A Story Illustrating Intelligent Design (ID) Theory
[UPDATE: In this post, Steve Landsburg and I take the argument to depths that only Marvel superheroes could withstand.]
I have known for quite some time that atheist critics didn’t even understand the actual position of ID theorists such as William Dembski, but (per Tom Woods’ suggestion that I check it out) I am sad to say that even Edward Feser seems to have deployed his considerable mental faculties into analyzing away Dembski’s obvious (to me) position.
In the present blog post, I’m not going to defend ID theory per se; I’m merely going to state what it is, since that seems to threaten/anger so many people that they refuse to deal with it on its own terms. It’s really quite straightforward. But first, to get us warmed up, a simple story:
William and Richard are on a ship that sinks at sea, and they wash up on an tropical island. As they explore, they stumble upon a large field with small bushes. The bushes are arranged in such a way that they look like letters, spelling, “STAY AWAY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.” The following conversation ensues:
WILLIAM: Whoa, we should turn around. We don’t have any weapons.
RICHARD: What are you talking about? I haven’t seen any gorilla droppings or seen any poisonous snakes. What do we need weapons for?
WILLIAM: You’re kidding, right?
RICHARD: No.
WILLIAM: The bushes, the warning, I don’t want to meet whoever planted them.
RICHARD: What are you talking about?
WILLIAM: Someone obviously planted those bushes. And he wants us to stay out. He’s obviously been here a while so he might have prepared weapons.
RICHARD: I’m sorry…did you see anyone planting bushes? As far as I know, we’re the only humans on this island. Did you see a Snickers wrapper or any other evidence of humans?
WILLIAM: You’re kidding, right?
RICHARD: No.
WILLIAM: Well, I mean, the bushes.
RICHARD: Right. Bushes occur in nature. There are a whole bunch of trees in the jungle, too. I didn’t see the trees freak you out. Why are you so terrified of bushes?
WILLIAM: I, I mean, I really don’t know what to say. How can you not see what I’m talking about? The pattern in the bushes clearly shows somebody else is here–or at least, was here.
RICHARD: Hang on a second. Are you telling me that if we go and look at those bushes under a microscope, we’re going to see something that a biologist can’t explain? Is there anything special about those bushes, that wouldn’t be true of any other bush?
WILLIAM: Well, no, it’s not the bushes themselves or their internal operations, I’m just saying it’s the way they’re arranged–
RICHARD: Yes let’s talk about that. How should they have been arranged? What pattern should their location have had, such that you would not now be afraid to keep walking in that direction?
WILLIAM: Uh, if they didn’t spell out a warning, for starters.
RICHARD: And now we see the vagueness of your position. I would have thought you could be a little more specific, if we’re supposed to alter our plans on the basis of your superstitious panic attacks.
WILLIAM: You’re kidding, right?
RICHARD: No.
WILLIAM: OK, let me try it like this. What are the chances that the bushes just so happened to be growing in that pattern?
RICHARD: OK that’s a great question, but I do want to point out just how much ground you’ve already conceded. You’ve already granted that there is no other human on the island necessary to explain anything about the bushes or the environment in which they’re growing. You’ve been reduced to a desperate and ill-defined question about probability over initial conditions. How the heck can we even answer such a question? Your tone of voice makes it sound as if you know the answer is vanishingly small, and yet you don’t know that at all. For all you know, there could have been depressions in the ground, in the shape of letters, and that explains why the seeds originally settled there. I can explain everything just by referring to wind and gravity. Or do you also think wind is evidence of a scary person up over the hill? Maybe when that scary person sneezes, that’s what causes wind? My gosh, I thought people stopped reasoning like you back in the Middle Ages.
WILLIAM: You’re kidding, right?
RICHARD: No.
WILLIAM: Um, OK, let’s suppose we go and investigate, and do find that the ground is depressed in the shape of the letters.
RICHARD: I like it! Actually bringing some empiricism into this discussion. None of this reasoning because of your intuitions nonsense.
WILLIAM: But let me finish. Let’s say we go ahead and do that. Still, that would just mean the guy living on this island used a shovel or something to dig out the ground in that pattern. You’ve just pushed the argument back one step.
RICHARD: You’re kidding, right?
WILLIAM: No.
RICHARD: That is the most desperate, anti-scientific Hail Mary pass I’ve ever seen. Of course science can never give the full story, start to finish. But I just solved your initial “this makes no sense, waaaaaah, I have to invoke another human” concern, and instead of admitting defeat like a man, you shamelessly move on to some other objection. First you thought there had to be a guy planting trees, then when I blew up that story with simple biology and physics, you shifted the argument and said there had to be a guy digging holes with a shovel. What’s the point of even continuing this discussion, if you’re going to pull stunts like that?
WILLIAM: I agree, there is no point in continuing this discussion.
RICHARD: And one last thing: Even on your own terms, your position is goofy. Look, you kept saying there was a man or a guy on the island. But it could have been a woman. Or it could have been an intelligent alien who knows English. See what I’m saying? You obviously had this weird psychological need to believe that there was another man on this island, and you grabbed at any old argument to “prove” it, even though the argument you grabbed couldn’t possibly have served the end you really wanted.
WILLIAM: Well, right, sure, the fact that the bushes spelled out a warning just meant there had been an intelligence. I had to bring in stuff that I knew beforehand, in order to speculate on the identity of the intelligence.
RICHARD: Check and mate. You just smuggled in your prior beliefs through an ever shifting and imprecise “argument,” which failed on its own terms and is anyway completely eliminated through Occam’s Razor. Now I’m walking up over that hill.
Moments later, William hears a scream ring out from beyond the hill. He turns and runs in the other direction.
Back to the actual debate over ID: Michael Behe–the guy who (in)famously said that the bacterial flagellum exhibited too much design to have arisen through unguided evolution in the modern neo-Darwinian sense–does not have a problem with the idea that all of today’s cells share a common ancestor. Look, as this website even adds at the end of the discussion:
[QUOTE FROM BEHE]: In summary, as biochemists have begun to examine apparently simple structures like cilia and flagella, they have discovered staggering complexity, with dozens or even hundreds of precisely tailored parts. It is very likely that many of the parts we have not considered here are required for any cilium to function in a cell. As the number of required parts increases, the difficulty of gradually putting the system together skyrockets, and the likelihood of indirect scenarios plummets. Darwin looks more and more forlorn. New research on the roles of the auxiliary proteins cannot simplify the irreducibly complex syetem The intransigence of the problem cannot be alleviated; it will only get worse. Darwinian theory has given no explanation for the cilium or flagellum. The overwhelming complexity of the swimming systems push us to think it may never give an explanation. (p. 73)
[WEBSITE DISCUSSION]: Behe concludes that such irreducibly complex systems were ultimately the result of intelligent design. (It should be pointed out that Behe has no objections to the concept of universal common ancestry. His objections to evolution are limited to the rejection of the neo-Darwinian mechanism as a sufficient explanation for the origin of all biological systems.)
So yes, Behe is fine with the proposition that if we had a camera and a time machine, we could go observe the first cell on earth as it reproduced and yielded offspring. There would be nothing magical in these operations; they would obey the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. The cells would further divide and so on, and then over billions of years there would be mutations and the environment would favor some of the mutants over their kin, such that natural selection over time would yield the bacterial flagellum and the human nervous system.
Yet Behe’s point is that when you look at what this process spits out at the end, you can’t deny that a guiding intelligence must be involved somehow. Now where William Dembski comes in, is that he tries to give operational meaning to terms like “specified complexity,” so that we can objectively study the types of phenomena that are obvious in my story above (about the arrangement of bushes), but apparently not so obvious when it comes to the structure of cells.
UPDATE: In my condensed statement of Behe’s position, I might be confusing him with Dembski a bit. I think it’s more accurate to say that Behe thinks that there could have been a single cell from which all life is descended, but that it was a “supercell” that contained all of the information (for bacterial flagella, the human eye, etc.) already coded inside it, which is just waiting for the right environmental triggers to deploy.
In contrast, I think Dembski with his “no free lunch” arguments is taking an even weaker position, and concedes that the “specified complexity” in today’s cells could have “entered” into organic molecules from the outside environment over time, a la the process of mutation and natural selection. But, Dembski claims, this is just pushing the problem back one step–it means the information containing the designs of the bacterial flagella, human eye, etc. were contained in the environmental landscape, so the Darwinian explanation hasn’t really solved the informational problem.
Now I know that when a believer in the modern neo-Darwinist position hears that, he or she will guffaw. But that was one of the points in my original story: Notice how William in the story is perfectly right in saying Richard has merely pushed the problem back a step, by supposing that there were indentations in the ground such that the wind and gravity could have “mindlessly” spelled out the message with the bushes. That’s what (I think) Dembski is trying to say, when neo-Darwinians say, “The complex structures we see in today’s cells just arose over time because the environment conferred differential fitness on random mutations.”
Replace “bushes in the shapes of letters” with “piece of meat following me with sounds coming out of its orifice”.
😀
you can inflation even when prices are falling, you can have a recession even when the economy is expanding and creationism is science. now just need to show that gold is not down 20% this year.
At least “Richard” in my story used his Shift key, Joe.
I guess the logic of the comparison is sound, but come on, is the fact that “bacteria are really complicated” really the same thing as bushes that spell out go away? Wouldn’t a better analogy be that if we looked under a microscope, the cells of bacteria would be structured to spell out “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me?”
I’m generally very sympathetic to religion and religious arguments (I personally believe in a creative force that caused the universe to come into existence). but this particular argument strikes me as kind of weak.
As a side note, “what are the odds of this being random” arguments seem to get weaker and weaker as we discover more and more about the size of the universe. Given how many galaxies and stars and planets exist, is it really THAT crazy to think that one randomly produced conditions hospitable to life which through thousands of years of finely tuned evolution would someday culminate in Beethoven’s ninth symphony? To put it another way, isn’t it possible that at some point in the history of Earth at some particular location, bushes did in fact grow in such a way as to resemble a message of “GO AWAY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED” in some particular language?
Technically, no; But people question the validity of many claims that are FAR more probable than that. Apparently, there is one standard for science and another for every day life.
At any rate, I abandoned the “Blind Watchmaker” argument a long time ago in favor of the argument from Free Will, because it can always be said “there’s still a chance a watch can be created that way”, which will always be technically true.
