, it was a different argument to the Saducees in the specifics. I did not claim it was the exact same argument, but it had a similar pattern, in that their argument also used scripture and sought to reduce Heaven.
There may or may not be sex in Heaven - that is besides the point that I was making about your argument. Your argument requires that potentially missing out on sex in Heaven be a negative thing about Heaven. Your argument is about forfeiting something that appears precious to us - your argument followed that the Christian concept of Heaven without sex was not as good as for example the Moslem concept with all the virgins (what a nightmare! I have enough trouble keeping up with one wife!) Your argument towards Mr G. requires that to be a negative comparison! I think you made a ridiculous statement, which ignores what Heaven means to Christian people!
And, for you to construct an argument against Heaven by using what Jesus said when He was defending Heaven, is also what I was having a go at.
Let me put that another way. If we think that sex is something that we can't go without, if it is something that has higher priority for us than Heaven, then perhaps we do need to contemplate how Heaven can be Heaven without sex.
Sometimes, Jesus' response was in absolutes like that. But we need to understand those responses in context to what was being asked to get the meaning. For example, the Rich Young Ruler:
Matthew 19 (NIV)
" 16 Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"
17 "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments."
18-19 "Which ones?" the man inquired.
Jesus replied, " 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,' and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'"
20 "All these I have kept," the young man said. "What do I still lack?"
21 Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.
23-24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
25 When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, "Who then can be saved?"
26 Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
27 Peter answered him, "We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?"
28-30 Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first."
OK, so lets examine verse 24 "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
I have enough trouble threading cotton wool through the eye of a needle! I think Jesus is comparing it with an impossible task. This is echoed again in verse 26, "With man this is impossible."
So, what then, shall we argue that rich men can not enter God's kingdom? Or, would that be taking Jesus' words out of context?
with God all things are possible.
I think this is all about the concept of having the will to forfeit everything we have now is a good thing in order to gain a whole lot more.
When this concept is kept in mind while reading the discussion about the Sadducees. How can it be used in a negative way the way you have?
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says a few detailed things about the Christian concept of resurrection. Some more about what we won't be in Heaven. But it is positive. Some examples include:
42-44 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.
50 I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
I understand that Paul uses flesh and blood in the meaning of our sinful nature.
Anyway, as long as we can worship God, I don't care if we don't have sex, it will be better than sex. It doesn't matter.
My final thought is this. When we are in the new Earth, don't you think we will be able to do what we were originally created for in the first Eden? Of course this is speculation, although it makes sense to me. But the point here is this, if you understand Heaven the way I do, then it does not contradict what Jesus was saying.
Hey, this is interesting...
http://www.biblicalhebrew.com/nt/camelneedle.htm
/Bevin
I think you made a ridiculous statement, which ignores what Heaven means to Christian people!
Making what you consider to be a ridiculous statement is not a reductio ad absurdum. As I clearly showed about your claim of that fallacy in the priest's question to Jesus, their question did not fit the pattern of the fallacy you asserted. Jesus responded by stating that their implied premise was false, not that their conclusion reduced a premise to an absurdity.
My statement that, if someone were to use Pascal's Wager at least go for the best payout, is not a fallacy of any kind, let alone a conclusion which reduces a premise to an absurdity.
Your putting lots of paragraphs together doesn't change that fact. If you want to prove that fallacy show my premise that is reduced to an absurdity by my conclusion.
Also, I second Bevin's link. I always find it humorous when a christian goes on at length about the camel fitting through the eye of a sewing needle.
Bevin: "rna is a self-assembling self-copying chemical"
Sounds wonderful, and wonderfully easy. But you're not telling the whole story, not by far. Start with the fact that you are describing a potential for some RNA, not an attribute of any or all RNA strands. Self-copying isn't automatic. And even supposing it possible, maintaining that quality places constraints on future changes to/interference with the RNA strands, or else risk losing replication. For example, it doesn't give a free cell-replication.
Robert Shapiro wrote a summary critique of the RNA position for Scientific American. Shapiro is not an advocate for ID. Nevertheless, his withering analysis leaves the pretty picture in tatters. He describes many points at which unrealistic assumptions are made or chemical difficulties ignored.
Shapiro: "Many chemists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the RNA-first hypothesis as if it were a building on fire."
For all the juicy details, I recommend
A Simpler Origin for Life
"The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. ..."
Meanwhile, Leslie Orgel (also not an ID proponent) later skewered Shapiro's alternative as well, concluding with this gem.
"However, solutions offered by supporters of geneticist or metabolist scenarios that are dependent on “if pigs could fly” hypothetical chemistry are unlikely to help."
The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth
Bevin: "we are still learning a lot about the many possible paths from a simple chemical soup to a simple soup containing replicating rna"
Yes, and much of it is very bad news (cf. above articles). But I will add that the chemical obstacles, per se, are not my focus. The challenge I am discussing is the subsequent one of symbolic information processing.
Bevin: "Sigh's claim above, "The primary problem is that this is already too late and assuming too much. It starts with a primitive cell and this cell is already employing a translation process" is simply and utterly false. Cells are not essential for the original replication reproduction processes. Indeed cells as we know them today are the product of as much evolution as the rest of the world around us. It is simply sloppy thinking that cells are simple and big animals are complex."
You seem to have completely missed my point. I wasn't implying at all that "cells are simple". Exactly the opposite.
The problem is one of a logical fallacy. If the task is to explain the origin of X, one cannot draw support from any article that begins with the assumption that X already exists and is in some sense already in operation.
This is called begging the question. It is a logical fallacy.
To account for the origin of symbolic translation, one cannot start with the assumption that translation is taking place.
In addition, it is precisely because cells are not simple that it is assuming too much to start with a cell of any kind, even an early cell. One of the core obstacles is the fact that one cannot use information based reproduction before one has information translation (another question begging assumption). Ergo, one has to justify an ability to reproduce any needed structure without the help of information based reproduction.
I notice that you are still dodging rather than giving specific answers to the specific questions I raised. If you want to engage in meaningful dialogue, those questions are still available. Copy each one and provide the answers.
If you want to go on dodging rather than engaging the hard questions, have fun but I may not take the time to deal with these attempts to shift the focus away from what you haven't been able to resolve. (But no one else has, either. Its not about you.)
"Many chemists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the RNA-first hypothesis as if it were a building on fire."
Or...
"Many theists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the creation hypothesis as if it were a building on fire."
Now, after every Biblical hypothesis about origins, age of the universe, age of this planet, and length of time life & humanity have been on this planet have been falsified you are left to argue about a "maybe" concerning one little point from billions of years ago which is not relevant to the deity of the goat herders anyway.
Chris: "But just out of interest, do you accept that evolution is a valid scientific theory?"
Well, an immediate difficulty is that "evolution" is a horribly abused term which has many meanings and all too often changes meaning as its being used.
I accept that Neo-Darwinism is a coherent proposition, and that it has some real application on micro-evolutionary levels. I just find its apparent abilities far too limited to account for what it claims. If you look at the three part blog series by Behe I linked to above (or his book The Edge of Evolution), that will give you the sense. It succeeds on a limited scale, but fails at being the over-arching theory of the diversity of life.
Chris: "I'm also trying to point out that it may be a false dichotomy. We need to accept that there are other ways of looking at it too. If 'naturalistic laws' are the result of an intelligent design, then the question contains a false premise! This would still fit the basic definition of intelligent design, wouldn't it?"
Some do make the case that one can infer intelligent design of the laws themselves, considering their incredibly implausible fine tuning beyond our ability to comprehend or easily describe.
The book The Privileged Planet goes even further to show the surprisingly unlikely correlation with our ideal position for doing scientific research -- something that has no discernible necessary connection with the laws that make Earth suitable for life. Yet so it is.
I have not much studied those considerations, and they are independent from the direct question of the requirement of intelligent agency for biological life.
Regarding life, some have wondered (including Paul Davies, who is not an ID proponent as such) if the specified complexity found in life could be supplied via some special kind of law. But the general acknowledgment is that it would have to be quite unlike any type of law that we have ever discovered, so such musing don't get very far.
Laws produce order, not highly specified complexity. They yield regular patterns, not unpredictable complexity that is free from following any regular pattern. In fact, sequence complexity can be measured by how much it resists being shortened or summarized (compressed) by describing it with rules or patterns.
Chris: "you seem to insist that naturalistic laws can not explain it.
Now, I am interested to talk about this second extra claim - that naturalistic forces are not sufficient."
If I gave the impression that supernatural causes are required, then I did not communicate well enough. When I talk about insufficiency and laws, I am merely saying that undirected matter and energy, behaving according to the natural laws of physics and chemistry (but with no intelligent intervention), are insufficient and could not be expected to create symbolic information processing systems. They simply don't do that on their own. They have no need for that, even if biology does have such a need.
Biology may need chemistry, but chemistry has never needed biology or symbolic information processing.
Hi keafan,
This can get tricky - so many different premises.
As to Pascal's wager, I accept your point, I didn't mean to refute that. I was only disagreeing with one of the particular examples you used.
As to camel and eye of a needle, as you can see I took the natural meaning, which that link from Bevin confirms. Which lines up with v26 as I already pointed out! Although, I admit that I was corrected on this only a couple of weeks ago myself - currently reading an interesting book about Bible interpretation, and that was one of the points in the first couple of chapters.
Yes, I find it humorous as well that we make mistakes. We do need to be able to laugh at ourselves :) The scientific elite used to believe that the earth was flat once as well. Now its just me :P
You said, "Jesus responded by stating that their implied premise was false, not that their conclusion reduced a premise to an absurdity."
Hmm? This gets silly, and I am partly to blame. Something doesn't quite line up with what I thought I was claiming.
The first bit: "Jesus responded by stating that their implied premise was false"
Yes, that is what I tried to say. I agree with this bit.
But then you said: "not that their conclusion reduced a premise to an absurdity"
Now, here I've lost track of what you think this bit is referring to. It doesn't seem to line up with what I thought I claimed.
The reductio ad-absurdum I thought I pointed out was the argument that the Sadducees were trying to achieve, not what Jesus responded! Jesus only had to show that one of their implied premises was false in order to nullify their reductio ad-absurdum.
The 'absurdity' that I was talking about, is stated very well in your own words, "The priests were leading to a conclusion that the situation in heaven would break the Mosaic Law."
I think that they expected that this absurdity would result in demonstrating the premise of resurrection to be in error. Their argument was attempting to reduce resurrection by showing an absurdity that results from resurrection! This is the reductio ad-absurdum argument that I was talking about.
I accept that this is a different absurdity than the one you were claiming. My point was that the pattern was similar. Not the details.
You made the statement, "Making what you consider to be a ridiculous statement is not a reductio ad absurdum." Of course, it isn't necessarily. But, in this case, my interpretation was that your particular reductio ad absurdum was ridiculous.
Your absurdity (in my opinion) was that Heaven without sex is not so good. This absurdity results in reducing the premise of Heaven. Which I believe was your aim as this would reduce Pascal's wager to seem not so desirable.
I have not attempted to falsify your point about Pascal's wager, because you used many other examples. And, I do agree with some of your other examples, there are some good points which demonstrate problems with Pascals wager. But I disagree with this particular example about sex in Heaven. I can see that this example might work for people who think that Heaven without sex is a bad thing. That comes down to a personal judgement call. But it doesn't work for me, and I suspect that it also wouldn't work for most Christian's understanding of Heaven.
Sorry for many paragraphs. I tried to email you, but my email server is kaput, and I won't be able to get to fix it until Thursday.
Sigh,
Thanks for your answers.
I'm OK with what you mean about semantics of the word supernatural.
You said, "I am merely saying that undirected matter and energy, behaving according to the natural laws of physics and chemistry (but with no intelligent intervention), are insufficient and could not be expected to create symbolic information processing systems. They simply don't do that on their own."
Now, there are two distinct claims that I am trying to contrast.
Claim one is that intelligent intervention may be merited.
Claim two is that natural laws of physics and chemistry are insufficient.
Do you think that claim two is necessary in order to accept claim one? I think this is a fallacy. I think that showing a potential theoretical pathway is not of itself necessarily sufficient to remove the merit of inferring intelligent design. Intelligent design may still be the more reasonable choice. Do you think that is all it takes to falsify intelligent design?
I have a problem with that thought, and can demonstrate that it is not necessarily correct. I can design and build a rock formation with my own hands that looks exactly like it would if it was made by natural causes. Natural causes could be sufficient to explain it, but that does not necessarily mean that I didn't design and build it that way! So, in this case, I have demonstrated that a plausible naturalistic (i.e. with natural laws of physics and chemistry) explanation does not correctly falsify the fact of intelligent intervention.
I know that you are arguing for claim two. But that is a side issue to my main question (although I am interested in it). My question at the moment is about claim two being necessary for claim one? Can you see why I think it is a logical fallacy that claim two is necessary, and I think that claim two being falsified does not falsify claim one?
Sigh wrote > I notice that you are still dodging rather than giving specific answers to the specific questions I raised. If you want to engage in meaningful dialogue, those questions are still available.
I have read through all your replies, and must have missed the one with five questions.
I wonder if you are refering to this list on Considers that you wrote. If so, I should point out that, in English, questions are usually written ending in "?" characters.
/Bevin
Sigh wrote the following
Consider...
1. All life depends upon stored symbolic information that is translated by complex molecular machines to drive the information-based construction of the cell's proteins.
>Bevin: Not true. There are self-reproducing systems that are neither particularly complex, nor cellular
2. Symbolic information can be created in abundance by the choices of intelligent agents. This we can observe.
>Bevin: Simple thermostats create symbolic information in abundance, as do huge numbers of simple chemical processes, including litmus paper.
3. Neither experience nor theory provides any undirected alternative cause capable of inventing symbolic information. We have no evidence of any other plausible candidate source.
>Bevin: Chromatography paper, prisms, rainbows, all create symbolic information and yet nobody every considers a rainbow a directed source of information
4. In particular, the laws of chemistry and physics have no need for symbolic information whatsoever. All of the known laws can be fully satisfied by a universe without symbolic information. Even materialists would have to acknowledge that this universe existed for some time without life or encoded symbolic information, yet the chemical and physical laws were not violated.
>Bevin: This statement is nonsenses
5. Further, when we examine how intelligent agents create symbolic language conventions and apply them to implement and use symbolic information, we see they employ qualities such as imagination, choice, planning, and working toward distant goals for their future benefits. These are methods that we know mindless matter cannot employ, and we do not find in mindless matter any sufficient alternative approach to getting symbolic information processing.
>Bevin: And computers do this all day every day
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criteria_of_truth
There are three "primary truths" inherently accepted in the investigation of knowledge and truth. They are the first fact (the fact of our existence), the first principle (the principle of non-contradiction) and the first condition (the ability of the mind to know truth).
Chris,
Good questions. You are quite right that intelligent agency can be hidden, i.e. can mimic or fall within the boundaries of what could have happened due to undirected processes.
The classic example is the crime boss who has one of his goons deal with a problematic individual, but without being detected. Intelligent agency hiding its influence -- "Make it look like an accident."
The flip side is the police detective who must take care to distinguish true accidents from deaths that only seem to be accidents. The scientist is also in the role of a detective.
So you are right, showing that something might have been due to undirected processes does not exclude the possibility of a directed influence. However, that is nearly always the case.
The potential for intelligent causation is too pervasive to incorporate just on the basis that it cannot be excluded. This is why, if something can be explained well by undirected causes, we choose that explanation. Occam's razor inclines us to the simplest satisfactory explanation. Or as Einstein reportedly said, a theory should be as simple as possible but not simpler.
Consequently, the strength of an inference to intelligent agency is directly tied to the strength of the evidence of the inability of undirected processes to achieve that effect. The more clearly something departs from what undirected chemicals and forces do, the more clearly we infer a directed influence.
If you see a turtle balanced on top of a fence post, one infers that someone put it there. We do this based on our understanding of the limitations of what the turtle itself could do. We wouldn't make the same inference for a bird or a squirrel. For an unknown animal, we also might not be in a position to assess.
Likewise, early in the history of origin of life research, all possibilities could seem wide open. For Dean Kenyon, for example, it wasn't until more research was done that he was driven to reject his earlier position. Others similarly report that it has been the advance of knowledge and experimental data that has driven them to conclude intelligent agency is required. Undirected natural processes are insufficient.
Bevin, Thank you for your recent response. I appreciate the way that you engaged with certain points I had made. I will see if I can clear up some communication problems.
A. I am not referring to just any vague idea of "symbols" but rather to encoded symbolic information and the corresponding symbolic information processing systems. Symbolic information translation systems require at least four coordinated components.
1. Symbolic information (e.g. meaningful base sequences in DNA or RNA, or the data on a DVD, or characters in a program).
2. A defined language convention by which the symbolic information was encoded and which maps between the symbol sequences and the realized meaning (e.g. player formats, or one of the various genetic codes that organisms use -- there is more than one, or a programming language).
3. Translation mechanisms that can decode according to the same convention (e.g. the corresponding DVD player, or ribosomes in living cells, or a compiler that implements a programming language)
4. The meaning, i.e. the correctly translated and functional output of the decoding (e.g. the viewable movie, or functional proteins, or an executable program).
Symbolic information requires translation via the associated language/code. By this sense of symbolic information, the only known cases are biologically living organisms and the artifacts of intelligent agents.
B. By "living" I am referring to biologically living organisms that depend on encoded genetic information. Obviously, my focus is on understanding the origin of their symbolic information systems. If you want to call other things "living" too by a different definition, you are welcome to think that way. That simply doesn't address the topic I am raising.
C. You are quite right that questions should have question marks. The why and how "questions" I was referring to are in my post from 17 October 2009 at 4:15, but they did lack the question marks. Sorry about that.
The core problem of explaining the origin of these information systems by evolution (i.e. variation and selection) is that these systems are essential to the effective, faithful reproduction of a complex organism with inheritable traits. Without that, Darwinian evolution cannot get going.
(It is said that biologist Dobzhansky has remarked, "prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms." Even Darwin's theory of evolution started from life "having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one", i.e. starting with living organisms.)
D. In your short response above regarding point 4, are you disagreeing with my point that, "Even materialists would have to acknowledge that this universe existed for some time without life or encoded symbolic information, yet the chemical and physical laws were not violated."? IOW, though biology requires chemistry, chemistry does not require either biology or encoded symbolic information.
E. About your response to point 5, computers do certainly manipulate encoded symbolic information -- because they have been designed to do so by intelligent agents. Notice that I am not claiming, for example, that the ribosome is itself capable of "imagination, choice, planning, and working toward distant goals for their future benefits". It is not the mechanism that has these qualities. Rather, you can see that my point was to "examine how intelligent agents create symbolic language conventions and apply them to implement and use symbolic information".
To the extent that a programmed computer ever employs "imagination, etc." of its own, to that extent one could say that the computer has begun to employ aspects of intelligence. FWIW, I'm not arguing against the possibility of artificial intelligence. But if someone wants to claim undirected chemicals in the prebiotic universe could do this, they will need to clarify that claim. A computer clearly is not a mass of undirected chemicals.
Thanks again for your previous response.
Sigh,
So you are right, showing that something might have been due to undirected processes does not exclude the possibility of a directed influence. However, that is nearly always the case
Thank you very much, I appreciate your answer on that a lot. I was feeling like no one on either side of the argument thought like I did on that. At least, it seems difficult to get people to say, yeah OK. And, all this talk of 'falsification', it can lead to the wrong impression.
I was going to bring up Occam's razor too. Yeah, I understand it to mean that we shouldn't take more premises than are required to explain something. Occam's razor is OK to accept a candidate theory as reasonable, but not sufficient to 'falsify' or reduce competing theories.
My gripe is this. People (not you obviously) claim that intelligent design has been 'falsified', at the same time they admit that they can not rule out the remote possibility of intelligent design. The word falsify is understood to mean impossible, however this is not really the correct meaning if they do accept a small possibility!
We have got past claim one, now we can move onto claim two.
What I want to ask you now, why can't that go both ways? We agree that ID opponents can't prove that the ID theory is impossible, and so why not also agree that ID proponents can't prove that the naturalistic theory is impossible?
(In anticipation of the question about what the word 'prove' means, I this context I mean it in terms of the claim being scientifically validated as true.)
For one, I think that words 'prove', 'falsify' and 'impossible' should stick to mathematics, and logic claims, but not to arguments that require inference when we have incomplete boundaries.
Let me take your example. Maybe there was a tornado that picked up Mr Turtle from the swamp, and landed the poor thing on a fence post. (Unlikely - yes, Impossible - why?) He couldn't crawl off, because his legs were left dangling in the air on the sides, so he is stranded there waiting for us to come along and make an observation, and generate scientific theory about how he came to be like that.
Now, would you argue that because we found him like that, then the only possible reason for him being there was for us to find him like that? To be honest, this is a little like how your argument about symbolic systems sounds to me. In that it is circular, and doesn't seem necessary. But I digress, let's get back to Mr T.
It appears on the surface irreducibly complex by naturalistic causes, but only if we don't consider all that can potentially happen in nature, like for example tornadoes! And so we can consider what is theoretically possible, all of the forces have already been shown to exist in nature to be able to achieve a posted turtle without extra intelligent intervention! I would agree that it seems highly unlikely, but I don't see how to claim it is completely impossible.
Now, are actually making the claim that the naturalistic theory is completely impossible? In your words, "They simply don't do that on their own." Am I misunderstanding what you are claiming?
How can we say it is impossible? I wonder how one would go about demonstrating that it is impossible? Which truth criterion are being used to claim the impossibility here? Can any of the truth criterion be used to claim impossibility in this argument?
Darwin made the claim in his book that "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case."
It is significant that he says, "But I can find out no such case." Are you claiming that naturalistic causes are unlikely, or are you claiming that they are impossible?
Bevin,
Does everything always need to have a question mark?
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Question_mark
Chris, (re: question mark) One good humor deserves another, and this one is even somewhat relevant.
Going back briefly to an earlier question, what would it mean to "falsify" the over-arching idea of being able to detect design / intelligent agency. It would imply a complete inability to infer that a watch or anything else was designed (rather than a product of natural processes) by examining its characteristics.
Imagine an alien visiting a planet for the first time and have a look at banishedonline.com/d/20060206 (and add the dot h t m l). I think you will see the relevance.
Chris, I fully agree that it would be improper to impose on science a proof requirement on the level of mathematics or deductive logic. Science works by inference based on evidence, so all results are tentative. Any result could later be overturned or require modification or at least adjustment.
Yet, that doesn't mean that all our inferences are equally weak. We have much more confidence in some than in others, and the possibility that an inference could be overturned doesn't prevent us from making some inferences confidently based on the complete consistency of the data we have now.
I claim that we can infer with very strong confidence that undirected natural processes would not invent and develop symbolic information systems even given the entire age of the universe, or longer. (You said "... In that it is circular, and doesn't seem necessary." Circular, how so? Not necessary, how so?)