>>>“there’s still a chance a watch can be created that way”
And there’s still a chance that one day you might put a kettle on a lit stove and the water will turn to ice inside the kettle instead of start boiling.
That, of course, is why simple considerations of probability do NOT trump the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
The reason your argument is irrelevant is that it can be mathematically shown that there are many, many more ways of throwing together metal and glass that result in just as many piles of junk rather than a watch. The watch is the extremely low-probability arrangement of parts; the many piles of junk are the high-probability arrangements. Since I believe in the 2nd law of thermodynamics, I accept that, over time, the watch — all by itself — will slowly move from its state of low-probability (a functional watch), to a state of higher probability (a non-functional watch), to a state of even higher probability (a completely oxidized, decomposed, pile of metal and glass).
I of course adhere to the 2nd law, so I would NEVER believe that a completely oxidized, decomposed, pile of metal and glass could — on its own — move to states of lower probability and eventually become a functional watch. Never.
To believe THAT, I would have to believe in a category of phenomenon called a “mathematical miracle.” That’s something I reject, because that sort of miracle — a miracle in a context that disallows miracles — is illogical and absurd.
That, of course, says nothing about other kinds of miracles — non-mathematical kinds.
some wonderful videos debunking of the theory of creationism, er, intelligent design.
Here’s a video highlighting the famous ID case that happened about ten years or so. What’s especially amusing is how the Discovery Institute edited their so-called science text book by simply changing the terms Creator or Creationism to intelligent designer and design.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epLhaGGjfRw
Here’s a video debunking ID’s favorite claim that evolution somehow violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNG6gYGYLBs
Here’s a debunking of creationists other favorite claim, the ‘fine tuning argument.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt-UIfkcgPY
As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, Intelligent Design is simply the philosophy of ignorance.
>>>Given how many galaxies and stars and planets exist, is it really THAT crazy to think that one randomly produced conditions hospitable to life which through thousands of years of finely tuned evolution would someday culminate in Beethoven’s ninth symphony?
Yes, it’s crazy, naive, mathematically incorrect . . . and, by the way, insulting to Beethoven.
I love the universe you guys mentally inhabit. You actually believe that if the universe were big enough, and you had enough lit stoves shoved in every part of it, with enough water-filled kettles on top, and if you could spend enough time inspecting every stove and every kettle, that eventually you would find at least one kettle with a flame underneath it that never came to a boil, but instead, froze solid on top of the stove and became MORE frozen the higher flame was (the law governing heat flow from the flame, through the metal, to the water, is a statistical one, after all).
Sounds crazy to me. The odds of even a “big” universe with “lots” of time forming one simple functional self-replicating cell are even smaller than the odds of finding a frozen kettle atop a lit stove.
If you don’t believe in the latter, then you have even less cause to believe in the former. On the other hand, if you DO believe in the latter, then you had better show how and why the 2nd law of thermodynamics — which is assumed to apply at all times, everywhere — should stop working on just that one kettle. If the 2nd law doesn’t stop working for that kettle, then it sure won’t stop working for the elements supposedly coming together randomly to form a new functional whole like a cell.
But go right ahead and believe in mathematical miracles if you wish. Just because reason, logic, and common sense are against it doesn’t mean the law is.
“Given how many galaxies and stars and planets exist”
There’s a rather large amount of factors that had to be JUST SO in order for there to even BE galaxies and stars and planets, instead of a mess of elementary particles. (Or just, you know, nothing.)
When IDers are looking for the workings of the designer in everything, is it a surprise they constantly find it? Isn’t a snowflake evidence of design? I mean it’s so elegant, no two are alike, clearly designed by a creator.
And when we ask the science minded IDers who this designer might possibly be, we of course get the answer. The god of the bible. Just another thinly veiled attempt to smuggle in creationism.
Bob, instead of trying to rationalize the silly idea of a super being creator like the one in the bible, why not just say you believe in magic and be done with it. It’s better than trying to justify with reason and logic why you believe such absurd things that defy logic and reason. You believe in the supernatural because it makes you feel good. Done. conversation over. No need to justify it because it can’t really be refuted. Sure beats trying to justify creationism and portray it as scientific and reason based. Might as well try and prove the existence of Santa Claus. At least he’s spotted every year and doesn’t have a track record of genocide.
Billions and Billions of Demons by Richard Lewontin
http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20files/Lewontin_Review.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=TZH2nHEPSjYC&lpg=PA346&dq=%22there%20is%20nothing%20in%20marx%20lenin%20or%20mao%22&pg=PA346#v=onepage&q=%22there%20is%20nothing%20in%20marx%20lenin%20or%20mao%22&f=false
Methinks Richard Lewontin had his head stuck too far up his butt.
>>>When IDers are looking for the workings of the designer in everything, is it a surprise they constantly find it?
When reductive materialists are looking for smaller and smaller particles or material “causes” for the workings of everything, is it a surprise they constantly find them?
>>>Isn’t a snowflake evidence of design?
No. The shape of elegant snowflakes can be predicted in advance of their formation based solely on the properties of water molecules and thermodynamic considerations. All you need are the starting conditions at t = 0, the general laws in place at t = 0, and you can predict what will happen at t = n. Same thing can be said about crystal formations (salt, sugar, etc.).
Completely different is the case of a Chopin Etude for piano. You can study the chemical structure of ink all you want; you can investigate the chemical properties of paper till you know everything about it; and you can discover everything about the interactions of ink on paper. Guess what? You still won’t have ANY useful knowledge as to how or why one specific kind of ink-dot got sequenced before or after some other specific ink-dot on the paper — because knowledge of the chemistry of ink-dots and the chemistry of paper tell you nothing about SEQUENCES of ink dots on paper. That ink MUST form a certain kind of bond when it meets paper is a non-design issue; the causes lie in the physical properties of ink and paper. But that an ink-dot we semantically call “A-flat” appears sequentially after another ink-dot we semantically name “D-flat” — and that the sequence in our minds is intelligible as something we call “music” — is something that can only be derived by studying the SEMANTIC aspects of these ink dots on paper (i.e., music composition), and not by studying the chemical properties of ink-dots and paper.
That’s why composers study music composition and not chemistry. Chemistry won’t help them.
Same with biology, especially the 4-symbol code that exists in the genome, and is simultaneously known by something outside the genome called the ribosome. You cannot understand why one symbol appears before or after another symbol in a code by studying the physical characteristics of the medium (ink, paper, nucleotides, ribose) used to instantiate the code.
Studying the properties of air and sound waves won’t tell you anything about why three arbitrary sounds like short beeps — dit dit dit — are mapped to another arbitrary symbol that looks like this — S — in the mind or memory bank of the person or thing receiving the short beeps and tasked with decoding them. Yes, the “dits” require air in order to be transmitted; but the point is, there’s nothing about the physical properties of air that determine in advance that the squiggle “S” must be represented by three beeps. That three beeps correspond to “S” was an arbitrary, linguistic convention, not a physical property. And when the decoder translates the three beeps into an “S”, he is not responding to something called “physical law” but is instead following something called a “conventional rule.” “Laws” and “rules” are utterly different things.
This all applies to the genetic code. The code is not the chemistry of the bases, or the chemistry of ribose sugar. Those are the media in which the code is instantiated (like ink and paper). The code is the SEQUENCE of the bases along the ribose helix, and there’s nothing about the chemistry of nucleotides or the chemistry of ribose that demands any particular kind of sequence.
So . . . you have to explain SEQUENCE in the genetic code, and unfortunately for your materialism and your Darwinism, chance plus natural selection over long periods cannot explain it.
>>>the god of the bible. Just another thinly veiled attempt to smuggle in creationism.
ID fully accepts the possibility that Martians (or Venusians if you prefer) designed the genetic code. Richard Dawkins accepts it (he admitted so on Ben Stein’s documentary, “Expelled”), and he never tires of bragging to everyone how much of an atheist he is. He doesn’t object to the idea of intelligent design, per se; he objects to a non-material creator (himself uncreated) as the starting point. That’s a completely different argument.
>>>Bob, instead of trying to rationalize the silly idea of a super being creator like the one in the bible, why not just say you believe in magic and be done with it.
Because there are different kinds of magic that different kinds of people believe in. You, for example, apparently believe in something called “mathematical miracles,” a category I completely reject.
>>> It’s better than trying to justify with reason and logic why you believe such absurd things that defy logic and reason.
Indeed. The belief that inanimate matter, over long periods of time, with nothing but chance and its own determined physical properties, could DEFY the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which mandates that physical arrangements of things ALWAYS move from conditions of “lower probability” (e.g., a nice straight brick wall) to conditions of “higher probability” (e.g., any one of a trillion configurations of piles of rubble) over time . . . and that this movement FROM lower probability TO higher probability IS, in fact, what we mean we say, “Time flows only in one direction” — that is absurd, as well as defying reason, logic, and, by the way, experience. You could look at it conversely, too: if you accept that time only flows in one direction, then you also have to accept that physical matter and energy, when left on their own with no purposeful intelligent guidance, always move from configurations of higher probability to configurations of lower probability.
>>>You believe in the supernatural because it makes you feel good.
I believe in the supernatural and it makes me feel absolutely terrified. But, irrespective of how I feel, that certain aspects of the universe like the genetic code (and a number of others, by the way) can only be explained rationally by reference to a purposeful intelligence appears to me to be almost self-evidently true.
>>>No need to justify it because it can’t really be refuted.
Sure it can, in the Popperian sense of being falsifiable. Just show a plausible chemical evolution pathway to the first gene — the first functional bit of DNA, relying ONLY on materialist assumptions.
Once more: that would be like trying to show how a Chopin Etude composed itself, just by reference to the chemical properties of ink and paper, and without the goal-directed causation of an intelligence named Chopin. Good luck.
>>>and doesn’t have a track record of genocide.
But Darwin sure does! Nazi ideologists proudly announced that the essence of Naziism was “applied biology,” by which they meant the Darwinian hypothesis of “survival of the fittest.”
“That’s why composers study music composition and not chemistry. Chemistry won’t help them.”
With Boulez it might have been a better idea.
>>>With Boulez it might have been a better idea.
Wait. I thought what Boulez did *was* chemistry!
You mean, that was supposed to be *music*?
You can’t maintain it was intelligently designed.
>>>You can’t maintain it was intelligently designed.
Actually, yes we can. Just as in Austrian economics, “rational” does not equate with “correct”, in ID, “intelligent design” does not equate with “good.”
Splatters of paint on canvas might have come about by chance, or they might have come about intentionally by an intelligent designer called “Jackson Pollock.” “Intelligent” doesn’t equate to “good”, and “designer” doesn’t equate to “talented.”
However, paint dots that form a pattern that closely resembles Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer could never emerge by chance, and could only have come about by intentional application of dots for the purpose of representing some other pattern that we already hold in our minds.
You need to rent a sense of humor.
Actually it was relentlessly designed of course, as was all serial music. That’s why people can talk for longer than the music lasts on how it works, and all the reverse triple inverted canons in it, but can’t hum a bar.
>>>You need to rent a sense of humor.
My friend, I assure you my personality credit card is maxed out on mirth and good cheer. Perhaps you’re not sensitive enough.
>>>Actually it was relentlessly designed of course,
Concur. The point is, it need not have been to get a very similar result. Pollock could have lovingly placed every drop and splotch with intention . . . or he could have splashed drops on the canvas by riffling the bristles of his brush. The results would have been very similar.
>>>as was all serial music.
True. Same argument applies to Schoenberg as applies to Pollock
>>>That’s why people can talk for longer than the music lasts on how it works, and all the reverse triple inverted canons in it, but can’t hum a bar.
That’s also why Ned Rorem eventually turned tail, dismissing it as all as mere “augenmusick” and claimed he always hated it anyway.
The best quote is from Glass, who talked about “these maniacs, these creeps …. creepy crazy music” He was referring specifically to Boulez and his acolytes.
If you like Rorem you might like Virgil Thomson, who never ever was remotely a serialist.
But I kinda like Pollock! More than Warhol anyway.
“ID fully accepts the possibility that Martians (or Venusians if you prefer) designed the genetic code. Richard Dawkins accepts it (he admitted so on Ben Stein’s documentary, “Expelled”), and he never tires of bragging to everyone how much of an atheist he is.”
The ID argument itself might do that, but rarely do those who subscribe to it concede that.
The reality is, ID is used all across the “scientific” community to smuggle in preconceived notions of a supernatural creator, regardless of whether a supernatural creator is necessary as per ID. That was the point being made.
“He doesn’t object to the idea of intelligent design, per se; he objects to a non-material creator (himself uncreated) as the starting point. That’s a completely different argument.”
It really isn’t, in practice. You’re the first I’ve ever seen to frame it in that manner. Most will frame it as “god versus science”.
“Because there are different kinds of magic that different kinds of people believe in.”
The whole point of “believing in magic” is that you believe in something impossible, illogical, and irrational. There aren’t really different “kinds” of magic, but rather that belief in magic takes different “forms”. Whether it’s self-sustained levitation or virgin births, its still irrational.
“Indeed. The belief that inanimate matter, over long periods of time, with nothing but chance and its own determined physical properties, could DEFY the 2nd law of thermodynamics”
Except its not defying the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The second law merely states that the overall level of entropy in a closed system must either increase or remain constant over time. And the only truely “closed system” in the universe is the entire universe itself (which, by the way, precludes a godlike figure outside the system from influencing it).
So the overall entropy of some subsystem of the universe can decline, stay constant, or decrease, as long as the sum of all entropy in the entire universe increases or remains constant.
“You could look at it conversely, too: if you accept that time only flows in one direction, then you also have to accept that physical matter and energy, when left on their own with no purposeful intelligent guidance, always move from configurations of higher probability to configurations of lower probability.”
First of all, it’s the other way around; configurations go from low probability to high probability. Secondly, they do so as time approaches infinity.
What you say is like making the following statement:
The Law of Large Numbers states that all the mean of measured values in a number of trials must always and at all times equal the expected value of the experiment.
in place of the actual Law, which states:
The Law of Large Numbers states that, as the number of trials increases, the mean of the measured values approaches the expected value of the trials.
The reality is, entropy is the expected result over time, but not always the actual, measured result of some specific state.
“I believe in the supernatural and it makes me feel absolutely terrified. But, irrespective of how I feel, that certain aspects of the universe like the genetic code (and a number of others, by the way) can only be explained rationally by reference to a purposeful intelligence appears to me to be almost self-evidently true.”
It can appear to you to be self-evident but that’s only the result of wilfull denial. It is by definition not rational to appeal to that which is irrational, sorry.
If you would like to make the case for ID by a rationally-defined creator, go for it, but any reference to gods or magic by definition makes your position irrational. So continue believing in the “supernatural” if you wish, but please avoid, if you aren’t doing so already, smuggling that word into debates where reality, facts, and truth are involved. Unless you’re making statements like “I don’t have the slightest clue of what could be supernatural because by definition it’s completely and utterly unknowable and could never affect me in any way”.
“Once more: that would be like trying to show how a Chopin Etude composed itself, just by reference to the chemical properties of ink and paper, and without the goal-directed causation of an intelligence named Chopin.”
No, actually, it wouldn’t.
First, you’re smuggling in the requirement of an intelligence by reference to the composure of music. Music (and the composure of it) by definition requires a conscious mind to give it meaning. It doesn’t require a conscious mind for random arrangements to emerge, only a mind to identify them as patterns or ascribe them meaning.
Second, it would be like trying to show how an arrangement of ink blots arrived randomly to any particular arrangement on a piece of paper by reference to everything in the universe that could possibly exist. Referencing only the properties of ink and paper excludes from discussion the possibility that we’re trying to examine; that of the development of the ink and paper in the first place, and the instrument to randomly arrange them.
The idea that such a thing could happen through pure chance, however unlikely, is not logically impossible. Because it’s not logically impossible, I’ve sufficiently falsified the claim that there must be a logically impossible cause. Do I need to show how exactly it might come about? Of course not. I merely need to observe that it could happen to debunk claims about the necessary “existence” of a godlike being that is capable of ignoring laws of rationality, physics, consistency, and with all manner of other absurd features.
“But Darwin sure does! Nazi ideologists”
Found your problem. Darwin isn’t “Nazi ideologists”, and what they said about his work is irrelevant.
>>>The ID argument itself might do that, but rarely do those who subscribe to it concede that.
The reality is, ID is used all across the “scientific” community to smuggle in preconceived notions of a supernatural creator, regardless of whether a supernatural creator is necessary as per ID. That was the point being made.
Ah, then your beef is not with ID theory, per se, but with specific ID advocates who believe that the original source of biological sequential information was Mind — literally, a Logos — which itself was not the product of still earlier biological or physical sequencing. That’s quite different, and is, in fact, a metaphysical issue.
>>>It really isn’t, in practice. You’re the first I’ve ever seen to frame it in that manner. Most will frame it as “god versus science”.
Actually, it is, in practice. And most ID advocates (Phil Johnson, Bill Dembski, Steve Meyer, etc.) are careful to distinguish their personal religious beliefs from the purely logical/philosophical implication of a “designing intelligence.” David Berlinski clearly sympathizes with ID advocates, yet is a declared agnostic. He’s also written a very engaging book criticizing atheism, “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.” Highly recommended.
Sir Fred Hoyle was an atheist, and not only rejected Darwinism and abiogenesis, but claimed that stars — inanimate objects — were intentionally designed “machines” for the purpose of creating stellar carbon (necessary for life). The nuclear resonance process by which carbon is manufactured in the interior of stars is so unlikely, that he couldn’t accept it as chance.
Hubert Yockey is an atheist, but rejects the chance hypothesis completely as being indistinguishable from an acceptance of miracle or magic. The difference is that Yockey claims that scientific questioning must stop, by definition, at the question of where the first biological sequencing information came from. We can speculate philosophically, religiously, etc., but, in his view, science has nothing to add to the issue.
Nothing else in physics or chemistry remotely resembles the sequential coded chemistry system in biology. Codes are obviously and always products of intentional correspondences between sets of symbols in two alphabets. The symbols themselves, and their media in which they are instantiated, might or might not be products of chance; but the CODE — the set of mappings or correspondences between the two sets of symbols — are always products of intention, and therefore evidence of intelligence.
The problem is that you usually close the book or shut off the video before the ID advocate in question gets to the part where he says, “I might personally believe a supernatural intelligence did it, but it’s not logically entailed by ID theory.”
>>>The whole point of “believing in magic” is that you believe in something impossible, illogical, and irrational. There aren’t really different “kinds” of magic, but rather that belief in magic takes different “forms”.
I dispute your casual definition of “magic,” but in any case, you’ve conceded my point. To say “there are different kinds of magic” is merely a different rhetorical way of stating “magic takes different forms.” A difference without a distinction.
Re the 2nd Law:
I did state it correctly elsewhere in its statistical-mechanical form. Apologies for reversing it in this post! True, entropy means: LOW probability (a nice vertical brick wall, which is an arrangement for molecules to take that has very low probability) toward HIGH probability (the brick and mortar crumble into one of trillions of arrangements of piles of rubble). And this movement from low-to-high is precisely what we mean by “time’s arrow.”
However, you’re under a serious misunderstanding of the 2nd Law. The 2nd law does not state that if you widen the system, that, ergo anything you want to happen can, in principle, happen. It’s also true that when you widen the system from a closed one to a more open one, you let in additional influences that disrupt any constructive, low-probability arrangements that might have been achieved in the original smaller closed system. See the papers on the 2nd law by mathematician Granville Sewall, University of Texas, El Paso.
>>>The reality is, entropy is the expected result over time, but not always the actual, measured result of some specific state.
True, but in your hands and in those of other materialists, it becomes an excuse to nonchalantly accept mathematical miracles without further thought (“Sure, it was unexpected, but it’s not a non-zero possibility!”). It also leads materialists to easily accept the “Gambler’s Fallacy”: Sure, I’ve rolled 3s and 4s 1,000 times, but if I keep rolling, my chances of getting double sixes increase!” Wrong, of course, Each roll is independent from the next, so the chances of rolling a desired value are exactly what they were before any rolls were made. It’s also not the way human beings actually go about their business in life, an important consideration. What you’re saying is that if you walked in on a 3rd-grade class watching a film of a house being torn apart by a tornado, you would have to check which direction the film projector was running to make sure you were watching an event that was moving forward in time, rather than backward. In your world, apparently, “the actual result as opposed to the expected one” could completely allow for tornadoes that actually assembled fully functional houses — whose to say? Only if you first say the projector turning in a direction defined as “forward” would you believe that in THIS particular instance, the actual result conformed to the expected one.