If we return to poor Mr. T, part of my point in including a range of animals, including one unknown, was to illustrate a range of confidence in excluding directed intervention. Yes, if we were to take the problem of Mr. T very seriously, we wouldn't just leap directly to the conclusion. We would need to investigate and consider the plausibility of any alternate scenarios, e.g. a tornado.
That is my point about the historical progression in origin of life research. Early on, one couldn't rule out the various alternatives. It is because of the careful research that the confidence in the inference to intelligent agency has grown.
So when I say, mindless matter does not behave like that, it is because we have studied matter and energy for a long time (much longer than origin of life research) and we do have a working understanding of how mindless matter behaves.
In particular, we do not see either any direct counter examples or any evidence of qualities that are used by intelligent agents to produce symbolic information processing. So we have
1. no empirical support for the idea that undirected matter ever does such a thing, and
2. no support for the idea in principle that undirected matter has the attributes to do this in the way that intelligent agents do it (no imagination, no determined pursuit of future benefits), and
3. no demonstrated alternative ways by which undirected matter could accomplish this.
In short, from within science proper, we have nothing on which to base a belief that undirected matter would do this.
What some people do have is a faith in philosophical materialism (which expects that matter should be able to do this). However, science is not the philosophy of materialism, nor should science be enslaved to it.
My gripe is this. People (not you obviously) claim that intelligent design has been 'falsified', at the same time they admit that they can not rule out the remote possibility of intelligent design.
Chris
Could you please show a statement from somebody on this thread where it was asserted that ID had been falsified?
I have stated repeatedly, and will state again, that Biblical Creation has been falsified. Creation has nothing to do with a chemical spark billions of years ago. The term God, everything people associate with the capital-g God, and every claim made about God in the Bible is contrary to the idea of some intelligence that possibly was a catalyst for some as yet unknown sequence of events billions of years ago. Claims made about God's intervention on this planet that are testable have been found to be false. Everything the ancient ignorant people of the ANE believed about the cosmology of the universe has turned out to be false. Therefore, as EVERY SINGLE THING that the ancients attributed to their deity have been found to have a natural explanation, reasonable people are correct to assume that the one little thing about some spark billions of years ago will ALSO have a natural explanation.
Yet, people like yourself want to run around claiming that somehow, even though God's actions in the Bible are false on the evidence, somehow that SAME deity WAS responsible for the spark billions of years ago, therefore the theory concocted by the same ignorant people thousands of years ago about salvation and paradise out in space somewhere is true.
The word falsify is understood to mean impossible, however this is not really the correct meaning if they do accept a small possibility!
If that is your understanding, and everything that has been discovered is known to have a natural explanation, why do you reject evolution which is not even reliant on knowing how the spark happened billions of years ago? You seem to be making assertions which derails your whole conclusion.
Regarding our increasing knowledge about how chemicals behave when left to themselves, here is an illustration I came across yesterday while looking for something else.
"As Thaxton et al. have pointed out, the degree of investigator interference in chemical evolution experiments increases as the subject of the experiments gets closer to the molecular genetic system.[10] In experiments simulating the primitive atmosphere the interference is minimal. The apparatus is filled with the starting gases, turned on, and left alone until products are analyzed.
"But in experiments designed to simulate the prebiotic formation of biopolymers the investigator may use unrealistic reaction conditions (e.g., high concentrations of a few pure reagents) and/or change the conditions during the experiment to enhance the yields of desired products. This intelligent manipulation of the experimental conditions (to guide the reactions to the desired results) is most apparent in simulations of prebiotic polynucleotide synthesis. The reason why increasingly large doses of investigator influence are required is that if the chemical processes are "left to themselves" they would not produce the desired result, in fact, would go away from the living state, not toward it."
...
"10. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen, The Mystery of Life's Origin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984), pp. 99-112."
Excerpt from
What do Ribozyme Engineering Experiments Really Tell Us About the Origin of Life?
by Gordon Mills and Dean Kenyon
Note that the above difficulties are still at the level of chemical difficulties. They do not yet even reach to the level of the obstacle of symbolic information.
Sigh
That article was written 13 years ago and the excerpt you referenced was from 25 years ago.
Scientifically, IOW, it is outdated and irrelevant.
Sigh
You seem like you would be aware of this research published THIS YEAR:
"Scientists have long known that DNA carries the genetic sequence for advanced organisms and that RNA is dependent on DNA for performing roles such as building proteins. But one prominent theory about the origins of life, called the RNA World model, postulates that because RNA can function as both a gene and an enzyme, it might have arrived on the scene before DNA and acted as the ancestral precursor for all life.
A stumbling block for this theory, however, is that the process of copying a genetic molecule (considered a basic qualification for life) appears to be exceedingly complex, involving many proteins and other cellular components. For years, researchers have wondered whether there might be some simpler way to copy RNA, brought about by the RNA itself. Some tentative steps along this road have previously been taken, but no one has been able to demonstrate that RNA replication could be self-propagating, that is, result in new copies of RNA that also could copy themselves.
Now, however, two Scripps Research Institute scientists have taken a significant step toward confirming the viability of the RNA World model. For the first time, they have synthesized RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves indefinitely without the help of any proteins or other cellular components."
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20090011195733data_trunc_sys.shtml
keafan,
Thanks for the quote. The most important words are "they have synthesized ...".
Facts about chemistry do not become "outdated and irrelevant" just because time passes. Otherwise, that would imply that chemicals behave differently today than they did in the past.
The issue then and now and for the foreseeable future is that RNA World researchers achieve their results through investigator interference. Meyer's book, which also was "published THIS YEAR", describes how this issue of investigator interference hasn't changed at all. The researchers still need to manipulate the experiments in ways that are not plausibly equated to undirected prebiotic conditions.
The quote I gave is just as relevant today as it was when it was made.
Here is an example of Robert Shapiro making the very same observation in his Scientific American article.
"The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time. No physical law need be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are so immense, that the suggestion implies that the non-living world had an innate desire to generate RNA. The majority of origin-of-life scientists who still support the RNA-first theory either accept this concept (implicitly, if not explicitly) or feel that the immensely unfavorable odds were simply overcome by good luck."
However, some scientists can no longer sustain that level of denial / blind faith, and have begun to consider other possibilities. The above quote is immediately followed by Shapiro's statement:
"Many chemists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the RNA-first hypothesis as if it were a building on fire."
This same article begins with these relevant observations:
"A careful examination of the results of the analysis of several meteorites led the scientists who conducted the work to a different conclusion: inanimate nature has a bias toward the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life. (When larger carbon-containing molecules are produced, they tend to be insoluble, hydrogen-poor substances that organic chemists call tars.) I have observed a similar pattern in the results of many spark discharge experiments.
"Amino acids, such as those produced or found in these experiments, are far less complex than nucleotides. Their defining features are an amino group (a nitrogen and two hydrogens) and a carboxylic acid group (a carbon, two oxygens and a hydrogen) both attached to the same carbon. The simplest of the 20 used to build natural proteins contains only two carbon atoms. Seventeen of the set contain six or fewer carbons. The amino acids and other substances that were prominent in the Miller experiment contained two and three carbon atoms. By contrast, no nucleotides of any kind have been reported as products of spark discharge experiments or in studies of meteorites, nor have the smaller units (nucleosides) that contain a sugar and base but lack the phosphate.
"To rescue the RNA-first concept from this otherwise lethal defect, its advocates have created a discipline called prebiotic synthesis. They have attempted to show that RNA and its components can be prepared in their laboratories in a sequence of carefully controlled reactions ..."
Which brings us back to your news -- "they have synthesized ...".
p.s. keafan,
Notice that the point of the quote you objected to was the issue of the need for increasing levels of investigator interference to produce the desired structures.
If you really want to refute that "old" observation, what you need to show is that someone is able to get the larger, more complex RNA World results without any investigator interference.
No one has claimed that results such as the one you gave cannot result from determined synthesis. It doesn't falsify any claim I recall seeing on this page. Quite the contrary, I fully expect that entire living cells can be created by design.
Notice that the point of the quote you objected to was the issue of the need for increasing levels of investigator interference to produce the desired structures.
Sigh
The part I objected to was "The reason why increasingly large doses of investigator influence are required is that if the chemical processes are "left to themselves" they would not produce the desired result, in fact, would go away from the living state, not toward it."
If you really want to refute that "old" observation, what you need to show is that someone is able to get the larger, more complex RNA World results without any investigator interference.
Since the RNA replicated, mutated, and the mutations proliferated to overrun the original combinations without interference it was achieved.
Personally, I couldn't care less if the RNA World turns out to be the most plausible theory. The only theory that has never worked is "God did it!" After a score of millions-to-zero in the Natural vs Supernatural game of science, you are still hoping to score a single point with an obscure, meaningless triviality. I doubt there are many bettors that are putting money down on that point being scored. I know I am not.
The researchers still need to manipulate the experiments in ways that are not plausibly equated to undirected prebiotic conditions.
Deniers of the plausibility of a natural origin of life need to show exactly what all the variables were in the time period when life began on this planet. They cannot, nor have they done it. Therefore, to state that life could not occur naturally according to their math is not valid as they could, in no way possible, know all the variables available in each situation billions of years ago. Its silly of them to claim they CAN know that something DID NOT happen based on a math formula. All that is required of science is to show that it could plausibly HAVE happened. After that, books like Meyer's are for the pew sitters.
0+0+miracle=ID
ID=God
God=Jesus
Jesus=Christianity is true!!!!
What a joke.
Sigh,
Thanks, now I understand better your understanding of both claims I was asking you about. I appreciate the effort it took to understand my questions.
God Bless.
Sigh
biological facts may not become outdated, but speculation certainly does
Speculation from 25 years ago can be totally out of date
/Bevin
keafan,
You asked me, "Could you please show a statement from somebody on this thread where it was asserted that ID had been falsified?"
I got the impression that you think that ID is false! You do seem somewhat opposed to it's claims. Please correct me if I am wrong.
You accepting that ID has not been falsified, I think is significant.
If you accept that the inference to intelligence has not been falsified, then what exactly are you arguing against? Can the inference to intelligence even be falsified?
Isn't the principal that you are agreeing with now, that theoretical naturalistic pathways are not sufficient to falsify the inference to intelligent agency? So then, what exactly is wrong with the inference to intelligent agency?
Then, you moved quickly onto a tower of extra claims. I never claimed billions of years. And you have not shown that the Biblical interpretation is necessarily 'falsified' - but you are claiming that they are 'falsified' now?
But based on the same principal that you have agreed with now, can any amount of theoretical pathways 'falsify' the Biblical account? Isn't it just a matter of scope?
Are these extra claims your reason for rejecting ID? I think that the claims of ID are separate to those other claims.
Deniers of the plausibility of a natural origin of life need to show exactly what all the variables were in the time period when life began on this planet.
Do they? But ID proponents are not claiming that it is theoretically impossible! Did you notice the conversation that I had with Sigh? This is what I was trying to address.
Is this not like asking that all the variables of the golf course need to be explained, before we can accept that it is unlikely for the golf ball to do a round without directed help? I think the opposite is true. If it claimed that a golf ball did do those things, then it needs to be shown to be plausible.
So, the same is true in origins. Proving that it did happen via naturally observable mechanisms requires that all variable be accounted for rigorously! And even then, as you have agreed it still could not falsify ID. Just proving that it is plausible (if they ever actually do that) is not sufficient to invalidate the claims of ID.
When looking at all of observable life, why does the theory of natural origin come to the conclusion of common descent? This is because we have not been able to infer any other occurrences of origins of life! The fact that we have not observed other occurrences of life originating does beg the question. Why only one observation? And is that sufficient to establish such a significant claim that intelligence was not actually used?
It is up to the believers of natural origin of life to prove their own claim! It is up to them to prove the plausibility. It is not up to believers of ID to do the work for believers of natural origin.
keafan: "Since the RNA replicated, mutated, and the mutations proliferated to overrun the original combinations without interference it was achieved."
Sorry, no. Not by a very long shot. The fact that the experiment required no more interference after the initial colony of very special RNA was synthesized does not negate the very plain fact that it took huge amounts of investigator interference to set it up. It wouldn't be news now if every RNA population did this.
Read the article by Robert Shapiro (who is not advocating ID). BTW, the last quote was from the start of page 3, not the start of the article.
keafan: "Deniers of the plausibility of a natural origin of life need to show... "
Robert Shapiro and others who have abandoned the RNA World scenario don't line up with your remarks.
1. They are not "deniers of the plausibility of a natural origin."
2. They don't need to know what you insist they must know in order to see that the RNA scenario is horribly implausible.
3. The assessment isn't simply a math equation or some set of numbers that are unique to "Deniers of the plausibility of a natural origin of life".
Please, read the article. The hard reality is that even those who are committed to a natural explanation are able to see when the RNA crowd is living in chemical denial as they perform unrealistic synthesis experiments. As Shapiro points out, chemicals don't go there when left to themselves.
"inanimate nature has a bias toward the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life. (When larger carbon-containing molecules are produced, they tend to be insoluble, hydrogen-poor substances that organic chemists call tars.) I have observed a similar pattern in the results of many spark discharge experiments."
That is chemical reality when investigator interference is removed. It isn't just abstract math. It is hard, repeatable, empirical data on how chemicals behave.
Chris,
It sounds like you are winding up. I would have liked to get more of your thoughts, especially on clarifying what seemed problematic, unclear, or questionable to you regarding symbolic information.
But if you need to move on, so it is.
Best blessings to you and yours.
Sigh
My 'Deniers of the plausibility' point was not specific to the RNA World hypothesis.
The math equation is from Meyers and many other ID'ers. They sit around and claim that because they can figure out a formula that is 10 to the negative thousand that somehow intelligence must have started life.
Does the plausibility of a natural origin of life falsify ID?
I have never seen anything from the ID'ers that would be scientific or falsifiable. Like Meyers, they tend to say that something is impossible until proven otherwise. The ID'ers who wrote Genesis have had their theory torn to shreds by ice cores, archeology, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology, etc yet some sit here today and claim that the earth and universe are 6000 years old. Currently, the ID'ers are 'down to their last strike' so to speak, trying to dispute one tiny spark billions of years ago.
The recent Dover case ruled the ID'ers to be not scientific, but religious. Wanting to teach religion under the guise of science. Evolutionary biologists like PZ Myers have a duty to stand up and call BS on guys like Meyers and his garbage non-scientific book.
Is that fair?
When you see some actual science from these guys then we can compare them apples to apples and discuss fairness.
The claimers of a natural origin of life are the ones making a claim. The onus is on them who take the belief in natural origin to prove their claim, if they want to convince others of the truth in their claim.
Religion has been making claims about origins for thousands of years. Much of it has been of the "Believe or else!" type of claims. The religious claims have been proven false over and over. Religion has never proven a thing behind their claims but are now resorting to "Believe that our sky deity created the spark that started evolution so you can go to Paradise".
Religion made the claim. They have no evidence for their claim. Every claim that has been tested so far has found that the goat herders from the Bible were complete ignorant idiots about origins and how species came to be.
The odds are, that since every single claim that has been testable about the cosmology and origins of this universe has been proven to be complete useless bunk that the claim, not of the Bible, but of "believers" that somehow the spark was created by their deity will ALSO be complete bunk.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Religion makes extraordinary claims, yet expects the public to keep paying their bills in spite of a complete absence of any normal evidence let alone extraordinary evidence.
Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
keafan,
I have edited my previous post.
Sigh,
I'll get back to you on that. I need to do some background research on those extra claims. If you are not claiming that naturalistic causes have been falsified (as impossible), then I have to reassess what you mean!
Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Why is uniformitarianism any less of a significant claim?
keafan,
They sit around and claim that because they can figure out a formula that is 10 to the negative thousand that somehow intelligence must have started life
I understand the claim differently to how you are posing it. The claim is that the inference ID is not unreasonable. It doesn't mean that ID 'must' have started life, it is just that it is reasonable to infer that ID started life. The word 'must' goes back to my gripe.
"uniformitarianism" has not been a standard scientific theory for at least 50 and maybe 100+ years
It was dismissed with evidence - of continental drift, meteor impacts, and ice-ages
/Bevin
Bevin,
Ahh, well then your understanding of uniformitarianism is not what I was asking about. Try the following.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism_(science)
Uniformitarianism, in the philosophy of science, assumes that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. Its methodology is frequently summarized as "the present is the key to the past," because it holds that all things continue as they were from the beginning of the world.
It contains a significant claim! Is there any proof of this claim? Or is it OK to accept some major claims without proof?
Bevin,
The methodological principles of uniformitarianism are appropriate and are still applied in science.
" * Uniformity of law: Natural laws are constant across space and time.[21]
The axiom of uniformity of law is necessary in order for scientists to extrapolate inductive inference into the unobservable past."
" * Uniformity of process: If a past phenomenon can be understood as the result of a process now acting in time and space, do not invent an extinct or unknown cause as its explanation.[20]
“We should try to explain the past by causes now in operation without inventing extra, fancy, or unknown causes, however plausible in logic, if available processes suffice.”[20] This is known as the scientific principle of parsimony or Occam's razor."
Science has not abandoned these, nor should it.
I got the impression that you think that ID is false! You do seem somewhat opposed to it's claims. Please correct me if I am wrong.
You accepting that ID has not been falsified, I think is significant.
Its not significant. You could tell me that the fairy in your backyard started life. I could not falsify it. It would not be significant that I could not falsify it. I just accept it as being a sign of insanity, stupidity, or a delusion that you would have. Like the idea that some intelligent thingy might have started the propagation of the first cells.
If you accept that the inference to intelligence has not been falsified, then what exactly are you arguing against?
There are thousands of moronic claims that cannot be falsified but still need to be rebutted. Its not science but is claimed to be science. It retards the minds of our nations future- the children. Less than 5% of this country's population is Jewish yet a large percentage of our population knows more about the fictional Noah than than they do about their own great-grandfather.
And Chris, what is your theory about how this "Intelligence" came to exist? If Life needs a "creator", then obviously the creator has not always existed as religion claims God has. The whole theory just crumbles in on itself using its own premises.
... can any amount of theoretical pathways 'falsify' the Biblical account?
It has nothing to do with "theoretical pathways". You show me the dome, created on the second day, and the ocean that is the "waters above the 'heaven' (dome)" (see Psalms and Isaiah) and we can talk about the falsity or truthfulness of the Genesis account. The whole cosmology of the Bible, both Hebrew and Christian testaments, including where God lives, is predicated on the dome. Without the dome modern christians have to pull an Ellen and speculate about holes in Orion etc.
Sigh
Our son is a biochemist at a top research university. I could come on here and spout the latest and greatest research but I don't think its necessary in order to refute the weak Intelligence of the Gaps people. A few thousand years ago practically everything was full of gaps, from seeds that died and came to life (God did it- the rain was his sperm), to womb which was thought to be like a dirt field that the man put his 'seed' in, to the storehouses on the dome where God kept the ice and snow, to the blue ocean in the sky kept up there by the solid dome with windows in it which God opens for rain.
Now, the gap is down to a spark or catalyst in a chemical reaction which started life. I have every confidence that, just as we now know the stars are not little tiny lights hung from the dome, we will figure out the natural explanation for the purely natural catalyst of life.
keafan,
"Its not science but is claimed to be science." Maybe, I think it passes the Popperian criterion. But would be happy for you to explain why it doesn't.
You are quite funny with your American parochialism. I love you Americans. Email me if you genuinely want to understand my personal religious beliefs. You are a long way off the mark at the moment. Too far off for me to go into detail now in this thread.
Email me if you genuinely want to understand my personal religious beliefs.
I don't need to understand your personal religious beliefs. I understand what the Iron Age Bible writers believed. If you want to debate the Biblical beliefs, fine. As every christian has a variance in their personal beliefs trying to understand your personal version of interpretation of how to make the Bible true for you in your mind would be futile and a waste of time. IMO, of course.
If you don't believe the Bible writers thought the ocean in the sky was held up by a dome then you do not understand the basis for the whole Biblical cosmology, starting with day 2 of creation and going all the way to Revelation. I don't think you understand the primitive foundation of the hebrew religion so we would not even agree on the first premise. Kinda hard to have a dialog without agreeing on some premises.
>>> Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
>> Why is uniformitarianism any less of a significant claim?
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism_(science)
As you read the Wiki article, notice that there are many different interpretations of Uniformitarianism. The critical point is near the end
“Geologists do not deny uniformitarianism in its true sense, that is to say, of interpreting the past by means of the processes that are seen going on at the present day, so long as we remember that the periodic catastrophe is one of those processes. Those periodic catastrophes make more showing in the stratigraphical record than we have hitherto assumed.”[27]
They have reached this point BECAUSE THE MODEL WORKS - it makes predictions that match reality
ID doesn't. Indeed most of the predictions made by ID'ers have since been proven false - predictions about what things require design and could not have evolved.
/Bevin
keafan: "I have every confidence that, just as we now know the stars are not little tiny lights hung from the dome, we will figure out the natural explanation for the purely natural catalyst of life."
You are certainly entitled to your hold onto your faith, whatever the evidence may be so far. Materialists are just as entitled to exercise faith as anyone else. (Now if you want to hold onto it despite contrary evidence while still denying that it is a leap of faith, well that would be simply inconsistent.)
The trouble is, there are good reasons in principle that the methods that have worked so well with regard to matter and energy, law plus chance, are unable to account for the origin of symbolic information. Symbolic information does not originate from matter plus energy plus law plus chance plus time. None of the areas of past success have required explaining the origin of information in that way, so past performance is no promise of future success in an unrelated area. (I believe Hume had some things to say about bad arguments from analogy.)
But I have a question for you.
Suppose that materialism is true. Even if that were so, it wouldn't guarantee that there is an undirected process that can produce the biological life that we see. It may be that a different kind of life arose, leading to some other intelligence that was responsible for designing the kind of life we do see. Dawkins has mused about the interesting possibility of design by aliens. Other people are more serious about the idea of directed panspermia.
So here is the problem for your "confidence" in science. Science cannot legitimately find something that is not true. Even if materialism is true, it does not follow that our kind of life can be created directly from undirected material processes.
What then is the real basis in your "confidence" that the inference to design must be wrong? It seems that there is no real basis (beyond preference or wishful thinking or blind leaps of faith or emotion that sometimes clouds judgment).
Even when science succeeds, it does so at the expense of shedding cherished theories that don't pan out. It may succeed by showing your "confidence" against design was misplaced and mistaken, and the evidence so far continues to stack up in that direction.
So tell me, what do you think is the basis for "confidence" that the inference to design must be wrong, even if we supposed (for the sake of the question) that materialism were true?
Bevin, feel welcome to give your own answer to the question I just asked keafan, if you are so inclined.
Sigh
I'm outta time. Will respond this weekend.
Chris
You are quite funny with your American parochialism.
How does it differ from Brisbane or Australian parochialism?
>>> So tell me, what do you think is the basis for "confidence" that the inference to design must be wrong, even if we supposed (for the sake of the question) that materialism were true?