Again, you live in a universe in which anything can happen — a magical one — because almost nothing can be claimed to have a zero probability of occurring.
>>>It is by definition not rational to appeal to that which is irrational, sorry.
Sorry, but an entire science of “forensics” is built around the idea that intelligent actors called criminals leave telltale marks that differ from those events called “pure dumb accidents.” We’re already acquainted with the idea of intelligent, goal-directed action through introspection. The idea that this must, ergo, ONLY apply to human actors is a narrow-minded assumption on your part. That humans sent out into space a craft with a line-etching of a man, a woman, a schematic of Earth’s location relative to the sun, etc., is an indication that other people — those at SETI — believe that a non-human intelligence would grasp the meaning of curved lines, straight lines, prime numbers, etc., in the same way as humans. There’s nothing irrational about that.
The actual method scientists use, and have used throughout history, to judge scientific validity is not, actually, Popper’s notion of falsifiability, though that’s an important contribution to the debate. The actual method used by Newton and many others is called “Inference to the Best Explanation.” Since we’re already acquainted with intelligent action as a cause — and a cause that completely overrides both determinism and chance — there’s nothing irrational in assuming that intelligence is NOT, by necessity, limited to humans only.
>>>Because it’s not logically impossible, I’ve sufficiently falsified the claim that there must be a logically impossible cause.
Well, no you haven’t. As you would put it, “not in practice.” As explained above, the actual method used to judge theories is “Inference to the best explanation,” and not simple logical falsifiability. It might not be logically impossible for a kettle of water to freeze on top of a lit stove, and get colder as the flame got higher, but — sorry — no one believes it (except you, perhaps).
Do us all a favor, OK? Never apply for a job in security at a casino. Someone would employ “design” at the roulette table — a procedure known as “cheating” — and beat the house for 90 days consecutively. And instead of arresting him, you’d tell your employers, “It’s not logically impossible for him to have achieved those results through honest gambling, so I’ve just falsified your accusation that the customer must be employing design and cheating!” That’s the color of YOUR sky on YOUR world, but not in everyone else’s.
Re music:
I see you’re an epistemological relativist, too, bordering on solipsism. In your view, a Beethoven symphony might sound like random noise to some other intelligence, and random, white noise, generated by a white noise generator, might sound like a Beethoven symphony. That, of course, is a subjective, unprovable assertion on your part; and, in any case, it undercuts the idea that things like “rational order”, “sequence,” could have objectivity and be grasped and understood in principle by any kind of mind, anywhere. If true, then it would apply to mathematical truths, too: maybe when we see a sequence of prime numbers, some other kind of mind sees nothing at all, or sees something completely different. That would mean that no communication is possible outside of human-to-human, since we assume all have the same “form” of consciousness.
I reject the notion, but in any case, it’s a subjective assertion on your part.
>>>Darwin isn’t “Nazi ideologists”, and what they said about his work is irrelevant
Talk about denial (as well as ignorance of history). Eugenics was the very reason Thomas Huxley — “Darwin’s Bulldog” — so strongly advocated the theory in the first place. The purpose of Darwinism was 1) to explain speciation and, by implication, the origin of life, without reference to an intelligent creator, for the very purpose of 2) manipulating life for our advantage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWxZm8WjlI8
Magic is exactly what the Genesis1 story is about. The ELOHIM (translated as “God”) simply say “Let there be” and VOILA! there it is. According to the WIKIPEDIA, “Many consider that the word “Abracadabra” is actually a Hebrew phrase meaning “I create (A’bra) what (ca) I speak (dab’ra).”
I don’t require antecedence and reductionism to acknowledge a metaphysical basis for the universe. Both of these methods either lead to brute facts, or the infinite dissection of matter, in the vain hope that one day materialism will yield the ultimate truth. What else could the ultimate truth present us with but brute facts, rendering further reductionism pointless?
If such answers exist, then they must be in abundance here and now.
go read “the selfish gene”. then talk about evolution.
migspalexpl wrote:
go read “the selfish gene”. then talk about evolution.
Not sure if you’re directing that to me or another commenter. If me, yes I’ve read it; the “Richard” in my story is Richard Dawkins.
Not sure how long you’ve been reading Free Advice, but I’ve said in the past that I was a “devout atheist” in college. I had read a lot on evolutionary theory, went to a conference on it (vs ID) at Notre Dame, etc. I daresay I could have made the case for the standard neo-Darwinian position better than most amateurs (like me) dabbling in the topic.
Who’s the William?
Btw the Richard is pretty good. Especially the My gosh. I can hear Dawkins’s voice in my head in that sentence.
Dembski, of course!
Greetings, Professor Murphy!
I’ve been a student of Intelligent Design for a number of years now, and I wanted to suggest further sources of information for you (in case you might not know about them). I’ll assume that you already know about the Discovery Institute (http://www.discovery.org); and William Dembski’s site, Uncommon Descent (http://www.uncommondescent.com); and Stephen Meyer’s two books (“Signature in the Cell”, which makes a positive case for ID and is not just a critique of the flaws in Darwinism, and “Darwin’s Doubt”, which describes the Burgess Shale and other sites of the Cambrian Explosion, and why they discredit the Darwinian assumption of slow, incremental change, with lots of intermediaries). You might already know about David Berlinski’s brilliant, accessible, and very funny article from Commentary Magazine titled “On the Origins of Life” (http://www.discovery.org/a/3209).
Here are some more source materials with brief descriptions:
The modern Intelligent Design movement grew out of a symposium in 1966 at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia called “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution”. Chaired by Nobel Laureate in medicine, Sir Peter Medawar, other members included mathematicians M.P. Schutzenberger, Murray Eden (MIT), C.H. Waddington, and George Wald (Harvard). See: Paul Moorhead and Martin Kaplan (ed.), Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Monograph No. 5.
http://wildersmith.org/library.htm
This is the archive site for Dr. A. E. Wilder Smith. I’ve linked to the audio lecture archive. Listen especially to lectures in the categories called “College Lectures” and “Thinking and ‘Believing.”
“The Creation of Life: A Cybernetic Approach”
A. E. Wilder Smith
1970
[This book was instrumental in changing the mind of a staunch advocate of “predestined” chemical evolution, Dean Kenyon. After reading Wilder Smith’s book, Kenyon was so distraught that he couldn’t refute his arguments, that he began corresponding with him. The correspondence led to personal meetings, a close friendship, and eventually — to the dismay of the neo-Darwinist academic community — a complete repudiation on his part of his own previous work in abiogenesis. There are many video clips of Kenyon on YouTube that fill in the details.]
“The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories”
by Charles Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, Roger L. Olsen (forward by Dean Kenyon)
1984
“Evolution: A Theory in Crisis”
Michael Denton, MD
1985
[This was the book that caused Michael Behe to become skeptical of Darwinism.]
“Not By Chance! Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution”
Lee Spetner (Ph.D. physics)
1996
[Clear exposition of Neo-Darwinism, and why it is inconsistent with (or refuted by) the ideas of information theory, which is also very clearly explained.]
“Information Theory and Molecular Biology”
by Hubert P. Yockey (Ph.D, physics)
1992 Cambridge University Press
Highly mathematical in some parts, plain language in others, it’s a pure application of communication/information theory, as established by Claude Shannon, Henry Quastler, et al., to molecular biology. Yockey is an atheist, but he mathematically dispenses with the idea that chance — even when aided by natural selection — could have developed the correct coding sequences in DNA in the time available since the Big Bang (about 14 billions years). He also completely rejects the current popular theory of an “RNA World” in which the Earth supposedly had lots of “warm little ponds”, with just the right nucleotides waiting to be sequenced in just the ways into RNA. The odds are basically zero; you cannot simply assume away destructive cross-reactions (always working to undermine anything constructive that nature might have accomplished); and geochemists generally agree that there’s zero geological evidence of such an environment on the early Earth. So Yockey sees the “RNA World” hypothesis as a non-starter.
“Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life”
by Hubert P. Yockey (Ph.D. physics)
2005 Cambridge University Press
Also highly mathematical, and a continuation of his previous work. Especially interesting is the introduction, since Crick and Watson come in for some pretty tough criticism (basically, they stole everyone else’s work, photographs, research papers, etc.). He also points out that the original idea that the molecule of heredity — DNA — stored something called “information” in the alphabetic form of a chemical sequence, was first suggested by physicist George Gamow, who hypothesized his own code called a “diamond code.” Gamow’s code was, of course, later proven to be incorrect, but he was the only one at the time suggesting the unique idea that biology was based on sequential information stored as a code.
“The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control”
David L. Abel
http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Gene-Programming-Messaging/dp/0965798895
A pure cybernetic approach to biochemistry and genetics. Abel asks a question that Darwin supporters and chemical evolutionists never do, and which they haven’t been able to answer yet: the sequential code of nucleotides along DNA (arranged in triplets called “codons”) is eventually translated far outside the nucleus by an organelle called the ribosome, which decodes each triplet as a command to retrieve a specific amino acid. It chains the amino acids together, putting a peptide bond as “glue” between each two, until it receives a triplet codon commanding it to “stop”. Then the ribosome cuts the peptide chain, and the rest is no longer the business of the ribosome or the RNA transcript. The question is this: any “code” necessitates that both the sender of the code (DNA / RNA) and the receiver of the code tasked with decoding the linear sequential message (the ribosome) know IN ADVANCE OF ANY CODED MESSAGE BEING SENT OR RECEIVED, *what* the RULES governing the code are. For example, before you can send a message in Morse Code to someone, both you and he must have studied a book on Morse Code, so that you both know how to make the correct mappings, or correspondences, between sequences of dots and dashes and the English alphabet; and that all has to be done before you send a message and before he decodes it. So the question is: how did both DNA-RNA and the ribosome both learn the same rules for the same code?
Finally, if you haven’t been to the site dedicated to the work of Sir Fred Hoyle, I recommend it. Hoyle was not, per se, an ID advocate, but he was a fierce and consistent critic of abiogenesis and Darwinism in general. He adopted and modified a 19th century theory called “cosmic panspermia”, i.e., the idea that life came from space, “seeded” on Earth (and, presumably, elsewhere) by comets. The site was constructed by an admirer of Hoyle’s named Brig Klyce and has many good articles on the problems with neo-Darwinism and abiogenesis, even if one doesn’t buy Hoyle’s “cosmic ancestry” scenario.
http://www.panspermia.org
Debunking of the creationist ‘informational theory’ argument.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18ivdLtR7IA
Thanks for the YouTube link, Razer!
At 0:57, the computerized voice narrating the animation says —
“The ancestral molecule of RNA just behaved in a certain way for chemical reasons, and life slowly assembled around it.”
WHAT “ancestral molecule of RNA”? You mean, the one that has never been discovered, only hypostatized for the sake of fleshing out a scenario that is untestable? THAT ancestral molecule? Oh. Well, even Carl Woese, the creator of the “RNA World” hypothesis cannot tell you much about the ancestral molecule of RNA except what he imagines about it. The writer of that video apparently takes imaginings of “ancestral molecules” very seriously, but the less naive do not.
Sorry, but there is no “ancestral molecule of RNA”; there is only “mRNA” and “tRNA” and “rRNA,” and whether RNA appeared first and gave rise to DNA, or whether DNA appeared first and gave rise to RNA avoids the only real important question: how did the nucleotides become SEQUENCED? Because the sequence of nucleotides, their arbitrary grouping into triplets, and their equally arbitrary correspondence to amino acids, IS what biochemists mean by the genetic code, and random trials by chance mutations won’t explain it.
At 1:50 the narration says:
“When DNA is used to create a protein, it does not send ‘info’ to RNA or the protein compounds, it just reacts with them chemically. There is no message, just molecules in a chemical dance.”
The creator of the video is apparently ignorant of biochemistry advances since 1953.
Neither DNA nor RNA ever physically touches or chemically interacts with the amino acids. Every triplet of bases (the chemical rungs along the interior of the double helix in DNA), called a “codon”, is a 3-letter code-word that has meaning to an organelle outside of the genome called the ribosome. DNA imprints its sequences into a single-strand of mRNA (messenger RNA), which snakes out of the genome, through the nucleus wall, and into the cell body, where it wiggles its way to the ribosome. It attaches itself to the ribosome, and the ribosome proceeds to read off the triplet sequences in RNA exactly in the same way that a DAT (digital audio tape-recorder) reads a digital audio tape. The code read by the DAT recorder is a sequence of zeroes and ones in binary code called “bits” (which stands for “binary digits”), with the bits arranged in larger units, or “block codes”, usually in groups of 8-bits, each block of 8 called a “byte.” Through pre-programming, the software in the DAT converts the continuous wave-forms of sound into segregated, discrete, digital data for storage and playback. The DAT recorder does all of this automatically, but only because intelligent designers pre-programmed it convert one kind data — sound — into another kind of data — binary code sequences.
In exactly the same formal manner, the ribosome reads each group of 3 bases in RNA as a block code, and through its own pre-programming, assigns each block code — here called a “codon” instead of a “byte” — to an amino acid. The amino acids are floating around freely in the cell body. The center cores of every amino acid are identical, differing only on the branches that stick out of the side (called a “side chain”). In the cytoplasm, there are three kinds of molecules that all manage to find one another because of a “lock-and-key” system of mechanical fit. The molecules are: free-floating amino acids; transfer-RNA (tRNA); and enzymes (called “aaRS’s”). There are 20 essential amino acids; 20 special enzymes; and 20 tRNA’s. Each is unique. The unique side-chain of each amino acid fits, hand-in-glove, into one side of its own unique enzyme; the other side of that unique enzyme fits, hand-in-glove, into one side of its own unique tRNA molecule.
When you have this trio of molecules — amino acid + enzyme + tRNA — the amino acid is said to be “charged.”
Each charged amino acid is then brought to the ribosome and is made to find its correct place in the sequence of other amino acids for protein synthesis by means of a process that has nothing to do with hand-in-glove mechanical fit but by means of the linguistic device of a code:
The tail end of the charged amino acid — which would be the tail of the tRNA molecule — has a small loop on it with a sequence of 3 bases. The order, or sequence, of those three bases is the “complement” to the order, or sequence, of 3 bases along the mRNA strand which is being read by the ribosome. Since the 3 bases on mRNA are called a “codon”, the complementary 3 bases on the tail of tRNA are called an “anticodon.”
The anticodon can only pair with its correct codon along the mRNA strand within the ribosome. Once codon and anticodon recognize each other, a suite of other enzymes brings the amino acid into a groove, or site, inside the ribosome called the “P-site” (“P” for “peptidyl”). That’s where the amino acid is “held steady” until its tRNA molecule can be cleaved from it and removed from the ribosome. The process repeats itself, with each new amino acid being attached to the previous one by means of a peptide bond, until a long chain is formed — a polypeptide. Eventually, a 3-letter codon in mRNA will correspond to the instruction to STOP. The polypeptide is cut, it exits the ribosome, and then folds into a 3-D configuration, at which point it becomes a functional protein.
You’ll notice that at no time does DNA or RNA ever physically touch amino acids. DNA transcribes into mRNA; tRNA binds with its own unique enzyme on one side, and that enzyme binds with its own unique amino acid on the other. No direct physical contact. Then the entire “charged amino acid” is put into the correct sequence in the growing polypeptide by means of code-recongnition: a codon in mRNA and its anticodon in tRNA recognize each other.
It’s all very nicely explained and animated at this John Wiley site:
http://www.wiley.com/college/boyer/0470003790/structure/tRNA/trna_intro.htm
“Neither DNA nor RNA ever physically touches or chemically interacts with the amino acids”
Oh this is sneaky. Typical of the dodgy appeals to ignorance that run through ID arguments like veins in a leaf.
For each tRNA there is a unique — unique! — small molecule that links the tRNA to it’s designated amino acid.
I guess I could argue I never touched the stolen money — I wore gloves!! — but I don’t think most people would buy it. Do you listen to music with an MP3 player? HA, NO YOU USE HEADPHONES GOTCHA!! tRNA never touches the amino acid!
>>>I guess I could argue I never touched the stolen money — I wore gloves!! — but I don’t think most people would buy it.
Talk about “sneaky.” That was a nice little equivocation on the word “touched.”
In the sense in which physics and chemistry use the word “touch,” you never did touch the money if you wore gloves. Um, that’s why thieves and burglars wear gloves when they crack safes: so as not to leave fingerprints by NOT PHYSICALLY TOUCHING THE OBJECTS IN QUESTION. Duh.
And, of course, an even more important point — that the amino acid never physically interacts at all with messenger RNA, but gets placed in a certain sequence for protein-synthesis because of codon/anti-codon pairing between mRNA and tRNA — remains in denial by you.
So? DNA and RNA work by means of a linguistic device known as a “code.” What are you afraid of? What is it about the idea of a code that frightens you?
Oh, yeah. I forgot. “Codes” are not products of physical nature but always of an intelligent agent.
Anyway, like the misnamed “Razer,” you have a few years of catching up to do in basic biochemistry. I’d say about 60 years worth.
>>>I guess I could argue I never touched the stolen money — I wore gloves!!
If you insert a key into your front-door lock, your key is not touching your door.
If you insert a key into your car-ignition lock, your key is not touching your engine — neither is your hand.
To answer EF on this about “information”, the video is pointing out a fallacy many make. What is real is the molecules, and the molecules react according to the rules of chemistry. You cannot tell what can or did happen just on the basis of an information analysis of the way the molecules are arranged since it is chemistry which performs the changes. There is information here, but it is in the encodings in the DNA sequence, it is not the DNA itself. The information on a printed page is in the arrangement of the ink spots, not the ink itself. So DNA as an object follows chemical laws, and the cell has sets of chemical reactions which together perform operations which can be understood as information processing.
>>>What is real is the molecule
LOL! You’re tapping away on a keyboard in order to send a meaningful message, i.e., “What is real is the molecule”, and you’re asserting that what is real is only the physical keyboard, your hard-drive, the internet hardware infrastructure, and my physical monitor . . . not, apparently, the code-mapping between the sequence of letters you tapped and their meaning correspondence in my mind when I read them. You’re like an author who claims that ink and paper are real, but not the meaning of the words encoded in the sequence of letter-symbols. That’s apparently unreal!
Get over it. Non-material things like “codes”, “meaning,” and “sequences” are just as real as ink, paper, hard-drives, and monitors. They’re REAL but NON-MATERIAL.
Ideas are real, too, but not material. That’s why we even have such a field as “intellectual property.”
Learn this: the word “REAL” does not equate to “MATERIAL.” Heck, even Ayn Rand understood that!
>>>You cannot tell what can or did happen just on the basis of an information analysis of the way the molecules are arranged since it is chemistry which performs the changes.
You have it backwards. You cannot tell anything about the chemistry without reference to the code sequences that store and impart information which instructs the chemistry what to do.
The Central Dogma of Watson and Crick states that information flows from DNA to amino acids and protein synthesis, and never the other way around. The reason for this has nothing to do with chemistry and everything to do with the formal mathematical characteristics of codes:
When you have 2 alphabets for which you are mapping one set of symbols to another, if the two alphabets have different numbers of symbols, then you can only create a mapping (i.e., a code) if you go FROM the larger alphabet TO the smaller one, and never the other way around. It’s perfectly valid to have several symbols from the first (larger) alphabet map to a single symbol in the second (smaller) alphabet, because then you merely have redundancy, which actually makes the code less prone to error. But you cannot have one symbol in a first (smaller) alphabet correspond to several symbols in a second (larger) alphabet, because then you would have ambiguity: whenever that symbol from the smaller alphabet was received by the larger alphabet, the program (or the programmer) could never know which of several symbols ought to be the decoded symbol. Ambiguity not only weakens codes, but eventually destroys them as incorrectly decoded messages accumulate.
In the case of the genetic code, the Central Dogma states that we are always moving from the larger alphabet of nucleic acid codons — a total of 64 — to the smaller alphabet of essential amino acids — a total of 20. Obviously many of those 64 codons are redundant and correspond to the same amino acid. The reason for that is NOT chemical but mathematical.