The inference to design is wrong, because obviously the Designer is so complex that THEY must have been designed, and hence there is GOD even bigger than God, just as God is bigger than the universe.
>>> Symbolic information does not originate from matter plus energy plus law plus chance plus time.
Your mistake starts here.
http://www.dnaftb.org/dnaftb/19/concept/index.html
DNA is not 'symbolic information', in the sense that a Fourier transform of an equation, or the AES encryption of a text is a symbolic representation. It is not even as symbolic as a blueprint.
Instead the DNA is mechanism for creating RNA, and RNA is (a) an autocatalyst, making itself; and (b) making other stuff.
Scientists are still looking for the complete steps that could make this happen. There are THREE obvious starting points - the DNA, the RNA, and the amino acids.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/43723/title/How_RNA_got_start...
http://www.evolutionofdna.com/
So God's problem is this. In a universe complex enough to have Adam and Eve walking in a Garden and replicating to make Cain and Abel, evolution WILL happen.
/Bevin
Bevin: "DNA is not 'symbolic information', in the sense that a Fourier transform of an equation, or the AES encryption of a text is a symbolic representation. It is not even as symbolic as a blueprint."
In the context of DNA, "symbolic information" means that sequences of bases, when considered in triplets (codons) according to the conventions of the genetic code of an organism, can act as a sequence of symbols representing associated amino acids (according to that particular genetic code). This is information that informs the ribosome concerning the sequence of amino acids to use to build a protein. The protein isn't built out of bases -- it is built out of the amino acid sequence represented by the information encoded into the sequence of bases.
Are you seriously trying to evade the plain and obvious fact that DNA holds information that has been encoded according to a genetic code?? You are clearly not going to carry that point successfully.
Bevin: "Scientists are still looking ..."
And looking and looking. But what they find is this.
"inanimate nature has a bias toward the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life. (When larger carbon-containing molecules are produced, they tend to be insoluble, hydrogen-poor substances that organic chemists call tars.) I have observed a similar pattern in the results of many spark discharge experiments." (from the Scientific American article above by Robert Shapiro)
Bevin: "So God's problem is this. ..."
Bevin: "The inference to design is wrong, because obviously the Designer is so complex that THEY must have been designed, and hence there is GOD even bigger than God, just as God is bigger than the universe."
Why is the word "God" slipping into your response again and again?
Sorry, but I think you missed the point of the challenge I gave to keafan. For the sake of this challenge, we are starting from supposing materialism were true. The point is to see, if we strip away anti-God bias and emotion, is there any scientific merit to the highly charged resistance to the design inference?
So far you seem to be (indirectly) supporting my expectation that the resistance is mostly about being against anything that might hint of God, whatever the science says.
If materialism were true, then what is the scientific case against inferring design regarding our kind of life? What is the scientific basis for being confident that our kind of life can come directly from "inanimate nature" without any help at all from agents that can synthesize the kinds of chemicals and nano-machinery and encoded information that inanimate nature shows no inclination to produce on its own?
The "more complex" argument fails. You've provided no basis whatsoever for supposing the designer of the life we see is "more complex".
Sigh,
what I am pointing out is that the DNA and RNA are NOT some abstract symbolic information but are, in fact, chemicals that directly cause the formation of the next chemical in the chain.
If you regard this as 'symbolic information' then there is NOTHING that you don't regard as 'symbolic information', and so your argument falls back to
'I feel this is too complex to have evolved'.
>>> Why is the word "God" slipping into your response again and again?
Because I can't be bothered using your eupherism of "The Designer".
>>> If materialism were true, then what is the scientific case against inferring design regarding our kind of life?
Because,
(a) contrary to your personal feelings, nothing in biology has been found that is not explainable without it. Science doesn't add rules to its model of the universe just to satisfy your gut feelings.
(b) The obvious scientific question is 'who designed the designer"? and, if the designer who is obviously more complex than our biology doesn't need a designer, then why does our much simpler status require one?
/Bevin
Bevin: "what I am pointing out is that the DNA and RNA are NOT some abstract symbolic information but are, in fact, chemicals that directly cause the formation of the next chemical in the chain."
This is false. The codons do not even directly touch the amino acids. Rather they pair with the anticodon of a Transfer RNA (which has an associated amino acid attached elsewhere on its structure). The Transfer RNAs implement a genetic code for that organism.
"The existence of tRNA was first hypothesized by Francis Crick, based on the assumption that there must exist an adapter molecule capable of mediating the translation of the RNA alphabet into the protein alphabet." -- Wiki
"mediating the translation" is exactly a symbolic translation. To say that it is not symbolic would be to claim that there is only one possible interpretation of a sequence of DNA bases. But this simply is not true.
A base sequence in DNA does not inherently or intrinsically mean any particular amino acid. That is why it is symbolic. If the exact same mRNA sequence were fed to an organism that uses one of the other genetic codes, it would translate to a different amino acid sequence, according to that genetic code's interpretation of the symbolic information.
I don't understand why you are resisting what is common scientific fact, known for decades.
Bevin: "Because I can't be bothered using your eupherism of "The Designer""
You still don't seem to get the point. For the sake of this question, we are supposing materialism were true. You're not obligated to take on the challenge, but if you do, you need to find a real response that meets the challenge.
Bevin: "The obvious scientific question is 'who designed the designer"?"
According to the assumptions, not necessarily anyone. The prior designer, presumably being of a different kind, may have arisen by some undirected natural process.
Bevin: "if the designer who is obviously more complex than our biology ...our much simpler status ..."
Sorry, no. I've already pointed out that your assertion that the prior designer is "more complex" is just an assertion without any support. There is no reason an earlier designer must be "more complex". How do you get from "earlier" to "more complex"?
Bevin: "... doesn't need a designer, then why does our ... status require one?"
Because our construction is presumably different. Our cells are quite like a programmed computer running a robotic assembly line, given our cellular use of stored programs with nano-translation units to decode the stored information to drive other work.
In fact, you made this very point. When I was writing earlier about translation, you wrote "Bevin: And computers do this all day every day" Indeed they do, and our cells are like those computers.
So far, you haven't shown that it is impossible for some other being to have designed the life we see on earth. (How could you? We may do it ourselves some day.)
Neither have you shown that there is some reason to know that it didn't happen that way for us. Or that, if we are the product of some other designer, it would be impossible to detect indications of this.
Neither have you shown anything to exclude the possibility that our type of cells depend on design.
In other words, the possibility that our kind of life is indeed designed, and necessarily so, is still a genuine live possibility that fits with all known evidence. That makes it a legitimate point of scientific inquiry -- even if one assumes materialism is true.
Do you want to try to deny this?
Sigh,
(1) To claim that we could not have evolved but require a designer, but that a much more complex being does NOT require its own designer is a patently self-serving piece of nonsense. Either we both require a designer, or neither requires a designer.
(2) There are lots of chemical reactions that run through intermediate steps. This is why I wrote "directly cause the formation of the next chemical in the chain." It was you, not me, who assumed that the next chemical was an amino acid - and then correctly said it was not so.
(3) There are many legitimate branches of scientific investigation, including investigating the possibility that a particular structure could not have evolved and hence must have had a designer.
No such structure has been found.
/Bevin
Bevin: "To claim ... a much more complex being does NOT require its own designer"
No one has made that claim. You are inventing a straw man, and boxing against a fictional position. As I've pointed out repeatedly, you are the only one claiming that the designer of our cells must be "much more complex". Where is the support for your claim/assumption/assertion that the earlier designer must be "much more complex"? So far, you've offered nothing.
While we are waiting on that missing piece in your reasoning, it does present an interesting irony.
You seem to take for granted -- not even needing support -- that our cells could only have been designed by a designer that is "much more complex" than us. To you it appears to be obvious that our cells could not possibly have been designed by an earlier designer that is not "much more complex".
Yet, at the very same time, you want us to take on faith that these same cells could have been produced by an undirected process starting with much simpler chemicals -- a process that has no intention, no future goal seeking, no imagination, no pursuit of future benefit, and no ability to design at all. You want us to accept this idea, even though (as Robert Shapiro points out), when left to itself, the hard scientific evidence indicates that nature prefers the simpler chemicals and is not inclined on its own to make the more complex building blocks essential to the function of our cells.
I would really like to see how you reconcile those conflicting claims.
So far, you have not sustained any case against the idea that it is reasonable to infer design for our cells -- even if one were to suppose materialism were true. Your core "much more complex" point hangs in mid-air unsupported, and it seems to be severely undercut by your own confidence in what an even mindless process could do.
Regarding symbolic information:
1. Are you agreeing or denying that a primary function of DNA is to store information, and that this is commonly and routinely recognized as information by the scientific community?
2. Do you agree or deny that this information is encoded according to the genetic coding scheme of the host organism?
3. Do you agree or deny that there we have found more than one genetic code in use in nature, and that decoding the same sequence of information according to the wrong code would not work to translate the information?
Three simple questions. Three simple answers please. No dodging please.
Bevin: "No such structure has been found."
That is an empty statement. There are many structures for which you can offer no plausible explanation (including but not limited to structures needed to make Darwinian evolution possible, e.g. to provide reliable reproduction of inheritable traits).
Your standard reply is to say that scientists are "looking" for such an explanation. So, in your mind, "looking" seems to count just as much as "finding" -- even if the data so far weighs consistently against undirected nature ever doing such a thing when left to itself.
Yet, the point of the challenge I've given, is that even if materialism were true, it is not logical to assume that science will necessarily vindicate your faith in the existence of an undirected origin for our cells. You have no basis to exclude the outcome that science's best answer concerning our own cells will be "designed."
Sigh
>>> you are the only one claiming that the designer of our cells must be "much more complex"
Since we have not managed to design and implement an alternative...
>>> you want us to take on faith that these same cells could have been produced by an undirected process starting with much simpler chemicals
No, I want you to take it based on an incredible amount of evidence found in the rocks and in the cells
>>> Are you agreeing or denying that a primary function of DNA is to store information, and that this is commonly and routinely recognized as information by the scientific community?
The primary function of DNA is to produce DNA. Chemicals, even very long chemicals, are not usually regarded as 'information' by the scientific community.
>>> Do you agree or deny that this information is encoded according to the genetic coding scheme of the host organism?
Yes, in the same way that any catalyst 'encodes' the construction of a chemical within an environment. There is very direct chemical path from the catalyst to the chemical - much more direct, say, than the path from a blueprint to a battleship
>>> Do you agree or deny that there we have found more than one genetic code in use in nature, and that decoding the same sequence of information according to the wrong code would not work to translate the information?
Absolutely agree that we have found more than one catalyst.
Absolutely deny that decoding it the wrong way would not work - indeed we know that various parts of the DNA are switched on and off, and read in different ways, to produce different results.
>>> There are many structures for which you can offer no plausible explanation
Just because we don't know something happened does not mean it did not happen. This is a huge logical fallicy that you repeatedly fall into.
>>> You have no basis to exclude the outcome that science's best answer concerning our own cells will be "designed."
Agreed. But so far all the evidence, ALL THE EVIDENCE, suggests that the cells have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and we have not found anything that could not have evolved.
You and I both believe in the existence of God. But I don't see the scientific evidence requiring His existence.
/Bevin
Bevin: "The primary function of DNA is to produce DNA. Chemicals, even very long chemicals, are not usually regarded as 'information' by the scientific community."
You are right in so far as most chemicals, even very long chemicals, are not information. DNA and transcribed RNA are exceptions in that they are recognized to carry information.
"DNA codes genetic information for the transmission of inherited traits. ... Though the linear sequence of nucleotides in DNA contains the information for protein sequences, proteins are not made directly from DNA. ... Before a cell can divide, it must accurately and completely duplicate the genetic information encoded in its DNA in order for its progeny cells to function and survive. ... The specific carrier of the genetic information in all organisms is the nucleic acid known as DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid." --Encyclopaedia Britannica (search on "DNA").
If one Googles for the phrase (with quotes) "information in DNA" one gets about 1,880,000 English pages of hits, beginning with a "What is DNA? - Genetics Home Reference" page by the National Institute of Health (sponsor of many scientific research grants, btw, particularly for biological research).
Again, I don't see how you have anything to gain from denying the obvious common recognition in science that DNA stores real information according to a code, specifically one of the genetic codes.
Bevin: "Yes, in the same way that any catalyst 'encodes' the construction of a chemical within an environment."
This is a clear misuse of terms. If one looks at any explanation of catalysis, one does not find it explained in terms of the need for codes, a coding scheme, encoding, or decoding. If you disagree, provide the counter example description of what catalysis or catalyst means and show where it connects its meaning to codes, coding, encoding, or decoding.
Bevin: "Absolutely deny that decoding it the wrong way would not work - indeed we know that various parts of the DNA are switched on and off, and read in different ways, to produce different results."
Your reasoning is a non sequitur. Within one organism, all those different ways of reading the information all use the same genetic code. Change the code, and it does not work. For specific examples of how that does not work, see...
2. Variant genetic codes are not analogous to the differences between dialects of the same language.
and
3. Miller's references to biotechnology do not accurately represent the experimental literature on variant genetic codes.
in
Reply To Kenneth Miller On The Genetic Code
Note in particular the statement from Nature Reviews Genetics (emphasis added):
"Any change in the genetic code alters the meaning of a codon, which, analogous to reassigning a key on a keyboard, would introduce errors into every translated message."
"Meaning" refers to the association between the codon and the amino acid that it is assigned in that genetic code. That is exactly the sense of "meaning" or "symbolic" that I am referring to.
Bevin: "Since we have not managed to design and implement an alternative..."
I have no idea what point that is trying to make. In any case, you still haven't shown that an earlier designer must have been "much more complex".
Bevin: "No, I want you to take it based on an incredible amount of evidence found in the rocks and in the cells."
and
Bevin: "Agreed. But so far all the evidence, ALL THE EVIDENCE, suggests that the cells have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and we have not found anything that could not have evolved."
You are mistaken and misapplying the evidence. There is no evidence found in rocks that tells us about the prior source or origin for cells. They just suddenly appear. The evidence you appeal to only touches on what happens after they appear, and is irrelevant to the question at hand. In fact, the very early appearance of cells so soon after the cooling of the Earth weighs heavily against any explanation by an undirected process. The shorter the time, the more it weighs against such a hypothesis and for a directed cause.
You can repeat "have not found anything that could not have evolved" all day, but yet you cannot deal with the origin of the ability to evolve, e.g. to have inheritable traits that are carried in a cell's information store. No information, no inheritable information. No inheritable information, no Darwinian evolution.
You cannot appeal to a process as the basis of an explanation for how that process came into existence. That is called begging the question -- a logical error.
keafan may be adding his own answers later (and I hope Chris has not disappeared, since I am still interested to get his input/questions about the issue of symbolic information).
But to sharpen the issue in the meantime, imagine duplicating a clock (or any other non-trivial mechanism).
It is not feasible to duplicate it accurately while it is running, but there are a couple alternatives.
A. Take it apart. Carefully duplicate each piece, using the original as the model. Then put the pieces back together again, making two clocks. Hopefully you remember how to rebuild it even though the original assembly is disassembled, and hopefully your motivation sustains you through the process.
B. Use information. The working clock does not need to be disassembled. Follow a set of instructions on how to make the clock pieces and then assemble them.
Even if we ignore all the artificial aspects of synthesizing a colony of replicating RNA strands, I would suggest it is a dead end. How does that type of mechanism for replicating a strand scale up to replicating molecular machines without the benefit of a cellular construction process driven by stored information? (And please, do not assume one can explain this by starting with a simple cell that already has such a process.)
An intelligent who wants multiple clocks can pursue that as a goal, even if partially assembled clocks do not yet function. Presumably, you at least want to rebuild it, since you have that goal. But an undirected process has no care for future goals.
Sigh:
Coding - catalysts v. information:
----------------------------------
Google "RNA, Catalyst"
Cell origins:
-------------
There are THREE places we look for the origin of cells
(a) the rocks, where we see the fossils - which, by the way tell us a lot about the cells
(b) the cells, where we see the various chemicals - including the DNA and RNA, and we get to 'play'
(c) the organisms built from the cells
And - what do you know - we discover teeth DNA in chickens, and we discover that the sharks and humans build their head bones and nerves out of basically the same fundamental genetic material
/Bevin
Bevin, while RNA can potentially (but not necessarily) function as an enzyme, or as a carrier of information (e.g. transcription), DNA can only store information, not act as an enzyme. (That is why no one suggests a DNA world hypothesis.) This shows that acting as an enzyme is not the same thing as storing information. Two different functions or potential roles. Two different meanings, not to be confused with each other. Coded information and catalysis are two different concepts.
Sorry, Bevin, but you are not distinguishing questions about what may happen after cells exist and are functioning from questions about how such an information processing system could come into existence in the first place.
This is an important distinction, especially since we find that inanimate nature, when left to itself, has a bias against making "the various chemicals - including the DNA and RNA" - that cells depend upon, let alone the higher level, information based, nano-scale molecular machinery needed to make reliable reproduction and inheritance of traits possible.
I'll check back and see if anyone else has something else to say.
Best blessings to you and yours.
p.s. To all, I highly recommend Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell. Whether one agrees or disagrees, this book is making a fundamental contribution to the discussion. Even those who don't like the conclusions will need to first understand the issues he raises, and understand them well, before they can hope to engage them.
Sigh,
Yep, I disappeared. I've been at our conference's Adventurer Camporee. Had a great time.
My question about symbols comes from this: I can think of nothing that is not symbolic. IOW, EVERYTHING that I can think of is symbolic!
I don't know of anything that can legitimately be called an undirected process. The word 'process' opposes the word 'undirected'! It's an oxymoron. So, I'm not sure what you categorise as a directed process or as undirected processes?
I need a stricter definition of what you mean by 'Intelligent Design' to be substantiate in biology. What types of observations, or attributes of an object can we use to infer an intelligent causal agency?
You said something along the lines that the laws of physics and chemistry do not require the actualisation of biological systems. But, the laws of physics and chemistry do not require the actualisation of Earth to have only one Moon. But it did happen! And Mars has two? Why is Mars so unique in our solar system? Is Mars more special than Earth because it is more unique?
Everything is unique in it's own way. Does uniqueness necessarily lead to ontological conclusions?
Come to think of it, the laws of physics and chemistry do not require the actualisation of anything at all. So, why is it considered significant that those laws did not require the actualisation of biological systems?
Some of your rhetoric sounds like you claim that it is impossible for mere undirected processes to have been the causal agency of the symbolic information systems that we recognise in biology. Are you claiming that it is impossible or just unlikely?
keafan,
You asked me how does parochialism differ between Australia and America. I hope you aren't asking because you thought I was insinuating anything? Please forgive me if you thought I were. Otherwise, I am pleased to find you are interested in my country.
Any differences in parochialism between our countries has nothing to do with my comment. I find all forms of parochialism are amusing. Your form was American patriotism - and I admire and respect that very much, please don't misunderstand me. I think it's good to see that you are able to show pride in your country in an international forum like this. It is something that I sometimes wish Australians weren't always so hesitant about.
I think the sovereignty of countries is extremely important for world security. America has a lot to be proud of in promoting that. America has been the torch of freedom from tyranny that the old empires used to burden the world with. But, don't let me get off topic here!
The essential nature of parochialism doesn't differ between countries, religions, states, cities or towns. Whatever form it takes, it's all amusing to me. I can be quite parochial myself at times too. It's our nature to identify with something that is 'home'.
I can't give you a Biblical exegesis about Australian parochialism! You might have to put up with my opinion on this one. And even then, my opinion is based on 2nd hand information, because I have never been to America personally. But I have met a few Americans, and have chatted to quite a few on these forums too. I have never studied this, so take this with a pinch of salt.
To answer your question, perhaps I could compare American patriotism with Australian tall poppy syndrome.
Of course these are stereotypes. To be honest, in my experience I haven't really found the stereotypes to be true. But, based on the stereotypes, it seems of more importance for an American to demonstrate their pride in their country in an outward manner. But not so much here, there is a strange twist in Australia, which I think comes from our cynical, irreverent background and distrust of authority.
I guess it grew out of the way that we keep authority and tall poppies in check! This cultural irreverence has been recognised as tall poppy syndrome - even though that isn't strictly about parochialism, I'm sure it goes some way in explaining the differences between America and Australia.
For example of the way of thinking, when an Aussie overtly shows pride in our nation, we might wonder why they felt a need to do that? Didn't they trust that we knew they were proud? Isn't it automatically assumed? Why did they doubt our faith in them? Don't get me wrong, this actually comes from our patriotism, it is very deep. But to show pride in an overt manner is to almost call question onto ones own patriotism rather than assume and own it.
When a fellow Aussie can make fun of our nation, and they do that in a particular way that we know that they have it, then we really know they own it too. There is a way that might seem disrespectful to an outsider not familiar with the nuances of the culture, but an insider knows the difference. That it comes from patriotism.
An outsider might think that it is self-deprecating humour, or some sort of compensation for low self-esteem - fishing for compliments. But it is not about that.
Weird huh?
Bevin might have some interesting input to this from an objective perspective, as a New Zealander having experienced America and Australia as well.
Australian culture seems to be drifting toward more like American culture in this regard over time - becoming too trusting of it's own authority in my opinion. I think New Zealand and Canada also shares this same tall poppy syndrome that Australia has, which I think they all inherit from the old British empire.
Likewise, America appears to me to be moving towards less trusting of it's authority, and I see self-deprecating humour (in a non-low-self-esteem sense but with the assumed pride I was talking of) now in American TV. And I even see some of the worse affected sub-cultures demonstrating more of the tall poppy syndrome. That's the impression I get from American TV anyway.
I suspect that American culture started with this same, or even stronger distrust of authority which is what lead them to becoming independent of the old British empire - e.g. the Boston tea party. And since then, American culture has established a stronger pride and patriotism in it's own nationhood as a result of self establishment, than the other countries which are still associated with the British commonwealth. Even though the other countries are more or less autonomous these days. One of the consequences in the culture having established it's own leadership arose a greater pride and trust that Americans have of their leadership, this pride is significant as a cultural phenomenon, because through this process America built a patriotism into it's culture that rose above the tall poppy syndrome, that has lasted well for a long time, and perhaps just recently starting to be challenged again.
That's my 2c! I'm sure some historian or political scientist would be cringing at what I just wrote :) that is just the impression that I personally have about the differences.
Bevin,
You said, "Indeed most of the predictions made by ID'ers have since been proven false ".
In the distant past, if I recall correctly you challenged me that ID does not make any predictions. And I recall some semantics about what qualifies as a valid 'prediction'. How do you reconcile that now with this sentence? Does ID make some predictions that have not been proven false?
Chris:
ID doesn't make predictions.
ID'ers do - predictions like "the following system could not have evolved because it is irreducibly complex". No such claim has held up.
Sigh:
>>> Coded information and catalysis are two different concepts.
Different concepts, yes. But a hammer can be used as a paperweight and as firestarter - two different concepts, same object.
Auto-catalysts both encode the shape of the thing to be made, and make it. RNA implements BOTH the coding AND the catalyst.
>>> Sorry, Bevin, but you are not distinguishing questions about what may happen after cells exist and are functioning from questions about how such an information processing system could come into existence in the first place.
Okay, so there are three steps:
(a) going from chemical solutions to prokaryotes
(b) going from prokaryotes to eukaryotes
(c) Going from single eukaryotes to whales
None of these steps looks impossible, based on our current knowlege. Instead we are trying to determine which of the plausible paths were followed.
In this conversation you are mostly concerned about step (a). All the steps are interesting, but this is (I agree) the least clear of them. There is a big difference between being unclear and impossible.
(a) obviously happened first, and it happened a long time ago, and it took a long time. It took about 3 BILLION years.
RNA has four amazing properties
1 - it is an arbitrary length family of molecules
2 - some of them are autocatalysts
3 - some of them can copy other ones
4 - it is remarkably similar to DNA
To learn more about them, read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis
The most important sentence in the above Wiki article reads
" This has been accompanied by many studies in the last ten years demonstrating important aspects of RNA function that were not previously known, and support the idea of a critical role for RNA in the functionality of life. In 2001, the RNA world hypothesis was given a major boost with the deciphering "
Given this recent explosion of ideas and research into RNA, it is curious that Meyer's is mainly concerned with DNA. Why is that? Perhaps because it is the easier target? And yet, once you see how RNA works, it is clear that it is possible that DNA basically is a parasite that has hijacked the RNA mechanisms for its own purposes - and being more reliable and scalable than RNA, and not killing the RNA, they have formed a beautiful synergistic relationship.
(b) This step may have happened relatively quickly maybe just a few million years. The eukaryotes are basically bunches of prokaryotes living inside a prokaryote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote
(c) This step has taken a mere 500 MILLION years. Get hold of the book "Your Inner Fish" (Neil Shubin) to learn just how solid the evidence linking from single cell eukaryotes creatures that we see in old rocks (correct - a creature does not have to have bones to leave fossils) to the complex life forms we see around us today is.
/Bevin
That's my 2c!
Chris
Thank you very much for your explanation.
We lived in New Zealand for a couple of years. My wife is a British Citizen, and our son was born in Auckland. He is very proud to be a Kiwi!
The relationship between the Aussies and Kiwis is similar to Texas and the other 49 States or the USA to all other countries. Kiwis try very hard with their All Blacks and cricket to score psychological points against Australia. Kiwis are very proud of their sailing, rowing, rugby, and cricket achievements in international competition. The sports seem to be a tremendous source of esteem for the country.
When you live on isolated islands I believe there is a strong need to compensate for the risk associated with that isolation. At least for those with european ancestry.
If we were to again move to another country (which we have discussed many times) the choice would be between New Zealand and Australia. The bias would be to NZ.
So, I'm not certain what came across as being parochial, but for an SDA dialog there is the fact that, even though the North American Division has become a small percentage of the total church membership, there seems to be no intention of allowing the vast majority to have much of a say in the formulation of church rhetoric and doctrine. Led by California, the progressives want to make changes in ordination, gay rights, etc that would be considered heretical and an abomination by a majority of the actual membership.
If I came across as "parochial" it was not my intent and apologize profusely.
You have a great country but I think New Zealand has a better society. There's a little parochialism for you!
GO ALL BLACKS!!! (and the RNZYS)
Chris: "I'm not sure what you categorise as a directed process or as undirected processes"
There is nothing unusual about this. Undirected processes simply refers to "whatever inanimate matter and energy do when not being interfered with." One could could also talk about what chemicals do when "left to themselves" and so on.
This is what science studies in fields such as physics and chemistry. Scientists look for regular patterns. When they can quantify these regularities, the patterns may be expressed by equations. Sometimes they use computational models to simulate the patterns.
Chris: "What types of observations, or attributes of an object can we use to infer an intelligent causal agency?"
A "directed" process simply refers to the influence of an intelligent agent. Every time you see something and can tell by looking at it that it is an artifact (a product of intelligent agency) rather than purely natural (a product of what mindless matter and energy does on its own, when left to itself), at least two things are true.
1. You have just made an ID inference, i.e. an inference to intelligent agency.
2. Even though the object you are looking at probably does not violate any physical or chemical laws, its nature does fall outside of the range of undirected processes, i.e. outside the range of what undirected matter and energy does when left to itself.
This is another way of saying that intelligent agents are able to influence matter and energy in directions they would not normally take on their own, hence the idea of being "directed" (as in "to dominate and determine the course of" Merriam Webster; synonym of "steered") by the influence of intelligent agents, as contrasted with "undirected" or "uninfluenced".
Computers do not violate physical or chemical laws, but their behavior is the result of the determined direction / influence of intelligent agents.
Another illustration is the way that chemists can synthesize chemicals through a process of carefully controlled and arranged steps to produce results we never see in nature.
For a more humorous example, did you ever look at the page I referenced in my post on 21 October 2009 at 12:29?
Regarding "symbols" it sounds like you are getting thrown off track by one of the vague meanings of the word "symbols". In this context, I am talking not vaguely about any use of "symbols" but specifically about "symbolic information". One could equivalently say, "coded information", or "information that is translated according to a code." The implemented code gives specific functional meaning to the information bearing symbols.
If you know something about computers, you know programmers write coded instructions to direct their operations. Before that can be put into practice (i.e. executed), the coded information must be translated according to the conventions of that language (e.g. by a compiler or an interpreter).
The same thing happens in every living cell. Coded information is translated into its functional meaning. The meaning of the codons is determined by that organism's genetic code, i.e. the language of translation into functional proteins. (Even the word "codon" comes from "code" plus the suffix "-on", indicating a unit of.)
That is the process I am talking about.
Other than in the known products of intelligent agents, we never find such a process occurring anywhere else in the universe -- except in relation to living organisms. They are fundamentally distinct in this respect.
That raises a legitimate scientific question. If inanimate matter and energy were left to do whatever they do without any interference by any intelligent agent, would they create language translation systems? My answer is No, they would not -- not even if you waited for billions or trillions of years. On their own, that is not the direction their own nature would take them.
What about planets and moons? That is fundamentally different. Neither stars, nor planets, nor moons contain coded information. We have now found over 400 planets in other systems. I don't know of any reason why the normal patterns of behavior for matter and energy could not have created stars and planets and moons just by following the laws built into matter and energy. (There still could be more to it than that, as we discussed earlier, and some do make a case that Earth is an unusually Privileged Planet.)
Does that clear things up for you? Or perhaps lead to new questions?
[Chris, you might find the following to be an interesting illustration in light of the plight of your Mr. T and the tornado you mentioned earlier.]
A.A. Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner is named after the first chapter's story "In Which A House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore" by Pooh and Piglet. For material, they use "a heap of sticks" piled up on the other side of the wood.
It's only later that they discover that Eeyore had been trying to build a house with those sticks. When they show Eeyore the new house at the new location (without revealing that they were responsible for designing and building it), Eeyore offers this bit of analysis.
"It's a remarkable thing," he said. "It is my house, and I built it where I said I did, so the wind must have blown it here. And the wind blew it right over the wood, and blew it down here, and here it is as good as ever. In fact, better in places."
"Much better," said Pooh and Piglet together.
One doesn't have to be an adult to catch on to the humor involved in Eeyore attributing his relocated and much improved house to the undirected force of the wind, without suspecting design. Yet, I wonder how well serious materialists and theistic evolutionists appreciate the joke.
We detect design when an agent has arranged matter in a way that, although "no physical law need be broken", is nevertheless distinct from what inanimate nature is biased toward creating on its own.
So, on the one hand there are those that are ready to recognize that the wind doesn't relocate, rebuild, and greatly improve the construction of houses made of loosely configured sticks.
On the other hand, there are those who are willing to believe that just because an intelligent agent can synthesize results under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, or intentionally move a golf ball through an 18-hole course, this all by itself is sufficient to show one should reasonably expect "that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time." (cf. Robert Shapiro Scientific American article).
And there are even some who hold the latter position with such unshakable and unquestioning faith that they apparently find it difficult to see why anyone would even question whether it is true, or expect to see evidence in support of it that outweighs the abundant and repeatable scientific evidence against it.
Sigh:
Have you wondered why
DNA, RNA, and Ribosomes are all made out of the same basic building blocks? And I don't mean atoms - I mean groups of atoms
The ribosomal subunits of prokaryotes and eukaryotes are similar but different?
Why bacterial and eukaryotic ribosomes are different enough to allow antibacterial medicines to be developed, but are still incredibly similar?
Why would a Designer have to use 'similar but different' - why not use 'same' or 'dramatically different'?
This is the same issue as the strong similarities between the DNA of humans, sharks, anemonies, and worms - get the ID'ers to explain that one also
/Bevin
Bevin, you are still dwelling questions concerning common descent, and not yet touching on questions of the origin of the mechanisms allowing descent with inherited genes in the first place. The former is irrelevant to the latter.
Bevin: "This is the same issue as the strong similarities between the DNA of humans, sharks, anemonies, and worms - get the ID'ers to explain that one also"
Although this too is irrelevant, it is worth pointing out a common misunderstanding in passing.
The "strong similarity" figures concerning DNA (e.g. a claim of < 2% difference between humans and chimps) are misleading for three reasons.
1. The figures only consider the minority of our genome used for coding proteins. It does not take into account differences in the rest of the genome. Although this was formerly thought to be just "junk" DNA, that term is now known to be inappropriate. In the last two years especially, we have begun to discover significant functions other than protein coding in those regions of the genome.
2. While comparing only protein coding regions, if one species is completely missing genes found in the other, that does not decrease the similarity score. The score given is only a measure of the differences in the genes both have in common. So it fails to represent the other protein coding differences that could be significant, e.g. having genes the other lacks.
3. Coding for the same proteins only tells you the "pieces" that each organism can build with. If you give two people the same set of Lego bricks, that does not mean they will build the same thing, or even similar things. The similarity figures do not claim to measure differences in how the proteins are used. This is part of why (IIRC) humans and bananas can be very different, yet be built with many similar proteins, and consequently have a higher similarity score than you would expect.
Among ID proponents, there are people with different views about common descent. An ID perspective, by itself, does not require, include, or exclude a particular view about common descent.
The flip side of that fact is that no amount of evidence for common descent can answer the ID question about whether intelligent agency is required in the history of life. Scientist Michael Behe, while seeing evidence both for and against common descent and though he leans in favor of accepting common descent, is one of the most vocal about the scientific evidence of the inadequacy of Darwinian mechanisms to account for the diversity of species. To see why the evidence clearly and repeatedly points to this inadequacy, see his The Edge of Evolution, or start with the three links I provided above at 18 October 2009 at 6:35.
For an illustration of the reasons why some scientists are skeptical of common descent, despite the type of points Bevin makes, an example can be found here: Guy Walks Into a Bar and Thinks He's a Chimpanzee: The Unbearable Lightness of Chimp-Human Genome Similarity.
But I will reemphasize the separate point that, even if common descent were true, that doesn't answer the question of whether intelligent agency was involved and required. Therefore, I don't intend to dwell on deciding something that cannot answer the question about the need for intelligent agency.
Sigh, the similarities are NOT ONLY in the individual parts of the DNA.
Instead, the DNA and the way that DNA is expressed to create a shark head and a human head are EXTREMELY similar. The same bones are constructed, except that they are extremely distorted compared to each other. The same cranial nerves are constructed going to the same places, except that those places are incredibly different locations because of the bone distortion, so the human nerves follow very contorted paths to their destinations.
It is this similarity that I refer to, not the % difference issues.
The reason I point out to you the common use of RNA building blocks in the DNA, the RNA, and the ribosomes is it strongly suggests a path by which these structures COULD evolve.
There are simple forms of RNA that are auto-catalysts that mutate. Not only do they copy themselves but they also copy similar but different RNA.
This can-copy-other-RNA capability is very similar to how ribosomes work. That the copying can be used to concatenate amino acids into proteins is useful - but is not essential to the initial survival of the RNA, but can be beneficial.
Once this mechanism is working, it can be used by DNA for making a few things, even while most of the stuff is being made directly by the RNA.
Once the DNA replication is happening, then you can go through a phase where DNA is providing some stuff and RNA is providing the rest. As DNA gets more and more complete, the RNA starts looking like it is some magic for copying DNA and looses its original 'I was here first' appearance.
NOTE: I am not saying this is precisely how it happened, but sketching one of the many possible ways it could happen.
In short, the claim that the DNA/RNA/amino-acid/protein stuff has to be designed does not hold water. It could just evolve.
/Bevin
Bevin: "NOTE: I am not saying this is precisely how it happened, but sketching one of the many possible ways it could happen."
Understood that you are not committing to this. Nevertheless, this is one of the many ways it could not have happened.
Bevin: "Once this mechanism is working, it can be used by DNA for making a few things ..."
For starters, even now DNA does not "use" these mechanisms at all. DNA is a passive store of information. Aspects of the system come to the DNA store to transcribe timely and relevant information from it and move that information to where it can be fed into the ribosome.
1. How does the idea of storing encoded information for a protein begin (even supposing it begins with RNA, not DNA)?
a) GIGO
Here is where the fundamental importance of Garbage In Garbage Out becomes crucial. Functional proteins are rare. For the most part, no one believes proteins came about by chance any more. Yet, the encoded sequences that correspond to the functional proteins of length N are rarer than the amino acid sequences of length N that correspond to functional proteins. Brute force isn't going to work. How do you get meaningful instructions for proteins into a data store?
b) Why build protein building machinery, even before proteins exist?
Trial and error, even if it could have worked (which it wouldn't), supposes a process that is trying to do something. We have no observed properties of chemicals that indicate "try to make a protein". The complex machinery cells actually use depend on multiple interrelated factors.
[For example, the transfer RNAs that implement the genetic code have different structures to associate an amino acid with an anticodon/codon. These design differences compensate for the differences in how readily different codons will bind with anticodons. In experiments where the alternate tRNA structures are swapped, even when implementing the same genetic code the ability to translate is messed up due to sensitive kinetic considerations.]
The take home point is that doesn't just happen for free. It requires coordinated machinery that must be built. Why would it ever be built?
c) Preserving and reproducing "progress":
If you get a little bit toward a complex machine, not by forethought but purely by unintentional accident, what preserves and reproduces a partially built machine? (See my post above about replicating clocks.) You do not have information storage yet. Supposing you might be able to replicate some strands of RNA, those strands are not machines. Do you take apart partial machines to duplicate them? How is this done faithfully with faithful reproduction of the partially built machines? Why are chemicals supposedly preferring to do this (instead of being content with lifeless tars and gunk), especially since the partial machines are not yet functioning?
d) Protection
Even making a simple cell is problematic. A cell is a complex molecular machine, just in regard to selectively separating interior from exterior -- letting in vs. not letting in. Without any cell wall, your delicate structures face destruction. (There is no protective chemist to keep away bad reactions. This is not artificial synthesis.) On the other hand, if you blindly seal off the interior, how do you get the materials to work with?
Note again, you cannot assume for free that Darwinian reproduction of a cell is working yet.
You are used to thinking that Darwinian evolution is available. Here we are in the time before those mechanisms exist. So you cannot just assume they still work. That's a big problem. Asserting a belief, a faith statement, that they could just evolve won't be sufficient.
You cannot start building the roof of a house first, as if the walls were already there. So far, you don't have the props for Darwinian evolution of molecular machines.
Sigh
If inanimate matter and energy were left to do whatever they do without any interference by any intelligent agent, would they create language translation systems? My answer is No, they would not.
OK, that is your answer. But, I don't expect the scientific community to jump at it. They pretty much have decided already that their answer is directly opposed to your answer. "Yes, they did" happen without intervention is the initial scientific a-priori, and they are now just trying to work out how to make the evidence fit. After all, their mandate is to follow Occam's Rasor, they will not bring in any extra axioms until they are forced to give up on what they have now. But, if they do end up construing some theoretical pathway, then what will your claims be left with?
Moons communicate information that is symbolised via their motion and translated from gravity and inertia in dialogue with their planets. There are patterns, harmonies, cycles and replications. Forgive me, but I fail to see the fundamental difference.
Just to give you some background. My personal position is agnostic to the ID question in biology. I'm neither pro nor adverse to Irreducible Complexities - but I do suspect that you'll have a very tough time proving them - they require proving a negative, which is a very tough thing to do, but they have to believe the negative in order to bring in the new axiom of another agency. None of my beliefs are subject to the question of Intelligent Design as it applies to scientific questions in biology. Actually, I should restate that - all scientific understanding follows law and causality, which I infer was provided by some intelligence. I can't help but see intelligence and rationality from quarks to galaxy clusters.
I believe that God created Adam and Eve as a mature couple in a fully developed biosphere. If science was to observe this couple when they were one day old, then what conclusions would be valid scientifically? If the scientists concluded that they appear a few decades old rather than one day old, then I would have to agree with science, and say yes it does look like that doesn't it? Likewise for the biosphere, I say yes, it does look old doesn't it? That fits what the Bible says, doesn't it?
Likewise, if theoretical abiogenetic pathways are devised, then what is wrong with that? Why say they are impossible? Why oppose the search for abiogenetic pathways?
Accepting the ID axiom would suggest to scientists to stop looking for theoretical pathways. I disagree with asking scientists to stop looking. Even if the abiogentic pathways were not what actually occured that doesn't mean they are not scientifically valid. Science can be valid, but not necessarily true. Furthermore, the subsequent discoveries that could follow from understanding those theoretical pathways is what is truly important, and well worth pursuing in my opinion.
Now, that's my background, I can continue my critique of your argument. In a nutshell, your argument sounds circular to me. You don't seem to establish the necessity of the 'intelligent intervention' axiom.
"We detect design when an agent has arranged matter in a way that, although "no physical law need be broken", is nevertheless distinct from what inanimate nature is biased toward creating on its own."
The critical challenge to your point here is about defining precisely "what inanimate nature is biased toward creating on its own."
Who knows what complexity is possible within the big-bang cosmology? I can not bring myself to say what is impossible. This is my biggest issue, that your answer argument appears to require me to say that it is impossible.
Yes, ALL of nature is very directional, bias one way. The second law of thermodynamics can never be broken, except by God. Even though sometimes the boundaries of a system are interfered with by sufficient external stimuli to push the process backwards from it's regular result. This just means that the system boundaries are ill-defined, while the 2nd law is never broken.
Water normally flows down a hill, but Mr T's tornado can push water out from a lake and water can flow up a hill. I have heard of it raining fish before! Could I infer intelligence simply because water flowed up a hill?
Your unstated premise appears to be that the 2nd law of thermodynamics was violated. I think if you could demonstrate that the 2nd law of thermodynamics was actually violated by the abiogentic pathways, then I would understand your claim about the bias in nature. If you are not claiming that this law was violated, then I can't accept that it was impossible for nature to do it.
Eeyore's situation is different than what IDers might think of non-IDers. That was a bit unfair. Eeyore did not consider all of the observations around him. He had no reason to not develop a theory utilising Piglet and Pooh. It's funny because he could have thought of a more plausible scenario based on the observations that he had available to him. Whereas, non-IDers don't see sufficient reason to bring in the extra axiom of an intelligent agency - they have never observed such an intelligent agency capable of causing abiogensis. And so, they follow on with Occam's Rasor as they should.
Posted by: Chris Plewright | 26 October 2009 at 10:39
Who knows what complexity is possible within the big-bang cosmology? I can not bring myself to say what is impossible.
Yes, I agree, Chris, and that was my point in bringing out the woefully incomplete, and perhaps forever open-ended, state of cosmology.
Posted by: MaggieB | 15 October 2009 at 2:30
Since we do not, and perhaps cannot ever (Stephen Hawking) have a Theory of Everything, and have not reconciled quantum mechanics with general relativity, it seems premature to me to talk about what "fully satisfies" physics and chemistry.
There are too many things that we haven't begun to understand, it seems to me, to be talking so confidently.
If, as EGW said, "The laws of nature are the laws of God," I can't see the point in truncating the study of these laws by pronouncing anything unequivocally about how God's laws do and do not work, at this point.
Like the religious man looking for a parking place saying, "God, if you'll help me find a parking place so I won't be late, I'll give up drinking and carousing forever." and then finds one and says, "Never mind, I found one myself," God is likely to be irrelevant to science for the foreseeable future, perhaps for the duration.
But that doesn't mean that science isn't teaching us about God.
The universe itself acts on us as a random, inefficient, and yet in the long run effective, teaching machine. Our way of looking at the universe has gradually evolved through a natural selection of ideas.
--Steven Weinberg
Perhaps the universe is teaching us to be content to always be questing, never have complete knowledge, and to surrender control of the process.
Sigh:
(1) DNA is NOT a 'passive store' - it is split, imperfectly copied (although much more reliable than RNA), and mutated
(2) How does the idea of storing encoded information for a protein begin? By being something that piggy-backs on the existing RNA constructing mechanisms and making something useful by accident.
Let me try the opposite question - what is a protein?
Answer: it is the class of materials that can be constructed this way. There are lots of materials bodies could be made of - but instead we are made of the ones that this RNA copying mechanism can make - initially by accident.
(3) Why build protein building machinery, even before proteins exist?
Answer: What was found by mutation and selection was a good way of copying RNA. It so happened that some variations of it also create a small family of chemicals that we now call proteins. Some members of this family happen to confer an evolution advantage on their makers...
(4) Why are chemicals supposedly preferring to do this (instead of being content with lifeless tars and gunk), especially since the partial machines are not yet functioning?
Answer: because the replication is independent of whether the result produces useful chemicals. And because some of the produced chemicals increase the likelyhood of the producer being replicated.
(5) Even making a simple cell is problematic. A cell is a complex molecular machine, just in regard to selectively separating interior from exterior -- letting in vs. not letting in. Without any cell wall, your delicate structures face destruction.
Answer: Initially cells were just blobs - much like a blob of milk or molten butter floatig in the washing up water. The complex cell walls come MUCH later - the cell walls we see today are the result of a LOT of evolution - as can be seen by studying how the cells of humans and algae are similar and how they are different.
Simply put Sigh, the situation is this.
(1) You have not shown that they can't evolve
(2) So you can't argue that they REQUIRE a Designer
(3) The evidence in the rocks and the cells is that they did evolve
(4) And, even if they did require a Designer, you have not explained where the Designer came from, or where it is now
/Bevin
Related questions from Chris & MaggieB...
MaggieB: "I can't see the point in truncating the study of these laws by pronouncing anything unequivocally about how God's laws do and do not work, at this point."
No one is advocating the truncation of study. However, there are ways to stagnate science and to harm its health. One of these is to make some favored ideas or points of view exempt from considering the evidence against them. When an idea gets a "free pass" regardless of what the data says, that is not doing good science.