>>>There is information here, but it is in the encodings in the DNA sequence,
Indeed. The sequencing AND the fact that such sequencing is understood by the ribosome and translated into commands to retrieve specific amino acids. A code requires two alphabets, each with its own sequencing, in which an arbitrary correspondence is made between a sequence in the first alphabet and a sequence in the second alphabet. The correspondence between the two alphabets IS the code, and the phrase “corresponds to” should be translated in your mind as the ordinary term, “means.”
Examples:
“* * *” means [corresponds to] “S” (Morse Code)
“01010011” means “S” (Binary Code)
“123” means “S” (Octal Code)
“53” means “S” (Hexadecimal Code)
“S” means “S” (HTML Code)
“GCT” means “alanine” (Genetic Code)
“GCC” means “alanine” (Genetic Code)
“GCA” means “alanine” (Genetic Code)
“GCG” means “alanine” (Genetic Code)
There’s no chemical interaction between the DNA bases and the amino acids; GCC never combines or interacts with alanine. So the big question is not why does GCC mean alanine; the big question is: why do DNA and the ribosome – in two completely different parts of the cell – both understand the same code correspondences.
>>>Now where William Dembski comes in, is that he tries to give operational meaning to terms like “specified complexity”
As per David Berlinski’s article “On the Origin of Life”, a clear way of looking at it would be like this:
You go to an art museum and you look at a Jackson Pollack painting. Try to describe it EXACTLY to a friend you meet for dinner later that evening. Can’t be done. “Well, there was a big yellow splotch in the left corner . . .” “Did you say a splotch? or a splash?” “I said a splotch! A splotch is different from a splash! Don’t you know anything about art? Anyway, it was sorta in the leftish corner, but not exactly in the corner, but more slightly to the southwest of the corner . . .”
Etc. See, you can’t really describe the painting, at least not accurately. If you wanted to accurately and precisely describe it, you’d have to bring a postcard of the painting, or some artbook reproduction, and point to it, and say, “This is what the painting looked like.”
That painting would be an example of “complexity.” To reproduce it, you need to reproduce each individual element of the original.
Totally different is when you walk into the next room of the museum and ogle an Andy Warhol soup-can poster.
When you try to describe it to your friend, you very easily tell him, “It was Campbell’s Soup, all the way down!”
That pretty much sums up the poster and describes it perfectly. That description is an example of “Specificity.”
Andrei Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin, two computer scientists working independently of each other in the 1960s, came up with the idea of “algorithmic complexity,” which is a way of characterizing how complex something is by the criterion of how easily it could be described, or summed up, in a computer algorithm. If the number of characters needed in the algorithmic step were fewer than the original number of characters being described, the latter was said to be “simple” or “non-complex.” For example:
01010101010101010101
Here’s a sequence of 20 characters. We could describe it an algorithmic step thus:
01twentytimes
The algorithmic description used 13 characters. There are probably even shorter such “strings” that would do the same job. The shortness of the string is called its “compression”.
So in Kolgmogorov-Chaitin Complexity, if a sequence of characters can be described or represented by a compressed string in an algorithm — a string that is shorter than the original string — then the original is non-complex. That’s similar to telling your dinner guest, “It’s Campbell Soup all the way down.”
But if you had a random number generator that gave you a non-reproducible sequence like
89058904723115056859
The only way to represent it, algorithmically (since the generator won’t give you the same result again) is to write out the full sequence,
89058904723115056859
You’d have to reproduce each element of the original string. This is the equivalent of having to show an actual reproduction of the Jackson Pollack painting to your friend, so there’s no way to “compress” its description verbally.
Dembski’s idea of “specified complexity”, of course, straddles these two ideas, because it’s based on the idea that the sequence being analyzed is “specified” in the sense that it corresponds, or matches, some pre-existing pattern that is meaningful to the analyzer; but it is “complex” in the sense that nothing in itself would predict, or entail, some adjoining part of the sequence. In the above random sequence, for example, there’s nothing about the whole sequence that would lead anyone to believe that starting with an “8” necessarily leads to a following “9”, followed by a “0” followed by a “5.”
An example that Dembski uses often is the presidential faces carved into Mt. Rushmore. The face of Washington is “specified” because it corresponds, or maps, to a pattern we already hold in memory, as well as to a general pattern of “human face.” It couldn’t be anything but human; it couldn’t be anyone but Washington. It is “complex”, however, in the same sense that any human face is complex: nothing about the shape of a nose, of example, requires the shape of the brow above it to be what it is; nothing in the brow demands that ears by a certain shape; etc. Those things simply “are” and they cannot really be described, or “compressed” algorithmically. You cannot algorithmically represent an image of your girlfriend; you have to show a picture of her to your pals at dinner.
One problem I see with evolutionary biologists is that most of them are math-challenged. It’s all prose, no equations/algorithms. And still they say they’re ‘scientists’, no different than physicists, and denying their Darwinian story is the same as saying that the Earth is the center of the universe.
It seems to me that evolutionary biologists also confuse description with explanation. Simply tracing back events in biological history is more of a description than an explanation. You can easily miss the big picture as the Richard and William story shows.
The most effective/fierce attacker of ‘neo-Darwinism’ I know is David Berlinski (definitely not math-challenged).
He’s got a famous article “The Deniable Darwin”
http://www.discovery.org/a/130
Excerpt:
” time and again, biologists do explain the survival of an organism by reference to its fitness and the fitness of an organism by reference to its survival, the friction between concepts kindling nothing more illuminating than the observation that some creatures have been around for a very long time. “Those individuals that have the most offspring,” writes Ernst Mayr, the distinguished zoologist, “are by definition . . . the fittest ones.” And in Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, Tim Berra states that “[f]itness in the Darwinian sense means reproductive fitness-leaving at least enough offspring to spread or sustain the species in nature.”
This is not a parody of evolutionary thinking; it is evolutionary thinking. Que sera, sera. ”
Berlinski on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89IskZI740
“One problem I see with evolutionary biologists is that most of them are math-challenged.”
An ironic comment on an Austrian site but anyway …
There’s some if you look. And the discipline is changing. Lots of solid math in evoltuinary theory, going back to the basic results of population genetics and evolutionary game theory. I lionked a book for Tel, Evolutionary Dynamics. To be fair I think you need to count genetics as evolutionary theory, and it’s pretty mathematical, lots of stats.
The most important aspect to grasp about modern biochemistry (and, by implication, origin-of-life studies and evolution) is the unexpected convergence of biological ideas with ideas from computer science and information theory: “code”, “sequence”, “information”, etc. An important book that explores this is by biochemist James Shapiro, “Evolution: A View from the 21st Century”, at:
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-View-21st-Century-paperback/dp/0133435539/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376333974&sr=1-2&keywords=james+shapiro
Shapiro is at University of Chicago. He’s not an ID advocate, though he’s sympathetic toward their extreme skepticism of Neo-Darwinism and chemical evolution. He’s a skeptic himself. He insists that a cell is a biological computer, with an operating system, “stop” codes, “go” codes, etc., and — along with his mentor, Barbara McClintock — he states that biological entities are not passively waiting around for a random mutation to strike, hoping to get “selected” in order to survive; they, in fact, have a genetic “toolbox” that allows them to try various strategies for maximizing their survival in different kinds of environments. The environment might “switch on” a certain set of tools that the entity can try, but the point is, those tools didn’t evolve incrementally in any sort of Darwinian fashion: they were already there, completely formed, but were lying dormant until needed.
Shapiro does not ask, “How did they get there if they weren’t going to be needed until some far off future date when the environment might be very different from the current one?” But ID advocates do.
The guy put in a fair effort, but he did get one of his introductory worked examples wrong by something like 20 orders of magnitude, then noticed the discrete solution and continuous solution didn’t match up, then came up with a plausible sounding explanation why these things do happen from time to time.
I’m not wanting to crack down on a single slip up, it’s more the approach that if in doubt explain it away. This type of thing blocks genuine investigation.
Or you, not the Harvard professor in a widely praised textbook, nade the error. Just a possibility I suppose.
I think we know how English and its orthography developed, and know that it is an arbitrary system, a convention.
It is that knowledge that allows us to understand that a set of trees, or ditches, spelling out “Bob Murphy, You owe me a response on OLG” would not have arisen by natural processes.
The key point is that we have a solid basis, from our understanding of language from which to draw our conclusions.
Do we have any comparable ex ante understanding of cellular life? No. Quite the reverse actually: all our best notions about cellular life are linked to natural selection.
It really won’t do to look at just the end result and say “AHA! Design!”
That presumes what it sets out to prove: that no simpler comprehensible mechanism can be at work.
You need to exhibit a step that cannot be explained otherwise.
With the OLG message you have a good candidate, because of the arbitrary nature of orthography and language.
Behe seems to get this, which is why he presents cilia etc.
But as others have shown, his examples don’t work.
There are ways the constituent parts of his machines can be useful without the final machine being complete.
Where does that leave us?
Occam’s razor (there’s a fetching picture next to my name).
>>>all our best notions about cellular life are linked to natural selection
Odd. I can’t think of a single “notion” about cellular life that is linked to natural selection except in the imaginations of True Believer Darwinists, who, of course, link everything to natural selection.
What you mean is that we can always RETROFIT a Darwinian explanation that makes use of natural selection to any fact we discover about the cell. Probably true. We can also wear a set of Darwinian spectacles that selectively filter out certain kinds of possible answers, as well as certain kinds of possible questions. That’s what Popper meant when he referred to Darwinian evolution, not as a scientific hypothesis or theory, but as a “metaphysical research programme.”
True, he recanted that line much later in life, but only after he had made some pretty significant changes to his ideas about falsification.
>>>There are ways the constituent parts of his machines can be useful without the final machine being complete.
It’s a complete misunderstanding of Behe’s point, in addition to which, it actually acknowledges — tacitly, of course — the need for intelligent guidance.
Yes, if you start with only the base of the future mousetrap, it could, in theory, be used as a doorstop (if heavy enough, or thin enough to wedge under the door). Fine. Then, let’s say, through a process of completely random mutation a spring and a catch manage to attach themselves to the base — never mind the fact that you also need glue, or nails, or screws, or some other way of attaching them to the base, and that this need automatically imposes restrictions on the original use of the base: it must heavy enough to function as a doorstop, but rough enough for glue to be useful on it, or soft enough for a nail to be driven through it; etc.