Was it good, for example, to exclude or disregard or disallow evidence that contradicts Aristotle's ideas about the heavens?
I asked you earlier about the importance of listening to what science says. (You left before explaining what someone like Michael Behe ought to do with the evidence and the implications he has uncovered.) If we disregard the evidence, we have stopped listening.
For example, there is some valuable work being done concerning the extremely limited abilities of Darwinian evolution. Of course, that is probably not what the researchers were wanting to find, but it is real scientific data of importance. See this new post by Michael Behe.
Chris: "Why oppose the search for abiogenetic pathways?"
I haven't. I don't know of anyone who has. It is a great source of data and evidence. The problem is not that they are looking. It is that they are usually in denial about what they have found and are consistently finding -- reproducible outcomes that don't fit the story.
Have you actually read the Scientific American article I linked to by Robert Shapiro? It is relevant, and I think you would find it helpful.
I have no objections to anyone trying their best at origin of life research. What I do expect is honest facing of the facts that are uncovered by that research. A "free pass" is unhealthy, as it lets a failed hypothesis live forever without accountability. That is not doing good science.
Similarly, "smoke and mirrors" science is bad science. When the claim is that undirected chemical and physical processes can do X, there needs to be serious accounting of the extent to which scientists fudge the picture through inappropriate interventions to help nature along. (Robert Shapiro makes this point.)
For example, when the unadulterated results show lifeless tars that do not give the desired results, that is genuine evidence that must be put into the scales.
Chris, you mentioned Occam's Razor a couple times. Here is an expression of that idea from the methodological principles of uniformitarianism:
* Uniformity of process: If a past phenomenon can be understood as the result of a process now acting in time and space, do not invent an extinct or unknown cause as its explanation.[20]
“We should try to explain the past by causes now in operation without inventing extra, fancy, or unknown causes, however plausible in logic, if available processes suffice.”[20] This is known as the scientific principle of parsimony or Occam's razor."
The one and only known "process now acting in time and space" that is demonstrably able to generate coding systems, coded information, etc. is intelligent agency. This is established both from observation and in principle, as we are able to observe that intelligent agency has the ability to pursue future goals and imagined future benefits.
Note carefully that these are qualities that processes lacking help from intelligent agency have never demonstrated. For example, when natural selection operates, it preferentially weeds out according to present considerations only.
This means that, at a minimum, intelligent agency needs to be allowed as an acceptable hypothesis, without fear of career truncation. It is the only demonstrably capable mechanism for originating those types of effects. Why prohibit it?
The violation of the above principle would be for scientists to be occupationally required to confine their hypotheses to those that assume that there is a "seeking to produce RNA (or proteins)" drive within unguided matter without any evidence to support such a property. (Shapiro brings this belief up as well.)
Both Chris and MaggieB allude to the fact that our knowledge is incomplete. That is true, and that fact is not going away in this life. Should we then stop doing science because we cannot make an inference based on complete knowledge?
Science is not proving a final answer. Rather, it attempts to make the best inference it can with the data it has so far. Any given ID inference is a claim to be the best explanation for some effect, based on current knowledge.
For example, Chris wondered: "But, if they do end up construing some theoretical pathway, then what will your claims be left with?"
If I'm not misunderstanding your point, you are wondering what happens if someone does find a plausible way that undirected processes can produce coded information and eventually a living cell. If something like that happens, it has the potential to falsify or overturn an inference to intelligent agency as the best explanation. The new idea might become the best explanation.
I think you must already realize science works this way, but I suspect you are uncomfortable with it in this case. If so, why? This is the state of affairs in all of (genuine and healthy) science. Why should an inference to the need for intelligent agency for effect X be different? Or, what do you think should happen instead?
As I've said, the inference to intelligent agency rests upon our best current understanding (which is all science ever has, never a complete and final understanding) of how nature behaves when it isn't being steered by intelligence. If our understanding of that dramatically changes, we will certainly need to update the inferences we've made about a great many things.
I don't see anything wrong with that. Do you?
Yes, I do.
Consider the more fundamental problem - why do subatomic particles exist and follow the laws they do?
Standard Physics - we don't know.
ID - because there is a Designer.
The obvious next question to the ID'er is - what does this hypothesis predict that simply saying "Don't know" does not? How is it a different answer?
/Bevin
Posted by: Sigh | 26 October 2009 at 5:51
You left before explaining what someone like Michael Behe ought to do with the evidence and the implications he has uncovered.
Well, as I said earlier, an inference of design is just that - an inference of design.
Behe can keep looking for inferences of design, and no doubt find a zillion.
http://helives.blogspot.com/2004/09/intelligent-design-quotes.html
What he can't do is prove that a superior alien race didn't cook us up. The infinite regress problem rears its ugly head.
So...there goes The Wedge Strategy to make godless science resonant with Christianity.
Chris: "Moons communicate information that is symbolised via ...I fail to see the fundamental difference."
Remember, we are not talking vaguely about any kind of symbolism. We are talking about codes (e.g. the genetic code) and encoded information. Moons have no encoded information. Neither do stars, planets, rocks, meteors, asteroids, sand, gravel, etc. Computers, books, other examples of text, and cells do have encoded information.
Living organisms are the only objects in the known universe that have this quality, other than the obvious products of intelligent agents. There are no other exceptions to this pattern within all of our experience.
This means, if cells were created without the help of any kind of intelligence (any kind, whether it be MaggieB's perspective or aliens or God), then they would be the only exception to that pattern in all the known universe.
Now, even on that basis alone, isn't it at least reasonable to suppose -- not prove, but for the moment just suppose at the level of a hypothesis -- that cells might also belong in the category of everything else that has encoded information and is the product of intelligent agency? Is there any reason that should be regarded as irrational or anti-scientific (as some react)?
Chris: "Your unstated premise appears to be that the 2nd law of thermodynamics was violated."
No, not so.
Regarding violating laws, it may be that laws of information are being violated. I alluded earlier to work being done in terms of the fundamental laws that govern information.
Regarding the 2nd law of thermodynamics, local decreases in entropy do not violate that law, if the net global effect is to increase entropy. The thermodynamic problem is that there is no mechanism to convert the flow of undirected energy (e.g. sunlight, lightning, etc.) into the configurational work that is required.
You can pay a company to make RNA strands (or other types) according to some specified sequence of bases (i.e. A, C, G, U). When people do this, they expect to get the sequence they paid for, and not a random sequence, because just any random sequence will not do what they want.
So, the company needs to build these collections of strands, in a very careful way, involving a series of specifically ordered steps. For example, at a given step, the strand may be allowed to grow by only one nucleotide that must combined with a kind of "brake" that prevents adding more than one. If the next base is G, the population of strands being built up will be exposed to G nucleotides only. Each strand can receive at most one G only, and they wait an appropriate time to allow all strands this opportunity. Then they change the conditions to remove the population of available G nucleotides. Next they strip off the brake so that the strands can be extended again. After the brakes are removed, the population of strands might be exposed to C nucleotides only (nothing else) and allowed to be extended by exactly one C nucleotide each (again with a brake). And so on, according to the exact sequence required.
This is configurational work that produces a functional result according to a specification. The order of bases is important to getting the desired function or fulfilling the desired purpose. (Ditto for amino acids in a protein.)
In the prebiotic wild, wild west, without chemists, what mechanism configures the sequence to get a functional result according to the requirements of the function (e.g. to do some job as an enzyme that fits that job)?
Some will naively suppose that random chance would be adequate. Its not. The number of possible sequences explodes as the length grows, and a non-trivial minimum length is typically necessary to provide functionality.
What about combining random chance with natural selection? That doesn't work either, for multiple reasons. Just one of these is that, as I've pointed out to Bevin, one cannot take for granted biological capabilities such as reliable reproduction of inherited traits. In the prebiotic world, you don't have that yet. This is what one is supposedly building up to, not the ground upon which one is already standing. Without the pillars of Darwin's evolutionary process, it cannot operate.
Meyer's book goes into these issues in far more detail and with helpful explanations, but many of the core issues have been known for decades and were discussed in the 1984 textbook The Mystery of Life's Origin.
They discuss natural selection on p. 146ff, and quote Dobzhansky,
"I would like to plead with you, simply, please realize you cannot use the words "natural selection" loosely. Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms."
and Bertalanffy,
"Selection, i.e., favored survival of "better" precursors of life, already presupposes self-maintaining, complex, open systems which may compete; therefore selection cannot account for the origin of such systems."
One of the stark revelations of that earlier textbook was the divide between the picture as it was recognized by the researchers and the fantasy story told to other people.
Regarding appeals to chance to find a functional sequence for a protein, they perform an extended analysis allowing fantastically generous assumptions.
"Eigen has estimated the number of polypeptides of molecular weight 10^4 ... that would be found in a layer 1 meter thick covering the surface of the entire earth. He found it to be 10^41. If these polypeptides reformed with new sequences at the maximum rate at which chemical reactions may occur, ..., the total number of polypeptides that would be formed during the assumed history of the earth would be
10^41 x 10^14/s x 1.6 x 10^17 s = 10^72 (equation 9-2)
"Combining the results of eq. 9-1 and 9-2, we find the probability of producing one protein of 101 amino acids in five billion years is only 1/10^45. Using somewhat different illustrations, Steinman and Cairns-Smith also come to the conclusion that chance is insufficient.
"It is apparent that "chance" should be abandoned as an acceptable model for coding of the macromolecules essential in living systems. In fact, it has been, except in introductory texts and popularizations." (p. 146)
Yet still today, you find people casually assuming that if an RNA strand joins together a random sequence of amino acids, you can expect to get a protein (not so; see above), and that this imagined protein will be "beneficial" to the organism (??), and will be reproduced faithfully and selected for (not so).
[Notice -- even if you could expect faithful reproduction, if the original system was attracting and accepting nucleotides or amino acids in random orders (i.e. not according to the direction of a stored encoded program), then a faithfully reproduced copy of that system would have the same method of operation -- random combinations.]
This is the world of popularizations, not the chemical hard reality.
Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.
--Sigh, quoting Dobzhansky
Is "anthropic principle" a bad word?
MaggieB: "What he can't do is prove that a superior alien race didn't cook us up."
Where does Behe claim to prove that? In fact, he and others have specifically recognized that possibility. You are arguing against how you imagine Behe and others to be, not against the real people and their actual positions.
ID infers intelligent agency. While you were away, I proposed the alien race scenario specifically to show that inference to intelligence cannot be excluded -- even if one assumes materialism is true.
MaggieB: "The infinite regress problem rears its ugly head."
An infinite regress is not required, as I pointed out in my alien intelligence scenario.
MaggieB: "So...there goes The Wedge Strategy to make godless science resonant with Christianity."
As long as you grip that script of expectation with unyielding ferocity, you are not going to be free to interact with people's actual positions, actual actions, and actual statements. Prejudging is not helpful to meaningful dialog or to understanding others.
ID infers intelligent agency, because that is the only mechanism known to be capable of producing certain effects. That intelligence might be an innate intelligence of the universe itself, rather than the God of Christian theology.
The ID inference does not distinguish because of the nature of the inference. It can only take you to the need for something that can choose, understand language and codes, imagine, seek future states for the sake of future benefits, and so on.
Random variations plus natural selection does not have those characteristics.
Posted by: Sigh | 26 October 2009 at 7:59
MaggieB: "What he can't do is prove that a superior alien race didn't cook us up."
Where does Behe claim to prove that? In fact, he and others have specifically recognized that possibility. You are arguing against how you imagine Behe and others to be, not against the real people and their actual positions.
Yes, I am aware that he is aware of that. I've read him saying that. I'm also aware that Philip Johnson names Behe as a "key Wedge figure" (along with Signature in the Cell author, Stephen Meyer).
Philip E. Johnson:
The movement we now call the Wedge made its public debut at a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University in March 1992, following the publication of my book Darwin on Trial.
The conference brought together as speakers some KEY WEDGE FIGURES, particularly MICHAEL BEHE, STEPHEN MEYER, William Dembski, and myself.
http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/le_wedge.htm
Unless Philip Johnson is being untruthful, it seems reasonable to infer that Behe would like to contribute to overthrowing godless, materialistic science, beings that he is "a key Wedge figure" and all....
Posted by: Sigh | 26 October 2009 at 7:59
An infinite regress is not required, as I pointed out in my alien intelligence scenario.
Could you please give me a brief recap of that, or post the date/time you explained that? Thanks.
Posted by: Sigh | 26 October 2009 at 7:59
MaggieB: "So...there goes The Wedge Strategy to make godless science resonant with Christianity."
As long as you grip that script of expectation with unyielding ferocity, you are not going to be free to interact with people's actual positions, actual actions, and actual statements. Prejudging is not helpful to meaningful dialog or to understanding others.
Easy there, Sigh. I quoted directly from the source. Don't make me the bad guy, OK? "Unyielding ferocity" is a little over the top when alls I'm doin' is just directly quoting and linking ID sources, don't you think?
THE WEDGE: FIVE YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN SUMMARY
We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID).
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to REPLACE it with a SCIENCE consonant with CHRISTIAN and theistic convictions.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
Posted by: Sigh | 26 October 2009 at 7:59
ID infers intelligent agency, because that is the only mechanism known to be capable of producing certain effects. That intelligence might be AN INNATE INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNIVERSE ITSELF, rather than the God of Christian theology.
The ID inference does not distinguish because of the nature of the inference. It can only take you to the need for something that can choose, understand language and codes, imagine, seek future states for the sake of future benefits, and so on.
Random variations plus natural selection does not have those characteristics.
Well, it all comes down to the ID argument balancing precariously on an inverted pyramid of "random variations plus natural selection" being inadequate, it seems to me.
So...let's say godless, materialistic science chugs along for another hundred years, and lo and behold, they now godlessly, and materialistically think that life came from AN INNATE INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNIVERSE ITSELF, i.e., a form of ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE has taken the place of the inadequate "random variations plus natural selection."
But DRAT!!!...we're still just as materialistic and godless as ever, but now we believe that mind/consciousness is fundamental, just as the other laws of the universe are fundamental, i.e., irreducible.
You cool with that?
The Discovery Institute isn't, but you don't want me to actually quote sources, right?
But this bears repeating:
The Wedge:
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to REPLACE it with a science consonant with CHRISTIAN and THEISTIC CONVICTIONS.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
As far as I can see, the problem of infinite regress is insurmountable.
Turtles all the way down:
http://www.lostgarden.com/gfx/TurtlesAllTheWayDown-small.jpg
(The late) John Archibald Wheeler: Participatory Anthropic Principle
John Wheeler, scientist and dreamer, colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, mentor to many of today's leading physicists, and the man who chose the name "black hole" to describe the unimaginably dense, light-trapping objects now thought to be common throughout the universe, turned 90 last July.
He is one of the last of the towering figures of 20th-century physics, a member of the generation that plumbed the mysteries of quantum mechanics and limned the utmost reaches of space and time.
After a lifetime of fundamental contributions in fields ranging from atomic physics to cosmology, Wheeler has concerned himself in his later years with what he calls "ideas for ideas." (...)
Wheeler's hunch is that the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing creation of not just the present and the future but the past as well.
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse
"We used to think that the world exists 'out there' independent of us," Wheeler wrote, "we the observer safely hidden behind a one-foot thick slab of plate glass, not getting involved, only observing. However, we've concluded in the meantime that that isn't the way the world works. In fact we have to smash the glass, reach in."
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2008/04/quantum-pioneer-john-whee...
It may be challenging in years to come to remake science into something "consonant with Christian, theistic convictions," is my guess, quantum physics being what it is, and especially since the theistic genie is out of the bottle - devilish hard to get back in.
Maggie, you wrote: "As far as I can see, the problem of infinite regress is insurmountable."
Kalam argued that an infinite regress is impossible; i.e., with an infinite past, a first event could never occur because once you arrive at the "first", an infinite past would still exist.
Shalom!
Jeris E. Bragan
> 10^41 x 10^14/s x 1.6 x 10^17 s = 10^72 (equation 9-2)
There are three hundred million people in the USA 3x10^8
There are approximately 1000 possible first names
There are approximately 1000 possible last names
The odds of the people in the USA being called what they are is
1 / (10^6)^(3x10^8)) = 1 / 10^(18x10^48)
This is MUCH less likely than the above calculation.
ie: It is much less likely that people have the names that they have, than it is these long chain molecules form.
The fact that the ID'ers present these bogus calculations tells you not how unlikely evolution is, but instead how dishonest or incompetent they are.
The fact that you repeat them tells me they have successfully bamboozled you.
/Bevin
Sigh,
I'm still not sure what you are claiming.
Chris: "Why oppose the search for abiogenetic pathways?"
Sigh: "I haven't."
or
problem is that there is no mechanism to convert the flow of undirected energy (e.g. sunlight, lightning, etc.) into the configurational work that is required
and
it may be that laws of information are being violated
etc. So, I feel these two claims conflict. When I put them together like this, can you understand why I think these seem to conflict?
Also, as to information, could you please elaborate on what 'laws' appear to be violated?
I'll tell you about a problem that I have not resolved about information. In mechanics we have the second derivative of motion, known as jolt, (or surge, or jerk as you Americans like to say). In dynamic systems, we are taught that we can not actually get non-smooth acceleration, but we do model non-smooth jolt. i.e. there is zero jolt, and then all of a sudden there is a whole heap of jolt, and then suddenly no jolt again. This provides for smooth acceleration curves which can always be modelled using natural logarithmic and circular motion functions. But this rule doesn't seem to apply for the derivative of acceleration.
This implies to me some infinite transmission of information problems. In my mind, I wonder if something about that is incorrect. Does this violate any laws of information that you are talking about?
Now, perhaps I should start with an example that appears to have non-uniform change in acceleration. If I tied an apple to a string, and let it hang motionless. Then, I suddenly cut the string. Would there be an instantaneous step change of force as the tension in the string no longer balanced the apple against gravity? Would the change in force (and consequently acceleration) on the apple go from zero to G instantly, as the apple suddenly enters free-fall. Or does there need to be a small amount of time when the acceleration increases from zero to G in a smooth manner?
Let me explore that for a minute. As we zoom in on the time scale, right down to few nanoseconds of time when the string was cut. We might actually notice that the cutting of the string is not actually instantaneous. There would be cutting through more molecules as time progresses. As the last few molecules holds the string together, there is a stretching as the elastic properties of the molecules comes into play, a gradual change of increase in acceleration from zero to G, over a very short time. So, it is not actually an instant step.
OK, so they have convinced me that acceleration is never really non-smooth. Acceleration is always smooth. Then, that gets me wondering, if the change in velocity (acceleration) is always actually a smooth curve, then what about the change in acceleration (jolt). Should jolt also be limited to smooth curves just like acceleration?
Now, here is where it gets interesting. If jolt should be smooth, then what about the derivative of jolt, (aka jounce or snap)? Should snap also be smooth? Then what about crackle (5th) and pop(6th), what about any derivatives of displacement?
Do you see where I am headed? Can there ever actually be a change from zero to something? If some object is said to have a motion curve of zero, i.e. completely still, motionless, then if change is applied so that it does have some motion, at some point somewhere an apparent impossibility seems to occur, and one of the derivatives of displacement is non-smooth. Does this break any information laws? Or is it OK if the information is transmitted instantly?
Is this a necessary infinite regress?
Anyway, which information laws do you think would be violated by abiogenetic pathways? That intrigues me.
Yes, I did look at your reference re Robert Shapiro's article. And don't worry, you don't need to convince me that there are difficulties, I humbly accept that it's no easy task, perhaps more difficult than a lot realise too.
Sorry if I'm a bit slow to understand what you are telling me. The main question I am asking you is this: Do you claim it is impossible for abiogenesis to have occured without intelligent agency?
Turtles all the way down:
http://www.lostgarden.com/gfx/TurtlesAllTheWayDown-small.jpg
Posted by: Maggie | 27 October 2009 at 3:37(according to my timezone)
:)
Jeris, you're back! :)
Whether or not infinite regress is philosophically (or mathematically) acceptable, infinite regress remains a practical problem for those who want to use science towards religious, political and cultural ends - actually "REPLACE" current science with a science "consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
An inference of design remains just an inference of design, and those "Christian and theistic convictions" remain just Christian and theistic convictions.
I don't doubt that science will be inferring a lot of design in the decades to come, but I seriously doubt that science will fall into consonance with "Christian and theistic convictions," not just because the ID people have seriously ticked off the scientists with their stated agenda, but because infinite regress cannot be overcome when it comes to identifying the purported designer, unless said designer decides to intervene in history.
But even then, how would we know for sure?
See what I'm saying?
Clark's Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
=)
I wrote a bit about Meyer at the Biologos blog, and a couple sentences seemed to encapsulate the mistakes he made, so I repeat them here:
Of course [the Designer is] an undefined being, [Meyer's] not doing science--that is, he's not matching up specific causes to specific effects, he's instead generalizing from one thing to another. That's nothing like science, it's the old faulty analogical method used prior to the scientific method.
I am certainly not denying that analogy is used in science there, the point being the "broadly analogical" methods used in sympathetic magic, much religion, and pre-science in general are what Meyer utilizes for his "arguments." A code is a code, you know, and if humans make and use codes, then the DNA code must have been produced by an unknown intelligence by unknown means and for unknown purposes. Never mind the sorts of causal explanations that are actually required in biology, and in archaeology with respect to known intelligent causes.
Glen Davidson
Chris, simply put at macroscopic levels all the derivatives are continuous. However at the quantum level we see that those macroscopic equations are just approximations, and its anyones quess whether at the very finest levels the universe is continuous or discrete - my personal bet is discrete.
But this does not preclude change. Consider an object moving along a sine-wave path (or, almost the same, a pendulum).
All the derivatives of its movement perpendicular to the dominant axis of motion are non-zero, they are all continuous.
/Bevin
Posted by: Glen Davidson / 27 October 2009 at 1:16
I am certainly not denying that analogy is used in science there, the point being the "broadly analogical" methods used in sympathetic magic, much religion, and pre-science in general are what Meyer utilizes for his "arguments."
A code is a code, you know, and if humans make and use codes, then the DNA code must have been produced by an unknown intelligence by unknown means and for unknown purposes.
Never mind the sorts of CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS that are actually required in biology, and in archaeology with respect to known intelligent causes.
From Dr. Michael Behe's last day of testimony at the Dover trial:
Mr. Rothschild: Before we leave the blood clotting system, can you just remind the Court the MECHANISM by which intelligent design creates the blood clotting system?
Dr. Michael Behe: Well, as I mentioned before, intelligent design does not say a MECHANISM, but what it does say is, one important factor in the production of systems, and that is that, at some point in the pathway, INTELLIGENCE WAS INVOLVED.
Mr. Rothschild: This would be a good time for a break, Your Honor.
http://www.aclupa.org/downloads/Day12AM.pdf
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Was Dr. Behe just invoking magic, or was that my imagination?
http://magicanimation.com/misc/SidneyHarris_MiracleWeb.jpg
Well, as I mentioned before, intelligent design does not say a MECHANISM
Then there's this web-forum-famous statement from Dembski:
As for your example, I'm not going to take the bait. You're asking me to play a game: "Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position." ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it's not ID's task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.
Often what doesn't receive a response are the "fundamental discontinuities" to which Dembski appeals, sort of the opposite of doing science, which looks for what continuities it can find. I'll grant that discontinuities might indicate something that science can't explain, but it's still the opposite of doing science, including normal archaeology with its inferences to a limited and known design.
IOW, they're continuing to try to find what they suppose can't be explained, rather than trying to come up with meaningful explanations.
Glen Davidson
The whole Irreducibly Complex concept falls completely apart when you realize that a pile of pickup sticks, with the easy ones removed, is irreducibly complex.
It also falls apart when you realize that a system built to do one thing, can be hijacked to do something else, and then the pieces not essential for the second task can be removed or reassigned and remodelled.
You see this in the conversation above - an RNA replication mechanism can be hijacked to make useful other chemicals, and can be reused to replicate DNA.
/Bevin
...it makes no sense to try to ape YOUR method of connecting the dots.
--Glen quoting Dembski
That's why it's so important to bring up the religious agenda behind the ID movement, IMO, because it wants to REPLACE science as we know it.
The Wedge:
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to REPLACE it with a science consonant with CHRISTIAN and THEISTIC CONVICTIONS.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
No wonder there is such huge resistance to the ID movement.
Once you've tipped your hand, as in the Wedge Document, you can't really cry foul when people call you on it.
"Pathetic level of detail," indeed.
Bevin,
Thanks, I respect that you are better at mathematics than I. Yes, interesting, perhaps the universe moves along in steps of Plank's time. And, this answer causes more questions.
You offered: "simply put at macroscopic levels all the derivatives are continuous"
Of course saying "ALL THE DERIVATIVES" implies an infinite number of derivatives? How can an infinite number of something exist in a discrete universe? The answer might be that there is not actually an infinite number. Also, if discrete time is actual reality, then no motion is actually truly smooth?! This solves my initial problem, but raises a whole slew of prickly questions. What about all of dynamics and calculus, it all assumes smooth continuity exists! Are Cauchy–Riemann equations bunkas at some levels?
So we admit that although we can see that our understanding is severely limited by absurdities (which may yet be resolved), it seems to work quite well for the level of reality that we experience. As you say, we make 'bets' on what reality is.
Even a clock pendulum winds down and there is a moment when it goes from some motion to actually zero. A non-smooth operation appears to happen then. Of course, that is only on the macroscopic level.
The fact that molecules are never actually still has something to do with it. Electrons shimmering electromagnet waves, and busy little quarks doing their thing, are not actually ever stationary. There is no such thing as zero motion in reality. It is just a contrived concept defining a macroscopic approximation. I fully agree with that.
Is this one of the edges of our universe? Does this prove that the universe is bounded and not infinite? What other dimensions might this discrete limitation apply to? Time is a contrived concept, one that is derived from our perspective of change and sequence. Hence we can derive Planck's time. What does that say about us extrapolating time from observation of a few thousand years to conjecture billions of years? What percentage of real time have we sampled compared to how much we conjecture? This amount of sampling would be inadequate for engineering speculation - it leaves us with almost zero safety factor! Anyway, I digress.
My point in context is a question towards the 'laws of information' which I think Sigh was talking about. I'm trying to go through step by step to find out what exactly appears impossible. What law is violated? The first step that I am exploring is that I can see no reason why molecules can't be moved around. This step doesn't seem impossible! Although it raises some interesting questions about reality as you have rightly pointed out - kind of gets me going off on a tangent.
Forgive me if this seems obviously self evident, but by doing this we have noted that we might not understand the laws of information correctly - and we have established that molecules can actually be moved around. So, then my subsequent questions would address the following: If molecules can indeed be moved around why not in any possible sequence? What is preventing arrangement of matter for sequencing biology? Does the arrangement of biological matter from non-biological matter break any laws? Biological matter is not an impossible sequence in and of itself, because it can replicate itself, bringing in new non-biological matter, and the sequence can be re-created with at least one known causal agency - itself. It appeared to me that Sigh was claiming that perhaps some scientific laws are violated by suggesting that theoretical non-intelligent abiogentic pathways exist?
Chris: "So, I feel these two claims conflict. When I put them together like this, can you understand why I think these seem to conflict?"
Sorry, but no I don't see what conflict you mean.
1) It may be that there are issues of violating fundamental laws of information. On that, see the works of Dembski (e.g. No Free Lunch, and related since then). But that is a developing area.
2) I am not claiming a violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, for the reason stated.
3) Nevertheless, there is a severe thermodynamic problem in that the prebiotic world doesn't have any mechanism that can plausibly fill the need for configurational work (cf. a chemist who is synthesizing a functional sequence). Plenty of energy (presumably), but no way to direct it to that work.
4) That isn't the only problem. Not by a long shot.
The cell is an information processing system, as much or more than computers driving the robots of an assembly plant. Essentially, one must suppose that nature has created a fully functioning computer without intending to and without the help of Darwinian evolution, since Darwinian evolution itself needs those mechanisms (faithful reproduction of the system as a system, inheritable traits, etc.) to operate.
Beyond that, the computer must be programmed. An empty information store is not a beneficial source of information.
Chris and motion: "Does this break any information laws?"
Sounds to me like you have been getting some inspiration from Zeno of Elea.
"Zeno's paradoxes have puzzled, challenged, influenced, inspired, infuriated, and amused philosophers, mathematicians, physicists and school children for over two millennia. The most famous are the so-called "arguments against motion" described by Aristotle in his Physics."
As interesting as that may be, my focus here is about encoded information, such as you find in cells and computers and books and on cave walls, etc. I would prefer not to confuse different meanings of "information" in the same conversation. (It is hard enough already to shift the focus from vague symbolism to encoded information. ;-)
Chris: "Yes, I did look at your reference re Robert Shapiro's article. And don't worry, you don't need to convince me that there are difficulties, I humbly accept that it's no easy task, perhaps more difficult than a lot realise too."
One of the key aspects I'd like to draw your attention to is not merely the difficulty, but the reason why Shapiro and others are fleeing the RNA world hypothesis.
They are making frank observations about what we see about how undirected chemicals in nature behave. He is describing repeatable observations that are so consistent and persuasive to them that they are essentially concluding, "No, the idea that nature is trying to build RNA is not plausible. We cannot sustain that wishful thinking any longer. No matter how unconventional, we must look elsewhere for a different answer. Undirected chemicals don't do what the RNA-first theory needs them to do and wishes they did."
Notice three more things. First, he is not an ID advocate, and he is not trying to make a God-proof.
Second, he is doing this despite ridicule concerning his when-pigs-can-fly chemistry. There is cost and risk, but he feels it must be done anyway.
Third, he is not doing this willy-nilly or on a whim or just an assertion out of ignorance. He is not just throwing up his hands because we have no idea how chemicals behave. Rather, it is exactly because he can no longer deny the evidence we do have about how chemicals behave that he feels compelled by the evidence to head in a different direction.
Now, does the idea of recognizing the limits of undirected chemical behavior still seem unreasonable to you? Does the fact that our knowledge is not perfectly complete (and will not be) mean that Shapiro is making a mistake in his reasoning? If so, what?
Chris: "Do you claim it is impossible for abiogenesis to have occured without intelligent agency?"
I claim that the kind of information-based cellular life that we observe would not have ever appeared in this universe without the contribution of intelligence, regardless of how long one waits. Intelligence is required.
Whether there could be some other kind of "life" that is not based on coded information that could arise and possibly become intelligent -- that is a conjecture outside my claim.
Sigh and the rest of the ID community doesn't have solid definitions of anything, and so "laws are violated" is their psuedo-scientific jargon for "my gut feel is it can't be so".
The same misapplication of laws that YEC's and ID's use to claim evolution can't happen also tells me I can't clean my room, and I can't type non-random sentences on a computer.
All the differentiation and calculus they taught you at engineering school are approximate models to reality. Within most of those models, all the derivatives exist. Within the universe, even the first-order equations are wrong - usually slightly, and occasionally horribly wrong. This is what I meant when I said that, at the macroscopic level, infinitely differentiable is the usual state.
However once you start looking at the fine details, things go a long way from these overly simplistic math models.
For example:
- gravity is NOT exactly inverse-square because the atoms and their constituents are not perfectly uniform spherical sources.
- PV = nRT is APPROXIMATE - because (amongst other things), the number of atoms colliding with the wall of the container is not exactly the same in each time interval
- mathematical integration is the infinite sum of infinitesimals using exact real numbers, but the universe has quantum effects to take into account
It is tempting, but wrong, to say that integration is the right answer and summing is approximate. In truth integration is used as an approximation to a sum we can't do.
/Bevin
> The cell is an information processing system
Sigh - get used to the idea that the cell (be it prokaryote or eukarote) is NOT the smallest unit of replication.
Even individual strands of RNA are not the smallest known auto-catalysts.
So statements about cells is simply playing on the wrong playing field.
/Bevin
By the way, you should stop quoting Shapiro to support your view.
All he is arguing for is that something *even simpler than RNA* was the first self-replicating evolving chemistry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Shapiro_(chemist)
"He claims that in this view life is a normal consequence of the laws of nature and potentially quite common in the universe"
HOWEVER, in 2009, it was shown that RNA is not that difficult to make - although Shapiro, having already stated his opinion, is saying it ain't simple enough.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/news.2009.471.html
So the dispute betweem the newer ideas AND Shapiro is about how the first RNA came together - but BOTH SIDES AGREE THAT IT COULD HAPPEN WITHOUT A DESIGNER.
/Bevin
Bevin, your math about probability (27 October 2009 at 10:57) is wrong.
The probability of everyone having whatever names they have is 100%. Guaranteed. Just like the probability that a shuffled deck of cards has whatever order it has is also 100%. Always.
But if you want to guess (i.e. specify) what the order is (or what the names are), without looking or cheating, then the probability that your guess is right is indeed incredibly small (and yes, you would probably have it wrong).
You seem to like to dismiss math within science, it seems (or perhaps only the math that does not go the way you prefer?). Nevertheless, that is how the hard sciences work.
What you don't seem to notice is that it is not just ID proponents who see that issue. They were quoting the work of other researchers as well. The whole field of abiogenesis knows about this issue. Notice with added emphasis:
"It is apparent that "chance" should be abandoned as an acceptable model for coding of the macromolecules essential in living systems. In fact, it has been, except in introductory texts and popularizations."
For example, Prigogine and Cairns-Smith are not ID proponents. They accept and affirm that blind chance sequencing of functional biomacromolecules is a dead end, even on the scale of billions of years.
The people in the Origin of Life field know that won't work. It doesn't get much public attention because they don't have a good alternative. (Too many people might start to have doubts, I would suppose. They might question the reasonableness of the popularized just-so origin of life stories.)
Bevin: "So the dispute betweem the newer ideas AND Shapiro is about how the first RNA came together - but BOTH SIDES AGREE THAT IT COULD HAPPEN WITHOUT A DESIGNER."
They share that metaphysical assumption / faith / belief / conviction, but both sides also agree that they don't have a plausible explanation yet. They just both have faith that it did happen without a designer.
I've never claimed they had any other position than that life is a result of natural processes. You seem to think therefore that I should stop pointing out what Shapiro points out, along with the uncomfortable fact that he is pointing it out.
But almost in the same breath, you will try to imply that only ID advocates have scientific issues with these proposals. That the numbers ID advocates quote are not meaningful, and so on. That is exactly why it is important to quote from scientists who are not advocating design.
You can't consistently have it both ways. If you want to claim only ID advocates are seeing and raising these issues, then it follows necessarily that non-ID advocates must be quoted as well.
Inference test case -- up for grabs. Please give, explain, and defend your answer.
Part I.
A martian rover finds writing painted or engraved on the flat surface of a rock on Mars. No other data is available (i.e. no other signs of anything else surprising). The characters are not recognized as matching anything from Earth, but there are a finite number of different characters (like an alphabet), they form a very long sequence, and the occurrence of the characters in that sequence is irregular and unpredictable, like the text of human encoded information. But in this case, we don't know whether it has meaning or serves a function.
1. Understanding that science is tentative, what is the best inference for scientists to make concerning this? What sort of hypothesis is the best inference to make from the available data?
a) Since we have no knowledge about any intelligent agents who could have done this, we must proceed on the assumption that this is the product of undirected natural processes. Perhaps the rocks or liquids or whatever is different on Mars. Perhaps there are unobserved properties of matter and energy that we know nothing about yet.
b) We should prefer to assume that matter and energy behave there (and in the past when this was made) as they have been observed to behave here. Despite having no other evidence than the writing itself, the best inference at present is that this is the product of intelligent agency.
Part II.
We learn that cells depend upon encoded information that is written using a sequence of four bases, grouped into code units (codons) that are interpreted according to a code and coding system. In this case, unlike part 1, we have partially cracked the system and do understand that the sequences do indeed represent functional counterparts when they are translated from the encoded representation according to what the codons mean in that coding system.
2. Would it be reasonable or unreasonable for a scientist to take the view, again as a tentative working hypothesis, that this system is the product of intelligent design. (NOTE: Not here asking "best", just reasonable or unreasonable.)
3. If unreasonable for question #2, but you chose (b) for #1, how do you justify the difference in treatment?
4. Should it be a legitimate scientific option for scientists to take the position that in they find the weight of evidence in favor of inferring design for the cell? (NOTE: Not asking if you agree. Asking if this is a legitimate scientific response to the available data, i.e. a response that ought to be regarded as within the proper practice of science.) If not, why not? If this differs from the case in Part I, what is the justification for the distinction?
Sigh,
I apologise for understating Shapiro.
Never heard of Zeno, but looks like I might get some amusement out of that. Thanks for the reference. No, these questions arose in my 2nd year of engineering (Mechanical), a subject called dynamic systems. I think the examples used to illustrate the problem of non-smooth acceleration at the time was to do with cams, and cam-followers.
I think I know one thing that is causing my confusion about what you were claiming. When I asked the question, "Why oppose the search for abiogenetic pathways?" and you answered, "I haven't." Perhaps my question wasn't clear enough. And, maybe you answered something that I didn't realise I was asking. I think I know why now too.
When I asked "Why oppose the search for abiogenetic pathways", I assumed I was asking in the context of abiogenetic pathways being those that can be described without requiring intelligent agency. I assumed too much. I apologise for my poor phrasing.
I think you are claiming that intelligence was necessarily required.
I'll try a better way of asking my question. Why oppose the search for abiogenetic pathways that do not require intelligent agency?
I'm not even sure what an intelligent agency necessarily is. So, part of the answer requires me understanding what you mean by "intelligent agency". I kind of think that anything that follows laws of nature is intelligent. So, not exactly sure what type of intelligence is necessary for your claim yet. I guess that answer will resolve itself from whatever the claim actually is about between what could not have occured, and what must have occured.
Part of the answer I think relies on your distinction between types of symbolism. Why and how is the type of information any more special in biology than it is in other sciences, with respect to requiring intelligence? Why is it different say than how quarks communicate with electrons? This is a very mathematical coded process (s p d f g h i , and more in theory). Electrons respond by behaving in this finite set of states, the possible states strictly depend on what is encoded by the quarks as they form different configurations of hadrons. This is all very symbolic, and we make a chart of chemistry based on the communication between these things. Why is this any less symbolic than the type of symbolism that you are talking about?
I'm trying to understand what is special about the symbolism that you are talking about. Why does that symbolism need intelligence whereas other types of symbolism do not need intelligence?
Do you believe that this is an example of an irreducible complexity?
I don't rest my faith in irreducible complexities. They let me down, and I gave up on them as being necessary! Anyway, I have religious belief in the supernatural, which by definition is beyond current scientific understanding. Consider if we limited our belief to current scientific understanding, then all of science would cease to develop! Therefore, I necessarily have faith beyond the bounds of scientific understanding! Does your personal faith require these irreducible complexities?
Sigh,
(a) NOBODY believes that specific long sequences of RNA or DNA came into existence by chance.
You and the ID'ers keep using words and math to attack something that NOBODY believes happened.
The sequences we see around us today are one possible result of billions of years of MUTATION and SELECTION.
(b) NOBODY believes that cells were the first unit of replication. There are much simpler self-replicating forms that support mutation and selection. We now have more than two obvious candidates - RNA being one.
(c) The results of mutation and selection can indeed look like a designer was involved. "Trial and error" is a standard technique intelligences use to solve problems.
/Bevin
Posted by: Sigh | 27 October 2009 at 8:36
Should it be a legitimate scientific option for scientists to take the position that in they find the weight of evidence in favor of inferring design for the cell?
How is that not an argument from ignorance?
“Premise One: Despite a THOROUGH SEARCH, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information."
Isn't there a "halting problem" issue, or a Gödel-type issue there, or something?
A "thorough search?" Since 1987, when the term Intelligent Design came into use after Edwards v. Aguillard was decided?
How does one do a "thorough search" of the...ahem...universe in 22 years?
I can't believe someone hasn't jumped on that "thorough search" bidness yet.
In any case, how motivated are ID scientists going to be to do a "thorough search" for sufficient material causes when their stated goal is:
Governing Goals
To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
To replace materialistic explanations with the THEISTIC UNDERSTANDING that nature and HUMAN BEINGS ARE CREATED BY GOD.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
How can this not be an argument from ignorance?
This can't be looked at adequately without the religious context, IMO.
>>> Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information
This premise is false. (a) The search has only been going on for at most 100 years, and only very recently have we had the technology to do a good job of the search, hence it can hardly be descibed as 'thorough'. (b) dramatic results have been published within the last few months. One can hardly describe a search as thorough when it is still turning up exciting new results.
If one is allowed to start with false premises, one can get anywhere.
/Bevin
Thanks, Bevin.
Now, please explain to me how one would ever KNOW that they had conducted a "thorough search" of the universe?
Stephen Hawking even gave up on that. Einstein died trying.
Or, alternatively, what frame of mind would one have to be in to convince oneself that this had been accomplished?
>>> what frame of mind
A "win at all costs" one - the kind that they teach lawyers to have, but not scientists
/Bevin
Attorney and "father" of the ID movement, Philip Johnson:
"So the question is: "HOW TO WIN?" That’s when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy...."
--"Berkeley’s Radical" - Touchstone, 2002
"In making this determination [Kitzmiller et al v. Dover Area School District], we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."
--Judge John Jones III, Harrisburg, PA, December 20, 2005The judge also stated:
"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."
Chris: " Why oppose the search for abiogenetic pathways that do not require intelligent agency?"
My answer is unchanged. I'm not opposed to anyone's search for such pathways. The search provides data and knowledge. The search is how Dean Kenyon, originally a proponent and author of a proposed undirected abiogentic process, was forced to reevaluate and conclude instead that that is unrealistic. As was stated in The Mystery of Life's Origin (p. 185, emphasis in the original):
"One characteristic feature of the above critique needs to be emphasized. We have not simply picked out a number of details within chemical evolution theory that are weak, or without adequate explanation for the moment. For the most part this critique is based on crucial weaknesses intrinsic to the theory itself. Often it is contended that criticism focuses on present ignorance. "Give us more time to solve the problems," is the plea. After all, the pursuit of abiogenesis is young as a scientific enterprise. It will be claimed that many of these problems are mere state-of-the-art gaps. And, surely, some of them are. Notice, however, that the sharp edge of this critique is not what we do not know, but what we do know. Many facts have come to light in the past three decades of experimental inquiry into life's beginning. With each passing year the criticism has gotten stronger. The advance of science itself is what is challenging the notion that life arose on earth by spontaneous (in a thermodynamic sense) chemical reactions."
"Over the years a slowly emerging line or boundary has appeared which shows observationally the limits of what can be expected from matter and energy left to themselves, and what can be accomplished only through what Michael Polanyi has called "a profoundly informative intervention." When it is acknowledged that most so-called prebiotic simulation experiments actually owe their success to the crucial but illegitimate role of the investigator, a new and fresh phase of the experimental approach to life's origin can then be entered. ..."
Chris: "not exactly sure what type of intelligence is necessary for your claim yet"
The ability to imagine, to choose, to understand languages and coded information, to plan for and pursue future goals for the sake of future benefits. In short, the ability to conceive of and build an information processing system for the sake of what it can eventually do, despite the lack of such function or benefit in the absence of essential parts.
Natural selection only reacts to present considerations. It doesn't pursue a future goal despite all intermediate consequences.
Chris: "I'm trying to understand what is special about the symbolism that you are talking about. Why does that symbolism need intelligence whereas other types of symbolism do not need intelligence?"
Rather than "symbolism" (which will head your thinking in the wrong direction), focus instead on "encoded information" that requires translation to be functional.
Humans are routinely representing things symbolically, but that doesn't mean that the systems they describe are themselves depend on translating encoded sequences of symbols that represent meaning by a convention (e.g. the genetic code, the Morse code, etc.).
In your comparison example, is there anything like a ribosome that takes in sequences of information according to one convention and translates them to a meaningful equivalent sequence?
Hubert P. Yockey (Journal of Theoretical Biology) has written in regard to the genetic code in relation to human languages and codes:
"It is important to understand that we are not reasoning by analogy. The sequence hypothesis [that the exact order of symbols records the information] applies directly to the protein and the genetic text as well as to written language and therefore the treatment is mathematically identical."
Chris: "Does your personal faith require these irreducible complexities?"
As a side point regarding your experience with irreducible complexities, I don't know the particulars, but I do know that ID opponents love to crow about knocking down straw men when they haven't and can't actually resolve the real obstacle. Hand waving, promises, misrepresentation, and misdirection prevail, but not an actual solution (e.g. Ken Miller example). The moral is that you sadly cannot trust such an opponent to represent matters accurately, and particularly not Ken Miller. There is no reliable substitute for double checking against misrepresentations.
To answer your question, there are many Christians who are theistic evolutionists and who hold that God's involvement with biology is real, but perhaps scientifically undetectable. If it were eventually found that all of biology can be explained so far as science is concerned through the demonstrated capabilities of (at least apparently) undirected natural processes, that would not be an obstacle for me.
I always have the option of the theistic evolutionary perspective, i.e. some form of God used evolution as His tool or means. Likewise, Behe, for example, has the same option available, especially since as he is a Roman Catholic, there is a certain amount of openness expressed to that in their tradition (though not unqualified openness to materialism as it touches spiritual questions).
Behe cannot take that option because Darwinian evolution is too feeble to support it, and the repeated observations continue to underscore this. He is theologically compatible, but scientifically compelled otherwise. I take the same view.
In some ways, it is the attempted refutations of the ID opponents (e.g. Ken Miller) that are the most persuasive to me. When I see obfuscation, misrepresentation, misdirection, and so on, that tells me that the opponent has a very weak hand. That isn't needed if someone really has the goods.