So now we have a base, with a spring and a catch. What “selective advantage” would they have for something already functioning just fine as a doorstop? None! The only reason the doorstop would be under selection pressure to accept these two additions as “beneficial mutations” would be if it were already being used — unsuccessfully — as something OTHER than a doorstop, i.e., as a tie-clasp. True, a base with a spring and a catch could function as a funky tie-clasp, but not by simply putting the base on the tie first and then hoping you get beneficial mutations to make it function as a clasp.
So the attempted refutation of Behe is bluster. If a base is already happy as a base, it will have no pressure to select things that are useless to it — indeed, which might even impede its present function — such as a spring and a catch. Conversely, if the base is already on the tie, while it sure could use a spring and a catch, it is already FAILING as a tie-clasp — and it’s offspring (little baby bases) are dying, too. Why would a spring and a catch suddenly appear via mutation just to save the base from extinction?
So neither scenario works. What DOES work, of course, is if the base is being used as a doorstop and a CHILD comes along – an intelligent designer with intention, goals, and purposes — and thinks to himself, “Hmmm. I’ll bet if I glue a spring and a catch to the base, it could be used as something else, maybe a cool tie-clasp for Father’s Day!”
The phrase, “it could be used” is the child “front-loading” information, in the form of intentionality and purpose, into his search for a spring and catch; for they are not “random mutations” but INTENTIONALLY SOUGHT-AFTER SHORT-TERM GOALS FOR THE PURPOSE OF ACHIEVING A LONGER-TERM GOAL.
Ah, now the scenario makes sense, but only when assuming an intelligent agent.
It’s actually much easier to move in the opposite direction in the absence of intelligence, because then we can let the 2nd law of thermodynamics take over: we START with a fully-functional mousetrap. Never mind how it got there. It’s there, and it’s functioning as a mousetrap. Over time, the little metal clasp that restrains the metal catch rusts and falls off. Now it’s only a base with a spring and the catch. It could, conceivably, be moved by a mouse into a drawer full of men’s shirts and ties, and voila! it functions perfectly as a tie-clasp. Then, over time, as the 2nd law advances inexorably, the spring and the catch rust and fall off. Now it’s only the base. Again, conceivably, it could fall off of a tie mid-day during a business meeting, and accidentally get kicked over to the door, where it just happens to work perfectly as a doorstop.
It’s unlikely, even implausible, but it’s not impossible. What makes it “not impossible,” is the fact that we started with something that was already irreducibly complex, and which had lots of “specified complexity,” and which DETERIORATED. The remaining parts might, of course, still exhibit function, and still integrate with one another in an irreducible way, at least for that context (doorstop, tie-clasp). But notice: that could only occur IF we start with the most complex object first, and then let it fall apart into simpler components.
Same with the bacterial flagellum, by the way. Molecular dating by sequence suggests that the complex flagellum appeared first amongst certain bacteria, and only later deteriorated and became a cellular pump. It went from complex to simpler, not simpler to complex.
When do you suppose a simpler comprehensible mechanism will be discovered, leading scientists and faculties to pack up their work and go home and academic journals to end publication due to this cause célèbre?
I’m being facetious of course, but it’s something to consider. Just imagine what it would be like to close the chapter on such a contested issue.
Will positivist science accomplish this? Of course not. Why? Because all enquires beget intense dissection. An “end” does not fit in with this methodology, it leads to brute facts and brute facts are irreducible.
Alternatively, it might lead to nothing and nothing does not yield something. In either case, the reductionist method has failed because it refuses to acknowledge the forms of things it dissects. In other words, on ontological grounds, science is evasive. Thus the reason it reduces qualitative states and psychic life to haphazard mutations of evolution, despite mutation being the reason for a posteriori knowledge and science (Does science deny itself?).
It’s not necessary to reach this conclusion discussing evolution. Why do objects occur and interact in the first place? There are no explanations in science, but rather a series of words and symbols, which are at most descriptions. When an object or system has exhausted its ability to be dissected, it irrevocably becomes a disposition, it has that elusive quality that seems so worthless to science. I think that’s where metaphysics begins
Sorry that I repeat myself and good day.
“Abstract:
Although it is a well-established scientific fact, evolution remains a controversial subject in the United States, and especially the issue of teaching evolution or creationism in public schools. An argument that appears to be increasingly popular among creationists is based on a postmodernist notion that science is simply one among many different but equal “ways of knowing,” and that its ascendancy over other methods is due to conflicts between social power structures rather than any objective superiority. Several creationist writers have argued that science’s exclusive reliance on natural causes (so called “methodological naturalism”) is an a priori assumption, or an arbitrary preference, and therefore that both it and religion are equally valid epistemologies. In addition, they argue that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment prohibit government from endorsing or granting “preferences” to science over supernaturalism.
This article is a response to these theories. In Part I, I argue that science is an objectively superior means of knowing, and that methodological naturalism is not an a priori assumption, but both an a posteriori preference and one that is necessary for any valid epistemology. I also reject the argument that naturalism or “humanism” are “religions” or that science requires a “leap of faith.” In Part II, I address whether the First Amendment requires the government to remain “neutral” between supernatural and naturalistic worldviews. I conclude with some general observations on the conflict between science and supernaturalism. ”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1088905
Glad you posted this, Bob. On a related note, we’re seeing something along the same lines in modern physics – the universe is much more complicated and open than most of us (as children of the Enlightenment) have been taught. I’d recommend “The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Orthodox and Modern Physics” by Archbishop Lazar Puhalo (a physicist by training) if anyone is interested in the relationship between faith and physics.
I think the problem with Bob’s example is that both Richard and William know that humans DO exist, and that humans DO speak in language and can write words down. So they recognize something they already know about, the existence of human life, on the island. How it is that living things survive , evolve and pass on traits is one thing. the question of how no life could have been existing and then later, life does exist is not so simple to explain as many think. How does something arise out of nothing? It either does not come from nothing or it is impossible for human understanding to grasp how this could be possible. So we are left with the mystery of existence. Some will name that God.
Bob,
Thanks for posting. A nice break from the topic of economics and is healthy to exercise a different part of the brains at times.
It is amusing isn’t it watch us Human Beings pontificate on the origins of life. The nature of our being is it is something we feel compelled to tackle and rightly so. Yet for many, they do so without the humility of the limitations of the human mind as it currently stands. For those who are absolutely convinced they have it figured out or at least “know” the other guy is wrong, they fail to acknowledge to themselves that the foundations of their thesis is premised on “laws” of things AS THEY UNDERSTAND THEM at the moment.
If we can all step back objectively and chuckle a bit at ourselves as we struggle with the “origins” issue, one can only imagine that it is a great source of amusement to a higher being watching all of us.
This was a fun story, however I would suggest the following.
What do we really know? Not much, we are learning and growing but in the end we are at a very very basic level of knowledge by universal standards. Now unlike many who believe God is some kind of Mystical Being outside the boundaries of ‘science’ I believe that God works ONLY within the bounds of science.
However I find the discussion superfluous. God exists. I know He does, just as I am fairly certain there is someone who wrote this post, it was not randomly generated words with no association about them because I have experienced reading it.
Do I know the method that God uses to communicate with man? Not in scientific terms. Do I believe that someday we can show that it occurs? Yes. Do I think someday we could ‘prove’ the existence of God?Sure. Just because you cannot see something does not mean it is not there. The evidence of God is in a million different places but perhaps the most compelling is that I stand as a witness today that God exists. That I have ‘heard’ His voice and experienced the joy of enlightenment as I grow closer to the kind of being He would have me be.
I join my voice to many who have come before me, and to many that will come after me that God is.
You may discount this witness as delusional, or a lie, or perhaps a mistake. That is your choice. However I also attest that everyone who earnestly seeks God will find Him.
How do you get to where you can have a testimony or witness of God?
I like to picture learning of God much the same as the old Oregon Trail. Why did anyone go from the East to Oregon? Was there not enough land to prove back east? Of course there was, but like anything people come back with stories and their own witness of a wonderful place that was beautiful to behold. So people packed up and began the journey. They did this starting with simply the ‘Witness’ of others. However they obtained from them a list of things that they would see along the way to help them know they were on the right track. Call them ‘Signs’. A river here, a mountain there, a land mark over there. All of these things lend CREDENCE to the original testimony of those that had told you about it before. Yet the actual proof of the place cannot be realized until you arrive.
People now-a-days do not know what it was like before there was television and movies and ‘proof’ of places that exist. Though I would have to say that movies no longer mean much as evidence of Middle Earth seems fairly compelling in film. At one point the witness of others and their testimony was the main driving force behind everything. We have lost that today as we search for ‘proof’. That is not to say the ‘proof’ is not there. I know the signs of God, I have experienced them, I know God is.
Nor is this a new phenomenon. Every Generation has those that hear and those that do not. Even as Christ stood among those around him many did not know him for what he was and is.
One last time I stand to tell you that God is. That you may know Him. That the path is clear, the signs are there, and it only requires a journey on your part to find Him. If you ask you will receive, if you knock it will be opened unto you. But these are actions. They require faith to acquire, just as those that went along the Oregon trail had to have faith in those that spoke to them.
Intelligent Design is nothing but a dirty trick and charlatanism.
I prefer the traditional creationism, – the naïve, childish, and stupid as it is. But it’s at least honest! Everything is made by God, period. Like Marxism, everything must be ruled by The Central Planner, no alternatives!
But ID is cowardly and opportunistic. Like Keynesianism. A bit of this and a bit of that.”Fine tuning” as they ( and you Bob!) name it. An eclectic mixture of a central-planner-god and spontaneous order ( let’s mix shit and chocolate in a “proper” ratio and we got a “scientific” candy! yeah right..)
No Sir, the only scientific theory of evolution is Darwinism.
As Austrian economics, it doesn’t need central planners.
I has no doubts that people who deny Darwinism just don’t understand ( or misunderstand) it. Because Darwinism ( in its modern form) is so true and wonderful that just can’t be rejected by anybody who has caught its essence. Its laconic beauty, its modest elegance, its undeniable logics, its intellectual rigour, its tremendous explanatory power.. it’s charming!