Bevin: "NOBODY believes that cells were the first unit of replication. There are much simpler self-replicating forms that support mutation and selection. We now have more than two obvious candidates - RNA being one."
You have multiple problems that you have not addressed with that story.
1) The wonderful synthesized experiments with replicating RNA depend on the informed intervention of chemists, as Shapiro has pointed out (and still says RNA is not easy enough). Things like artificially protecting the RNA, artificially providing only what is needed and pre-excluding the larger majority of naturally occurring chemical by-products that would prevent success, and more.
2) It is even one thing just to get RNA and quite another to get RNA sequences that have the property of the replication you desire. Notice people have been doing experiments with RNA that didn't replicate. It is not an automatic property of all RNA. So you have a sequencing configuration problem even at the level of RNA replication.
How do you solve that problem? Trial and error? Before you get to replicating RNA? Trial and error is overwhelmed by the non-working sequences.
3) Unless I missed it, I haven't noticed your solution to how you replicate a system of integrated molecular machines without a stored information system. You cannot assume that the strand replication used by RNA works for systems that are no longer just free floating strands. Start tacking on parts and see what happens to the simplistic replication used by RNA.
Bevin: "Trial and error" is a standard technique intelligences use to solve problems.
Yes, it is. And intelligent agents do try, i.e. seek to pursue an unrealized goal. But chemicals have no discernible goals, apart from blind obedience to the laws of physics and chemistry.
The study of chemistry has no chapter on the drive within chemicals to pursue encoding systems. Nor is there likely to be any such chapter, so far as the evidence indicates. Chemicals can do everything that chemicals are required to do without ever needing to have coded information machinery.
There is no known "want to" that could drive a chemical "trial and error" for building such a system. If you want to say there is, science cannot take that on blind faith.
Finally, a huge problem is this. Even if we supposed, for example, that a vast colony of replicating RNA existed and really, really wanted to make a protein, and was able to shuffle amino acids all day long at the maximum rate possible -- even then that by itself would still be woefully insufficient.
The implausibility of trial and error is not eliminated even if your RNA were coating the earth and had billions of years to do trial and error. A protein is not just a random polypeptide. Trial and error cannot cut it.
>>> For the most part this critique is based on crucial weaknesses intrinsic to the theory itself.
No. For the most part this critique is based on inventing or misapplying inappropriate and flawed laws
>>> Notice people have been doing experiments with RNA that didn't replicate.
Yeah, right - do you do ANY research before you copy this stuff out of the book?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090109173205.htm
"The scientists have synthesized for the first time RNA enzymes that can *replicate themselves* without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely"
>>> Finally, a huge problem is this. Even if we supposed, for example, that a vast colony of replicating RNA existed and really, really wanted to make a protein, and was able to shuffle amino acids all day long at the maximum rate possible -- even then that by itself would still be woefully insufficient.
(a) replicating RNA don't 'want to do' anything.
(b) woefully insufficient for what?
>>> A protein is not just a random polypeptide
On the contrary, that is EXACTLY what they are - random chains of amino acids. It just so happens that vast numbers of different chains are useful for all kinds of things.
/Bevin
MaggieB: "How can this not be an argument from ignorance?"
First off, you have your dates wrong. For example, The Mystery of Life's Origin (TMoLO) was published in 1984, years before that red herring court case. That textbook itself quotes work, research, and inferences to intelligence that go back even earlier, IIRC, at least back into the 1970s.
For more on how this was due to the advance of knowledge, not an argument from ignorance, see the first part of my last post to Chris at 29 October 2009 at 12:52.
MaggieB: "This can't be looked at adequately without the religious context, IMO."
If you don't take off your colored glasses, you will be unable to see anything except your preferred color. When you always report only seeing that one color, it doesn't carry much weight once people notice the colored glasses you always look through.
Some of the very earliest scientists to begin advocating for intelligent design inferences, even before TMoLO was published, specifically advocated for a non-theistic intelligence within the universe.
In TMoLO, when the listed the various categories of possible responses to the information and specified complexity of the cell, one of those categories was for a designing/creating intelligence within the universe, in distinction from a supernatural creator from outside the universe.
Why would the scientists in that category make such inferences, since they were not compelled by religious reasons (and had no connection to anyone's favorite conspiracy)?
It is because they were compelled by the data. The advance of knowledge made an undirected origin unbelievably implausible for scientific reasons.
This is also another indication that this issue comes not from what we don't know, but from what we have been learning and from the advance of knowledge. Those inconvenient results have implications independent of someone's religious context.
Bevin, thanks! And for all this time I thought you were disagreeing. Now I find you supporting my point. A pleasant surprise.
I pointed out that not all RNA is auto-catalytic / "self-" (actually "each other -") replicating. It is not automatic. People have been doing experiments with RNA that doesn't replicate for years.
Now, Bevin has come to my aid by pointing to an article with the bold title "How Did Life Begin? RNA That Replicates Itself Indefinitely Developed For First Time" (emphasis added). I couldn't have made my point better.
This was not the first time people have worked with RNA. Just as I said, not all RNA has this property. But, with trial and error, smart scientists have succeeded in designing RNA strands that do have this property for the first time. Excellent work on their part. Or was it??
Side question for bonus points:
Should those scientists take any credit for this event??
If they are approached for a Nobel prize, should they honorably decline??
"Well, no. We cannot accept this. You see, it wasn't us at all or to our credit in any way. It was just the RNA. It just did this all by itself. We simply feel privileged that the RNA happened to do this in our lab and that we were fortunate enough to notice."
Seriously -- do they have a basis for taking credit that this happened or not?
Bevin: "woefully insufficient for what?"
Insufficient to find an amino acid sequence that will make a functional protein. Functional proteins are extremely rare among all amino acid sequences, especially if you don't help the process by making right decisions on behalf of the process, e.g. supplying only the desirable chemical components and excluding anything that would get in the way.
You can be quite certain that in the above mentioned experiment, for example, the numerous naturally occurring chemicals that would have prevented success were prevented by the chemists from doing so.
p.s. to Bevin,
When scientists try to make something, they can study and learn from their errors.
If RNA supposedly engages in a process that involves perhaps sometimes some amino acids attaching to each other or to other things, e.g. bases on the RNA, by various kinds of bonds (not all of them appropriate for protein), what exactly does RNA "learn" from many events, none of which makes a protein?
You want to imply I am knocking a straw man by pointing out that chance arrangement is insufficient. If so, you have to show how the RNA I just described can do better than chance. How does it do better than many events that are repeatedly not making proteins (especially since you acknowledged that RNA is not trying to make proteins anyway)?
UNMET CHALLENGE -- Inference test case
I find this very interesting, and possibly quite revealing.
Unless I missed it, it seems that not any of the ID critics that scrutinize other things I've said was willing to go on record with their answers and, more importantly, their justifications for my post at 28 October 2009 at 2:36.
See Inference test case -- up for grabs. Please give, explain, and defend your answer. above.
Now if inferences to intelligent design are such a push over obvious mistake by ID proponents, why the dead silence? If the reasoning of ID proponents is so very obviously wrong, here is a wonderful chance to explain why.
So, where are the critics on this one?
Unmet challenge?
Deafening silence is reasonable seeing that the challenge is ridiculous.
It is not reasonable to infer intelligence in the beginning of life. If you can find some intelligent agent sitting on another planet scraping a rock against flint to start the process then your comparison to finding writing and the beginning of life is meaningless.
Maybe you would be so kind as to give us an example of evidence for an intelligence with the capability to start life billions of years ago. Then we could try to determine if that intelligence actually has done anything other than sit around smoking a bong looking at the stars.
Sigh: Your "challenge" was in two parts - a hypothetical Martian tale, and then a reference to the genetic code.
As you may know
(1) the genetic code is a direct 1-1 encoding of the elements of a protein
(2) the translation process is literally a grab-the-next-that-fits-and-move-on
As you obviously don't know, but should
(1) many variations on a protein are acceptable replacements for it
(2) many of the genes on the human DNA are broken, not producing anything useful
(3) we can track the genes all the way from single cells, flatworms, and jellyfish to humans. We have very solid evidence that all life forms around us today evolved from a very small set of original life forms.
If this level of mutation and selection has been working for 500 million years, why should I suddenly infer that the mechanism was not working before then
The only reason I keep this conversation going is to give the readers pointers to more material for them to see how strong the evolution evidence is.
I strongly recommend "Your Inner Fish" (Shubin) as a simple introduction to how a fertilized ovum turns into an adult chicken or human, and how similar those two bodies are.
/Bevin
Bevin: "the genetic code is a direct 1-1 encoding of the elements of a protein"
Actually, it is a many-to-one mapping between codons and amino acids (or "stop" instructions). Don't know what you meanby "direct" since the mapping by its nature translates from the domain of codons to the range of amino acids.
Bevin: "many variations on a protein are acceptable replacements for it"
And a great, great, great... many more amino acid sequence variations cannot form a protein at all. There is no point to denying what is true. The non-protein arrangements dwarf the protein sequences. That is a huge problem that mere chance cannot overcome.
You want to complain that no one believes it is by chance (and that is true -- it is known it won't work). Yet I asked at 29 October 2009 at 2:20 for a clear and rational explanation of how you do better than chance.
What is your answer to how that system of RNA with amino acids thrown in does better than chance.
Trial plus error without learning equals no better than chance.
When chemists fail, they can study and learn why it did not reach the future goal they are trying to succeed. They can then imagine other ways to reach the goal and choose to change their behavior in order to meet the goal. Those are qualities of intelligent agents.
Chemicals don't learn in this way. The keep doing the same things over and over. They have no unmet future goal and no intention to try to find a different way to get there. They have no "error" in their "trials" because they have no other goal. Take another look at that post I just mentioned. What is your solution?
Bevin: "many of the genes on the human DNA are broken, not producing anything useful"
Until a couple years ago, there was a widespread belief that most of the genome was "junk" that did not produce anything useful. Now we know that was wrong. There is a great deal of use to it, and much of it codes for functional RNA (along with other functions).
Bevin: "If this level of mutation and selection has been working for 500 million years, why should I suddenly infer that the mechanism was not working before then"
Because we are talking about the origin of the very parts that make Darwinian evolution possible: the ability to have reliably reproducible life with inheritable traits that are encoded information in the cell's information store of DNA.
You cannot climb to the top of a ladder to get the wood you will need to originally build that same ladder. It is a break down in logic. Until you have these parts, you have to show that something else is able to get the whole job done until they are in place. Otherwise they would never be built, and Darwinian evolution would never begin.
Your repeated allusions to the evidence of Darwinian evolution are irrelevant to this issue of the origin of the tools needed by Darwinian evolution.
>>>[Sigh:] A protein is not just a random polypeptide
Bevin: "On the contrary, that is EXACTLY what they are - random chains of amino acids. It just so happens that vast numbers of different chains are useful for all kinds of things."
It is quite mistaken to think that proteins are random chains of amino acids.
The reason there is wide spread agreement in the field of origin of life research that chance cannot work is precisely because a protein is not just a random polypeptide. If it were, the recognized consensus would not regard the idea of a "chance" explanation so grimly.
At a minimum, proteins
1) must have amino acids of the proper optical isomer (not mixed isomers, as are usually produced by undirected nature),
2) must have the amino acids bound together by peptide bonds (not any other bond that might occur in undirected nature),
3) must not have other stuff mixed in (e.g. any of the inconvenient competing reactions or bindings that could also happen in unprotected and undirected nature), and
4) have one of the very rare sequence arrangements that yields the stable functional structure of a protein.
Even plausibility estimates that ignore 1, 2, and 3 and take them for granted without any consideration will still blow out on just point 4 alone.
As I said, it is not just ID proponents that recognize this problem. It is acknowledged across the field of origin of life research. The number of functional protein sequences is dwarfed by the vast number of non-functional polypeptide sequences.
Hence the problem. How does one get / find functional sequences in a prebiotic world without the help of intelligence (which is able to do such things)?
UNMET Roseta Stone CHALLENGE -- ID critics appear unwilling to go on record with clear answers
Chris, I wonder if you have noticed this. I would think it would be fairly easy for an ID critic to say clearly where they stand on each of the questions I asked about inferring intelligent agency (vs. undirected natural processes).
They must have answers. Yet they are unwilling to put them out in public in a point by point manner. None have been willing to do so.
Hypothesis: Doing so would force them to either concede what they wouldn't want to concede, or else to give answers that are clearly and evidently biased.
Now, how many will show my hypothesis wrong by going on record with clear answers to each question?
[I do recognize that keafan made a post, but not one that gives clear answers to each of the questions, and I wouldn't attempt to mind read what his answers would be.]
BTW, the Part One can be summarized by the idea that we find essentially a Rosseta Stone on Mars, but no other details.
Part Two checks for consistency in applying the standards used in Part One. Original at 28 October 2009 at 2:36.
While waiting for those responses to the so far UNMET Rosseta Stonge CHALLENGE, there is something worth noticing about the article Bevin pointed to concerning the claim of indefinitely replicating RNA. It is a far weaker an accomplishment than I supposed.
Each RNA strand is composed of two subunits, i.e. each strand is made up of two "half"-strands. The scientists establish a starting population of whole strands and provide them with a steady supply of the subunits or partial strands.
All the whole strands need to do is to each bind to two partial strands and join them together. That is all. They do not even construct the subunits.
This is not unlike "Made in Country X" claims where country X inexpensively imports all the prebuilt components from some other country and just performs the final step of joining them together.
The article even acknowledges (emphasis added), "The subunits in the enzymes the team constructed each contain many nucleotides, so they are relatively complex and not something that would have been found floating in the primordial ooze."
I wrote earlier about the careful, strictly controlled, sequential process by which specified RNA strands are synthesized. No random process of construction would have consistently provided the desired sequences (each many nucleotides long) for the essential steady stream of subunits.
Without appropriate sequences of the nucleotides in the strands, you wouldn't see the binding behavior exhibited by the experiment.
The sequencing issue for RNA and for protein remains a huge stumbling block for all undirected process stories about the origin of life. But the issue of coded information is, I believe, even worse.
Sigh,
I don't think anyone is opposed to the validity to the inference of design in a general sense. The question of general validity is not what is being debated. If that's all ID was about, then there would be no debate. My guess is that's probably why no one answered your challenge!
The question up for debate is not about Martians, rather it appears to be more specifically about RNA at the moment. I am guilty of not knowing enough about biology to understand the nuances of what RNA can and can't do. Perhaps I have been unfair to you by not knowing enough background of the topics under discussion? But it does interest me.
Both sides employ rhetoric that suggests that the other side is impossible. But then when I ask the question directly, both sides deny they saying that the other side is impossible. But then it still sounds like they are saying the other side must be wrong. This conundrum annoys me.
People from both sides have also agreed with me that neither side can be proven true or false in a mathematical sense. So, then what sense are we discussing claims? Of truth or of validity? All of science has to deal with the problem of confirmation bias - no doubt.
I don't understand why biology needs any more imagination than say, how electrons behave? From a strictly reductionist scientific point of view, are you potentially employing 'anthropic' and 'pathetic' fallacies? I mean as in 'empathetic' personification, I don't mean in a pejorative sense. You are saying that there is necessarily something special about what you ascribe value to? The challenge from the anti-IDers is that it may have just happened, and that just because it appears valuable to us observers, it doesn't mean that it was necessarily special.
i.e. science simply observes and develops theories, but how can it say that biology was any more necessary or 'special' than anything else that actually exists? Just because biology simply exists, does not mean that it was any more important or special than Mars having two moons? According at least to what science is allowed to comment on.
I believe in the 'Image of God', so I potentially commit a similar anthropic fallacy. I don't expect the viewpoint of strict reductionist science to understand it.
Sigh wrote >>> And a great, great, great... many more amino acid sequence variations cannot form a protein at all.
Tell me one sequence of peptides that is NOT a protein
Sigh wrote >>> Until a couple years ago, there was a widespread belief that most of the genome was "junk" that did not produce anything useful. Now we know that was wrong. There is a great deal of use to it, and much of it codes for functional RNA (along with other functions).
Until a couple of years ago, we could not easily sequence DNA. Now it is easy. Now we KNOW which part of the genome sequences smell receptors - and we KNOW that they are broken in humans, and are really badly broken in whales, because we know what they look like in dogs.
Sigh wrote >>> Because we are talking about the origin of the very parts that make Darwinian evolution possible: the ability to have reliably reproducible life with inheritable traits that are encoded information in the cell's information store of DNA.
READ MY LIPS.
YOU DON'T NEED CELLS TO HAVE DARWINIAN EVOLUTION.
YOU DON'T NEED DNA TO HAVE DARWINIAN EVOLUTION.
YOU DON'T NEED PROTEINS.
ALL YOU NEED IS AUTO-CATALYSTS, OF WHICH RNA IS ONE.
Having said that, many of the proteins that are in our bodies DID evolve after DNA-based reproduction - and we know this because we can study the cladistics tree, and figure out when particular proteins probably appeared by which leaves of the tree make them and which leaves don't.
See the discussion on color vision, for example...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision
Sigh wrote >>>
>>>At a minimum, proteins
>>>1) must have amino acids of the proper optical isomer (not mixed isomers, as are usually produced by undirected nature),
The UNDIRECTED PROCESS of RNA production of proteins yields the right isomers.
>>>2) must have the amino acids bound together by peptide bonds (not any other bond that might occur in undirected nature)
The UNDIRECTED PROCESS of RNA production of proteins produces the right bonds.
>>>3) must not have other stuff mixed in (e.g. any of the inconvenient competing reactions or bindings that could also happen in unprotected and undirected nature), and
The UNDIRECTED PROCESS of RNA production of proteins usually stops this from happening.
>>>4) have one of the very rare sequence arrangements that yields the stable functional structure of a protein.
On the contrary, it is critical for the functioning of bodies that many of the proteins are UNSTABLE.
Why don't you do some research in the non-ID books, instead of quoting the ID liars.
/Bevin
[Chris, you might find the biology aspects of this helpful.]
Let's see, Bevin wants me to stop quoting ID proponents because (he claims) they are liars. But when I quote non-ID scientists who say the same things (e.g. Robert Shapiro), he tells me I should stop quoting them because they don't believe in ID. They are true believers in the sufficiency of natural processes, so they are off limits (even when they agree on the facts ID proponents give).
So it seems you basically aren't willing to listen to any source that tells you the facts you aren't willing to accept.
Who is left? Perhaps you don't want me to quote even from the article you referenced yourself? The one that plainly stated (a different emphasis added):
"The subunits in the enzymes the team constructed each contain many nucleotides, so they are relatively complex and not something that would have been found floating in the primordial ooze."
The reason the subunits wouldn't be found in the primordial ooze is because of the complexity that comes from having many nucleotides. The problem is a compounding one.
Every increase of one nucleotide multiplies the number of possible sequences of bases by four. Doubling the number of nucleotides squares the number of possible distinct sequences.
Length Number of possible distinct sequences
1 4
2 16
4 256
8 65,536
16 4,294,967,296
32 >18,446,744,000,000,000,000
They openly conceded that the half-strands were already too complex. The search space of possibilities for the whole strand is literally the value of the half-strand squared.
[BTW, notice that no one is claiming that the subunits (the half-strands) also had the property of being able to function as the whole strands did.]
Would it matter to you if a Nobel laureate thermodynamicist had something to say about the implausibility problem that attaches to macromolecules in the prebiotic world? Would you accept then that it is a real problem, not something that ID proponents have fabricated? Does it matter to you that other non-ID scientists recognize the problem?
Your statements about proteins being random amino acid chains are false. Anyone who studies the difference between the term "protein" and the term "polypeptide" will find that while all proteins are polypeptides, not all polypeptides are proteins. Although proteins are usually not rigid, their sequence allows them to form stable conformations suitable to their function.
The fact that a "polypeptide" is not always a "protein" shows that there is more to being a protein that forming a chain of amino acids with peptide bonds.
Beyond that, peptide bonds are not the only types of bonds that can form. You can connect amino acids in ways that do not even qualify as a polypeptide, let alone a protein.
Anyone can check the meanings of these terms and verify the differences.
If you are still confident in you position, why haven't you answered my questions about, even if we supposed replicating RNA, how does such a system with amino acids thrown in "learn" in any sense of the word so that it can do better than chance? Why wouldn't it just go on doing things that are chemically allowed and normal but that don't make proteins -- over and over and over? See my question at 29 October 2009 at 2:20.
[Also, if you would care to give me some documentation about how the presence of RNA guarantees that only the isomers and bonds would be used in the pre-biotic world (not in the post biotic world), that would be interesting. Thanks. But mostly I am interested in how you expect RNA will get to the first protein by better than chance, even though it is not trying to make protein.]
Chris, I don't have time for more of an answer at the moment, but I will ask you to reconsider the reason that people won't answer the Rosetta Stone questions.
Notice that I didn't require them to agree to anything in my position. They only need to clearly state their own view. If that view is not controversial, as you suggest, that would make it all the easier, not harder, to plainly state their position and show how the case of the Martian Rosetta Stone is in principle different (if they think it is).
The reason they cannot is quite simple. It would be absurd not to infer design for the Rosetta Stone or to insist on a natural process explanation -- even though there is no other support for the existence of the alien intelligence other than the writing itself. They infer it unavoidably because they know that stones won't form such writing. They make the inference from the observed limitations of natural processes to duplicate this effect.
That said, one cannot with consistency deny that the exact same process of reasoning becomes unreasonable or disallowed for the Signature in the Cell, to quote Meyer. Note, I did not say they must agree. But I suggest they cannot even bring themselves to permit others the legitimacy of drawing such an inference.
It is a double standard. But anyone who want to prove me wrong is free to answer the questions I've asked and show otherwise.
The challenge is still open and still unmet.
To anyone who wants to claim otherwise, clear answers, please. It really shouldn't be that hard, if there is no double standard.
p.s. You will note that the closest thing to any answer I received was from keafan, who mostly implied question about the reality of the alien intelligence.
But that gives someone like him two options. He can say that without independent evidence (beyond the writing itself as evidence), we cannot infer intelligence and must resort to natural process explanations for the Rosetta Stone.
Or, such a view could acknowledge that the coded symbols themselves do count as evidence -- enough to provide warrant for an intelligent design inference even without any other evidence. But then that puts them into a very difficult position to justify a claim that Meyer's inference to intelligence is unscientific or unreasonable. It is the same reasoning.
I've been pointing out that one cannot just assume for free or as a given that Darwinian evolution works even before you have a functional cell. Nevertheless, Bevin appears unwilling to take this issue seriously. Let's take another look at the article he pointed out (emphasis added).
"But the main value of the work, according to Joyce, is at the basic research level. "What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts." He is quick to point out that, while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not themselves a form of life."
There are clear acknowledgments that...
1) there is a "key moment when Darwinian evolution starts" (i.e. it cannot be assumed to be always operational -- it has a beginning when it can start to operate), and
2) this "key moment when Darwinian evolution starts" is identified with when "life begins", and
3) they are hopeful that this basic research "could be relevant to how life begins" (i.e. They obviously hope this contributes toward understanding a process that would result in life beginning. They don't know that it does, but they think it "could be relevant"), but
4) "He is quick to point out that" this type of replicating RNA enzyme system is not a form of life. In other words, has not yet arrived at the destination of that "key moment when Darwinian evolution starts".
This is exactly the point I was making. There is a point before which you cannot assume that Darwinian evolution has started. Before that point, one must justify all claims and assertions that undirected nature is still capable of doing all that Darwinian evolution claims to provide (however much or little that turns out to be in reality).
The researchers did not claim that Darwinian evolution could be assumed. Rather, they found it "extremely interesting" that this experiment showed some "some life-like properties" that were "akin to Darwinian evolution".
"The research shows that the system can sustain molecular information, a form of heritability, and give rise to variations of itself in a way akin to Darwinian evolution. So, says Lincoln, "What we have is non-living, but we've been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting." "
The two-fold problem for Bevin's position is that it is also freely acknowledged
1) that the system depends on a steady supply of subunits that would not "have been found floating in the primordial ooze", and
2) the same issue (i.e. of having too many nucleotides and too much complexity to be expected to be floating in the primordial ooze) is squared when we consider the RNA enzymes that were doing the work in the experiment.
You cannot assume the use of any process that depends on scientists providing what nature would not have provided.
I predict this obstacle will continue to consistently block the way. Robert Shapiro is right that the RNA first hypothesis is still not plausible. It is not realistic to assume that prebiotic ooze will be composed of the type of functional RNA with the sequences needed to make this type of experiment work. If you don't have appropriate sequencing of the bases in the RNA, it doesn't work. (Remember, this is the "first time" that scientists have managed this, but not the first time for studying RNA replication.)
Bevin, you can assert all day long, but that is not the same as evidence that nature would duplicate what these scientists have synthesized artificially and artificially sustained.
And even that still doesn't get you to better-than-chance for making a protein without trying. Looking forward to that explanation.
No goal pursuit + no learning = not better than chance.
Chris: "The question up for debate is not about Martians, rather it appears to be more specifically about RNA at the moment."
I would say that the core issue is about when inferences to intelligent design are or are not warranted. I claim that there is a bias that leads to an unjustifiable double standard. That is why the Rosetta Stone example is very relevant and revealing.
"Nature would not have done this on its own."
That assessment is the basis for every inference from evidence to the need for influence from intelligent agency. In some cases, however, an emotional or ideological bias can attempt to exclude or disallow or prevent others from making that inference.
That is the current struggle. Are scientists, working as scientists, permitted to make this inference based on scientific evidence they find compelling within their respective fields?
Chris, you asked me earlier to distinguish what I've been talking about from other things that could be thought "symbolic" in any general sort of way. I think it might be expressed in three words.
Meaningful Encoded Sequences
We understand what a sequence of objects or markers is.
The idea that they are encoded refers to a process of translation according to a code. An encoded sequence comes in and something else, the translation, comes out.
To say that it is meaningful indicates that the translated output has functional value. It works. It becomes a message that is meaningful, or a protein with the specific shape to do some work, or a manufactured part in an automated assembly line, or whatever.
Another important point comes from the fact that translation is needed from the encoded sequence and the realized functional form. The properties of the message are distinct from the properties of the realized translation or meaning.
The English letters "sun" are not especially large or hot. Likewise, oxygen cannot be ported around the body by the sequence of bases that describe the protein hemoglobin.
So to bring this around to one of the many obstacles that Bevin and others face, even if one were to assume some kind of "selection" at work in a prebiotic world, that selection cannot select for future value and it cannot select for a translated value that is not yet translated.
So you cannot have selection working directly on the encoded representation according to the benefits of a future protein it might encode one day. On the other hand, a central dogma of biology is that translation only goes from the encoded message to the realized form, not backwards. And the third hand (Martian hand?), is that without having the information that describes a particular protein, how does a prebiotic world have a better than random chance of coming up with the sequence for some protein? And if it had a protein, how would it learn and remember it, if the protein was not produced according to encoded information?
Juggling bases randomly only gives a random chance of anything (and a poor one at that for chemical reasons).
If you have done some programming, you may have found yourself asking the question, "I need such and such calculation done. Where in the program is the information available for making this calculation?"
If you have done this before, consider the same type of question regarding the information (as a meaningful encoded sequence) for the first functional protein in the universe. Where in that universe could that information possibly come from? What possible prebiotic steps could lead to that information, without any help from intelligent intervention?
Think on that as a thought experiment. Is that available within that system?
This is fun
>>> Let's see, Bevin wants me to stop quoting ID proponents because (he claims) they are liars. But when I quote non-ID scientists who say the same things (e.g. Robert Shapiro), he tells me I should stop quoting them because they don't believe in ID.
It's not my fault your position doesn't have any credible witnesses. When you quote someone who does not agree with your position as evidence for it, you should consider the possibility that you have misunderstood or are misapplying them.
>>> how does such a system with amino acids thrown in "learn" in any sense of the word so that it can do better than chance?
Imagine that you have a thousand pennies, and you wish to have them on the table showing all heads upwards.
There are three ways of doing it
1) Place them that way on the table - ID
2) Throw them onto the table - if they aren't all heads, pick them up and try again - NOBODY, BUT THE ID'ers CLAIM THE EVOLUTIONISTS BELIEVE THIS, AND THEN DO CALCULATIONS TO SHOW HOW WRONG THEY ARE
3) Throw them onto the table - pick up the ones that are tails, and throw them again, repeat until only heads are showing - DARWINIAN EVOLUTION. It takes only about 20 throws.
This is how the RNA 'learns', 'does better than chance', or what-ever incorrectly applied anthropomorphic phrase you want
>>> I've been pointing out that one cannot just assume for free or as a given that Darwinian evolution works even before you have a functional cell. Nevertheless, Bevin appears unwilling to take this issue seriously.
Unfortunately the phrase "Darwinian evolution" is ill-defined, as googling it will clearly show.
In the following, the speaker is merely distinguishing evolution of cells using mutation and selection from evolution of RNA using mutation and selection.
"The research shows that the system can sustain molecular information, a form of heritability, and give rise to variations of itself in a way akin to Darwinian evolution.
However their system CLEARLY used mutation and selection to evolve a much better 'top dog' - and did so in a lab in only a few liters of solution in a very short period of time - whereas the real world used all the oceans and billions of years.
In other words they have clearly demonstrated the answer to your statement >>> "one cannot just assume for free or as a given that Darwinian evolution works even before you have a functional cell. Nevertheless, Bevin appears unwilling to take this issue seriously". These guys HAVE ONE OF MANY WORKED EXAMPLES OF 'MUTATION+SELECTION' EVOLUTION THAT DOES NOT USE CELLS.
Bevin: "When you quote someone who does not agree with your position as evidence for it, you should consider the possibility that you have misunderstood or are misapplying them."
Here is where you misunderstand. I am not quoting scientists such as Shapiro as though he endorses ID. I quote Shapiro, for example, to show that credible scientists recognize that the RNA first hypothesis is implausible for scientific reasons (not theological reasons or for preferences for design or due to believing bad calculations by liars). He takes that position clearly and publicly. There is no misunderstanding.
Is that true or false? Do you agree or deny that he has taken this position for what he finds to be compelling scientific reasons? If you disagree that his position is due to scientific reasons, what is your support for saying so?
Quoting Shapiro becomes necessary when people want to deny there are serious scientific reasons to consider a scenario such as RNA World implausible and who want to imply that only liars and/or ID proponents think so.
Shapiro is not an ID proponent. Do you therefore consider Shapiro a liar for taking this position?
It is widely recognized that one of the best sources or witnesses one can quote concerning establishing facts is someone whose agreement is clearly not because they share any bias in favor of your position. It demonstrates that their assessment of the evidence cannot be written off or ignored as due merely to bias in favor of one's conclusion.
It is exactly because Shapiro is not an ID advocate that his testimony about the scientific problems with the RNA first wishful thinking becomes important.
The question for you -- do you reject his testimony for some reason other than the fact it is not what you want to hear? If so, on what basis would you dismiss his scientific objections?
Bevin: "2) Throw them onto the table - if they aren't all heads, pick them up and try again - NOBODY, BUT THE ID'ers CLAIM THE EVOLUTIONISTS BELIEVE THIS, AND THEN DO CALCULATIONS TO SHOW HOW WRONG THEY ARE"
First of all, we are talking about origin of life. Regarding origin of life, you are mistaken regarding its history.
Scientists did consider random chance as a possible explanation for the appearance of the necessary macromolecules. It was only through the advance of knowledge that this was shown to be unsupportable. It was an advance of science during the last half century to rule this out.
Even now, believe it or not, there are still people who believe that all you need to have a protein is a random sequence of amino acids. Can you believe that? Still today. Trust me, it is still true. Such people will then believe that it is enough of an explanation that they are connected in some random order, without being willing to consider how rare or unlikely it is that that would result in a functional protein.
Even if you would never believe this, it needs to be pointed out because there are still those who haven't learned otherwise. They don't know the history of the research.
You are also wrong about who is responsible for the calculations. The calculations came first and were done and/or affirmed by various scientists, many of whom are not ID proponents, e.g. Steinman, Cairns-Smith, Prigogene.
The rise of the move to ID came as a result of such calculations along with the failure of other approaches. The Mystery of Life's Origin, for example, was published in 1984 as a survey of the research results up to that point.
[I will put the next item of response in its own post, because of its importance.]
Bevin: "Imagine that you have a thousand pennies, and you wish to have them on the table showing all heads upwards.
"There are three ways of doing it
"1) Place them that way on the table - ID
"2) Throw them onto the table - if they aren't all heads, pick them up and try again - NOBODY, BUT THE ID'ers CLAIM THE EVOLUTIONISTS BELIEVE THIS, AND THEN DO CALCULATIONS TO SHOW HOW WRONG THEY ARE
"3) Throw them onto the table - pick up the ones that are tails, and throw them again, repeat until only heads are showing - DARWINIAN EVOLUTION. It takes only about 20 throws."
Actually, there is a relevant problem with your analogy. Option 3 -- as you have it in your analogy -- is also an example of ID. It involves a person with a goal, who chooses in light of the future goal, and who makes changes according to what is needed to achieve the future goal.
Natural selection considers no future goal. To make a better illustration, you would need an example where no end goal was in sight and the effects were do to present considerations only, and where no intelligent choosing is involved that relied on imagination, knowledge, etc..
I have understood all along what you have wanted to believe about the claimed ability of the prebiotic world to employ Darwinian evolution to progress toward information and life. The challenge hasn't been to restate that belief.
The still unmet challenge is to show how a mindless prebiotic process would do the equivalent of "pick up the ones that are tails" when the goal is "build the first protein".
You have offered a kind of vague analogy expressing your belief about what you want to be true. How does that work for amino acids and progress toward an actual protein?
How does that work when you cannot employ a decision (e.g. I will decide to "pick up the ones that are tails") and as you admitted earlier there is no "trying to make a protein" (i.e. no "you wish to have them on the table showing all heads upwards")?
As I asked earlier at 29 October 2009 at 2:20...
"If RNA supposedly engages in a process that involves perhaps sometimes some amino acids attaching to each other or to other things, e.g. bases on the RNA, by various kinds of bonds (not all of them appropriate for protein), what exactly does RNA "learn" from many events, none of which makes a protein?
"You want to imply I am knocking a straw man by pointing out that chance arrangement is insufficient. If so, you have to show how the RNA I just described can do better than chance. How does it do better than many events that are repeatedly not making proteins (especially since you acknowledged that RNA is not trying to make proteins anyway)?"
Remember, you cannot employ decisions on the part of the molecules, or reaching for a future goal. Nor can you answer the question with vague analogies that involve decisions and future goals.
>>> I quote Shapiro, for example, to show that credible scientists recognize that the RNA first hypothesis is implausible for scientific reasons
What does Shapiro believe?
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/10/nyu-chemist-robert-shapiro...
"Shapiro said such a metabolismlike reaction would require five things: some sort of a boundary to keep the ingredients together, such as a rock-bound compartment; a supply of energy; a coupling of the energy to a “driver reaction”; a chemical network that would permit adaptation and evolution; and reproduction."
In other words, there are even simpler things than RNA-based molecules that support evolution. He is not saying complex RNA formed spontaneously, he is saying it came about from even simpler systems.
Remember we are building a chain
simple molecules -> RNA -> cells -> DNA -> multicellular -> us.
We already have a lot of evidence for the last cells .. us step. We are rapidly accumulating evidence for the RNA -> cell step. Shapiro is simply saying 'work on the simple molecules -> RNA step'.
He is NOT saying you can't get from simple molecules to RNA, which is what you are implying he is saying. He is just saying there is extra detail in there which needs to be fleshed out.
>>> would result in a functional protein
Sigh, a protein is a random linear sequence of polypeptides. Whether it is FUNCTIONAL is in the eye of the beholder.
Fortunately in our bodies we have all kinds of uses for proteins, from carrying messages to forming solid structures to blocking other proteins from working.
Fortunately many different variations of proteins will perform exactly the same function. Would you believe some people believe you need exactly the right protein to detect light! Unbelievable but true! They don't understand that there are many different proteins that can do this - and that (surprisingly) many different animals use similar but different ones!
This is why some animals can see colors better than others. Some animals just use 1 or 2 proteins, but we use 3 - the first of which is the same as the 2 protein animals use, and the other two of which are very similar to each other, and very similar to the second protein the 2 protein animals use.
THIS IS BECAUSE THE THREE PROTEIN FORM IS A MUTATION OF THE TWO PROTEIN FORM.
Furthermore there are some people who are alive today who use FOUR proteins - having evolved two variants of one of the standard three...
>>> The rise of the move to ID came as a result of such calculations along with the failure of other approaches. The Mystery of Life's Origin, for example, was published in 1984 as a survey of the research results up to that point
as usual the YEC and ID community has mistaken a search for a better explanation of one step as an attack on the whole process of evolution
This is why I refer to them as liars - because this one of the many things that is repeatedly pointed out to them, but they keep on doing it anyway
>>> The still unmet challenge is to show how a mindless prebiotic process would do the equivalent of "pick up the ones that are tails" when the goal is "build the first protein".
THAT IS NOT THE GOAL! There is no goal.
/Bevin
It occurs to me that maybe you really don't understand how natural selection and mutation works.
Do the following experiment with ten quarters.
Put 6 pennies to your left on the table. These are the initial variant of some gene. 6:0
Each breeds to produce another penny, so put 5 pennies on your left, and 1 penny - a new mutation - on your right. 11:1
The original 6 pennies die - so take them away. 5:1
Each of the living pennies reproduces, so put 5 more on your left, and one more on your right. 10:2
Once again, the older ones die - but the right hand pair have an adaption to live 2x longer, so 5 on the left die and none on the right 5:2
They all reproduce 10:4
The oldest ones all die 5:3
They all reproduce 10:6
The old ones die 5:5
They all reproduce 10:10
The old ones die 5:8
They all reproduce 10:16 (3+5+8)
The old ones die 5:13 (5+8)
They all reproduce 10:26 (5+8+13)
The old ones die 5:21 (8+13)
They all reproduce 10:42 (8+13+21)
etc....
In only a few generations the mutation completely takes over the pool, or at least forces the old form into some niche that the new form is not suited for.
We see it happen all the all.
If you don't understand this, then I understand your continuous misunderstandings about learning, goals, etc.
/Bevin
Bevin, what I notice most about your response is that you are still dodging.
I asked you to connect your analogies specifically to going to a protein in a prebiotic world. Even supposing RNA that "replicates" akin to the type in the recent experiment that supposedly showed continuous "replication" for the first time.
So, please take a try at it. Let's see if your analogies can be made to fit that reality. We will then see (I suspect quickly) whether they hold up or break down upon inspection.
As I said, I haven't had any difficulty understanding what you want to believe. I am claiming you cannot connect your faith to the prebiotic world in a way that doesn't break down when scrutinized.
And btw, I will take it that your answer is to affirm that Shapiro's resistance to RNA-first is due to scientific issues.
I have never had any illusions about Shapiro, nor have I ever implied that he thinks an undirected solution is impossible. Exactly the opposite. His brutal scientific frankness about RNA is important exactly because he still wants to believe that some more indirect solution is possible.
As with your unmet challenge, he also cannot do is to connect the dots in a supportable way. In other words, his faith also breaks down at the point of trying to connect the analogies to reality. As mentioned earlier, Orgel's observation about the indirect metabolism alternative (e.g. Shapiro's search for another path) was this:
"However, solutions offered by supporters of geneticist or metabolist scenarios that are dependent on “if pigs could fly” hypothetical chemistry are unlikely to help."
Sigh: just because we can't explain the details of something doesn't mean it can't happen.
Google "self-replicating lipid vesicles 2009"
>>> I asked you to connect your analogies specifically to going to a protein in a prebiotic world.
Perhaps this will help
http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/448/a-primer-in-abiogenesis---the-origin...
Start about the sentence
"The pri-biotic environment contained many simple fatty acids. Under a range of Ph they spontaneously form stable vesicles and they are permeable to small organic molecules meaning no complex proteins are required to get stuff in. "
No-one claims to have worked out all the details. This doesn't mean there are no possible paths - it means we are facing a maze of possibilities, and many of them might be successful. Indeed there are strong indications that several of them succeeded.
Shapiro, for one, thinks he can see an outline of how it could have happened. In the above you see a proposal "Recent experiments have shown that some of these are capable of spontaneous polymerization, such as phosphoramidate DNA. Monomers will base pair with a single stranded template and self litigate. They can also polymerize in solution, and spontaneously form new templates, or extend existing templates. No special sequences are required, it's just chemistry"
Now, let me ask you a question - what is the shortest length of RNA or DNA that will auto-catalyse?
/Bevin
From the page Bevin just pointed to: "Many people mix up abiogensis [sic] with evolution ..."
Hmm, who in this conversation is insisting that Darwinian evolution is undoubtedly, obviously, unquestionably available for abiogenesis?
Which of us has been insisting that they are distinct, that evidence for subsequent Darwinian evolution (e.g. fossil record, etc.) is not evidence regarding abiogenesis, and that it is necessary to justify (clearly, not with hand waving wishful thinking analogies) any claim of Darwinian evolution helping out with a tricky step of abiogenesis?
From the page Bevin just pointed to: "So this is very powerful evidence in the fact that RNA not only stores the genetic material, but it also catalyzes its own reproduction and it also is a very important enzyme in the cell too and will later on lead to protein synthesis."
This is the closest the page comes to even talking about how this process gets to proteins. "...and will later on lead to protein synthesis" [by a process they do not even describe in a hand waving way].
Nearly all of the references to "protein" on the page are merely talking about why the explanation they offer does not need to include proteins. (Implicitly, that is a way of explaining why they don't have to include any explanation for the transition to proteins. The deal with it by not dealing with it.)
So, Bevin, you are still empty handed. In fact, you are worse off. As before, you cannot yet show that Darwinian evolution would plausibly work in the direction of proteins in a prebiotic RNA world. Now, you have also lost the justification for just assuming that abiogenesis is the same as [Darwinian] evolution. You need to connect some dots, or else all you have is an appeal to have faith.
Bevin: "No-one claims to have worked out all the details. This doesn't mean there are no possible paths - it means we are facing a maze of possibilities, and many of them might be successful."
If there are "many" rather than none, pick your favorite and defend it. I'm not asking for proof. Only asking for one that plausibly shows how Darwinian evolution helps (rather than hurts) the prospects for getting proteins out of an RNA world.
Here is a hint of the problem you face. Darwinian evolution is based on favoring what reproduces and eliminating what does not reproduce.
However, if you have amino acids binding to RNA strands, that hurts their ability to replicate. An amino acid binding to a base is in the way of a complementary base binding to the same location.
This gets in the way of forming the complementary strand, which all the RNA methods of undirected replication depend upon. As with DNA now, the complement of the complementary strand then gets you back to another copy of the original. [Technically, these are reverse complements, but that level of detail is not needed here.]
The strands least likely to replicate (i.e. most likely to be eliminated by Darwinian evolutionary principles) are those with amino acids (or anything else) attaching to the bases.
If you remove the amino acid from that location in order to form the complementary strand, you have now lost the former association.
Since you don't have information based reproduction, only complementary replication, you have just lost all "knowledge" that that amino acid to RNA base connection ever existed.
Short answer: RNA replication is a dead end for getting to proteins. It doesn't provide Darwinian evolution magic for getting to proteins.
Sigh wrote>>> Hmm, who in this conversation is insisting that Darwinian evolution is undoubtedly, obviously, unquestionably available for abiogenesis?
It always amuses me watching ID'ers and YEC's wiggle on linguistics to try to win what they can't win on logic and science.
The author of this document is merely distiguishing two different applications of "mutate and select" - those before the development of the cell - abiogenesis - and after - evolution.
Sigh wrote>>> "...and will later on lead to protein synthesis" [by a process they do not even describe in a hand waving way]. ... So, Bevin, you are still empty handed.
What this page said was
Oops - oh no - he describes how this mechanism that initially did RNA making can also make proteins
So, lets see
For the record, here are a couple other observations regarding the page the Bevin recently pointed to, as well as his earlier link to the "first" experimental result of ongoing "replication".
Example #1 from the recent page:
"This is just a wonderful backup explanation and to demonstrate that even if ribozymes or other things to replicate RNA aren't in existence which would be replicasis, RNA could still make copies of itself. That being said this is somewhat slow and error-prone so a ribozyme which would make copies of RNA called a replicase, would have probably evolved fairly early."
This is a good example of the uncritical thinking that is common within this perspective. It works like this:
My theory would (sometimes admittedly) not work well without X (e.g. a replicase).
Therefore, X "would have probably evolved fairly early."
Is it shown that X "would have probably evolved fairly early"? No, that is the conclusion when reasoning backward from the needs of the theory, assuming that the theory is true.
It is precisely concerning the question of whether it is likely to get specific functional sequences that the whole theory is weak. It remains standing because people who want it to be true are examining it through eyes of hope and faith, not critically.
Example #2:
Consider the significance that has been attached to the break through result of continuous "replication" of RNA strands for the "first time".
And yet, even in the article itself they acknowledge that the great, great majority of the actual replication that is being done in that experiment is due to the scientists themselves.
The scientists are providing a continuous supply of the subunits. The only action required by the full RNA strands is to bind to two subunits (i.e. half strands) and combine these into one full strand.
In other words, nearly all of the actual replication is done off line by the scientists who are synthesizing and providing replicated copies of the two parts that make up the full strand.
For the RNA World perspective, this apparently counts as big news.
The degree of dependence on the scientists is not considered any problem at all by those who believe with earnestness that those are just details to be filled in someday later.
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