Like other great scientific theories ( Euclidean Geometry, Austrian Economics, Newton’s Mechanics, The Theory of Relativity etc.) modern Darwinism is a deductive science, based on a handful of axioms. Some great mind could deduce laws and theorems of biology ( including our terrestrial life made of proteins and DNA as a particular case) just by theorising, like Mr. Sherlock Holmes in a armchair with his favourite pipe ( BTW, I’m sure that the common stupidization of intellectuals (at least partly) is a result of anti-smoking campaign ( initiated by statists -socialists of course! but bought by some silly libertarians, alas)).
I, a little modest Russian businessman, libertarian, anarchist, atheist, Austrian so on .. prefer good tobacco, good wine, and good girls to bad ones, he-he. I also prefer good music and good scientific theories, like ones of Newton, Einstein, L.von Mises, Darwin, etc.
Sorry, but I don’t like stupid theories like Marxism, Flying Saucers, Kainseanism, Poltergeists, Bermuda Triangles, Lysenko’s genetics, ID, Voo-Doo magics, Global Warming, Christianity so on… sorry… from my childhood. I’m a bad boy, ever been, I know.
P.S. But I don’t understand Bob why do you claim so boldly that Atheism IS Darwinism. They are not the same, in no way! There are ( and was) a lot of very religious guys who were 100% Darwinists!
I think ID is something very-very American and very provincial ( America IS provincial by its nature 😉 , some Mass.Bay’s kind of rural Puritanism, he-he).
“I prefer the traditional creationism, – the naïve, childish, and stupid as it is. But it’s at least honest! ”
Me too. I have more respect for William Jennings Bryan. He was forthright: “if this is true my religion is wrong.” That’s the motive for all this stuff, but few are open about it.
>>>“I prefer the traditional creationism, – the naïve, childish, and stupid as it is.
Yep. That’s the one naive, childish, and stupid people subscribed to — like Isaac Newton.
He’s the kind of creationist I prefer.
Argument from Authority is not an argument. Also, Ken B was correctly describing the belief of YECism, not the people holding it.
>>>Argument from Authority is not an argument.
Neither is Argument from Intimidation.
In any case, Ken B was making an Argument from Intimidation. I was merely expressing a preference for a certain kind of creationist — the scientific genius kind, like Newton — and not actually making an argument at all.
It’s a shame he didn’t know about evolution. Newton could have discovered so much more. When you think that the magic sky fairy to did it all, there’s no reason to try and figure it out for yourself.
>>>It’s a shame he didn’t know about evolution.
Well, that was a typically modest statement from a typically knee-jerk True Believer Darwinist: “If only Newton had been more like me and had my prior ideological biases, boy! He would’ve discovered so much more!”
But YOU have discovered nothing, and no major scientific discovery in the 20th century — including the discovery of the code-structure of DNA — relied on a prior commitment to Darwinism or evolution.
Here’s another naive, stupid person who believed in a magic sky fairy, this time as the designer of molecules:
“No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction.
None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural.
On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self existent.”
— “Molecules”
by James Clerk Maxwell
A lecture delivered before the British Association at Bradford, and published in the journal “Nature” in September 1873
See:
http://www.victorianweb.org/science/maxwell/molecules.html
>>>orry, but I don’t like stupid theories like Marxism, Flying Saucers, Kainseanism, Poltergeists, Bermuda Triangles, Lysenko’s genetics, ID, Voo-Doo magics, Global Warming, Christianity . . .
Christianity is a “theory”?
Quite the timely post, this new and excellent 38-minute documentary just came out last week, available on YouTube for free viewing, EVOLUTION VS. GOD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u3-2CGOMQ
There is absolutely no observable evidence for Darwinian evolution. You’ve got to have GREATER faith to be an atheist.
Of course, there really is no such thing as an atheist. they know the truth and suppress it in their unrighteousness:
Romans 1:18 “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,[g] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”
Yep, that’ll learn ’em to say ID is just creationism with lipstick!
“Of course, there really is no such thing as an atheist. they know the truth and suppress it in their unrighteousness.”
What a self-congratulatory load of horsesh*t. Are you Church of Christ or Southern Baptist by any chance?
I’m an atheist because there is no evidence that your god exists. It’s just that simple.
“There is absolutely no observable evidence for Darwinian evolution.”
-Genetics, anyone? What do you count as evidence?
“You’ve got to have GREATER faith to be an atheist.”
-Unture. It is God that is the needlessly complicated hypothesis. All thinking beings have brains. If God can’t think, he is not God. God doesn’t have a brain. Therefore, God can’t think. Therefore, God isn’t God. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
“Of course, there really is no such thing as an atheist. they know the truth and suppress it in their unrighteousness:”
-I know; those horrid Japanese!
What’s the point of quoting the Bible to people who don’t believe it’s the Word of Brainless Thinker?
If your ability to think was solely due to your brain, then everything you think about is a necessary consequence of physics – you have zero control over your thoughts, and consequently, your thoughts don’t mean anything.
Brain damage can affect our ability to think, but if we view the brain as merely the area which is directly controlled by our soul (a free agent is a requirement for the existence of free will; see above), then we can surmise that the damage limits the soul’s ability to interact with the brain.
In this view, the brain reacts to the chemical signals sent through nerves, and the soul can interpret these signals; and the soul can send signals through the brain and nerves to make our bodies move. Bodily functions that don’t require deliberate action can be understood as mere chemical reactions.
At any rate, unless you’re willing to give up the concept of free will, you must logically accept the existence of a soul; And the soul logically implies at least one God.
I don’t think free will exists because the concept is nonsensical-there is only one timeline (Law of Identity). I act like I have free will because my brain is pre-determined not to remember the future.
I’m going to act like you just threw up a bunch of letters, not intending to communicate anything.
Trololol
Hey, just because we don’t have free will doesn’t mean communication doesn’t exist. Plants use hormones, humans use words. Neither have free will.
>>>Neither have free will.
Of course, since your brain was pre-determined not to have free will, you have no choice but to believe that neither have free will. It’s not as if you can claim that you “arrived” at a certain conclusion.
In fact, not only do humans have free will, but plants do, too.
Has your pre-determined brain not kept up with the latest research?
Reactions aren’t communications.
Communicating is an appeal to reason in the hope that it will modify another’s behavior; because it is assumed that reason modifies behavior.
Which in turn is a presumption that there’s something inside that piece of meat that is capable of controlling its behavior.
(*Or future behavior)
There’s no reason to communicate, otherwise.
guest, do cells communicate?
No. Communication requires intent.
Economic Freedom
-Is there only one version of history? If so, how can there be free will? The very concept appears to me to violate the Law of Identity. [citation needed] for your statement about plants.
guest
-What is “intent”?
Intent is the attempt to achieve a specific end.
Do not cells and plants have specific ends?
Better yet, as he appears throughout the Bible, God is a psychotic, violent nutcase proving absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So speaks the troll from the LvM site.
Socrates once asked whether what the gods deemed moral was because they were advocating genuine moral behaviour or just advocating their personal preferences. The Bible quite clearly shows what God shows is that what He deems moral is his own personal preferences and not a greater moral code.
I don’t care, troll.
Agreed. 🙂 He’s also testable (1 Kings 18).
>>>Genetics, anyone? What do you count as evidence?
How about an actual fruit fly that evolves into an actual wasp, bee, gnat, moth, or something OTHER than what it already is, after being zapped with lots of radiation.
Scorecard to date: zero.
Clearly another creationist that doesn’t understand anything about evolution at all, sort of like the Keynesian that doesn’t understand economic calculation.
So the evidence you require for evolution is a half man, half duck? Is that it, Kirk Cameron?
You could easily end this debate by producing your designer you talk of. I’m sure you just happen to have him on your Rolodex, right? Just bring him around, give a lecture, end the speculation.
>>>So the evidence you require for evolution is a half man, half duck?
LOL! Well, you’re the one with the theory which predicts that there’s a series of incremental forms between duck and man, right? So prove it. Prove the fossil evidence of intermediate forms . . .OR, alternatively, prove phylogenetic evolution by making one species turn into another species. OR, do provide ANY objective, empirical evidence to support your theory.
Unlucky for your theory that the facts of the Cambrian Explosion debunk any theory that relies on incrementlaism and putative intermediate forms.
>>>You could easily end this debate by producing your designer you talk of.
I doubt it would end the debate. Obviously, if you’re so dull that you cannot recognize the obvious results of a designer, then meeting him, her, or it personally wouldn’t do a thing to convince you.
Your position is one of philosophical denial, not scientific skepticism.
What, you mean fruit fly speciation? That has already been documented.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
I suspect you don’t mean speciation. If so, what do you mean?
From your talkorigins link:
>>>5.3 The Fruit Fly Literature
>>>5.4 Housefly Speciation Experiments
Sorry, but that itsn’t what Darwinists themselves have in mind when they brag about “macroevolution” being a fact.
Prove that mutated fruit flies can turn into houseflies. The literature at talkorigins proves that fruit flies always remain a variety of fruit-fly, and house-flies always remain a variety of house-fly. Prove to me that one kind of body plan can evolve into a very different kind of body plan via mutation . . . which, after all, what youre claiming when you claim that macroevolution actually occurred.
Prove that one species can actually turn into another DIFFERENT species.
Bah.
For examples of new species, see
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB910.html
Why would scientists want to create a new lasting species of fruit fly, anyway? Fruit flies are pests.
On some of your objections, see
http://www.hartnell.cc.ca.us/faculty/jhodin/superfly.htm
Humans are a variety of fish. Does anyone call humans fish? What do you mean by “a very different kind of body plan”?
“Behe’s point is that when you look at what this process spits out at the end, you can’t deny that a guiding intelligence must be involved somehow.”
Couldn’t one say the same thing about the economy? The economy is amazingly complex and looking at what the process spits out at the end, shouldn’t we say that it must be a result of some kind of guidance, without which there is much disorder? Doesn’t it make more sense to say if we can accept there is not any guiding intelligence that leads to the incredible outcomes regarding the market, there just as well might be no guiding intelligence with regard to cells and evolution?
I guess it’s a little bit different as far as the processes, since in the market each individual acts with intelligence and in biology each cell, etc. essentially acts without it (acts biologically), but your statement strikes me as similar to the statement, “Well the economy is so complex, we must have someone intelligently guiding it, otherwise there’s chaos.” Correct me if I’m missing something, but as someone who understands spontaneous order with regard to the market, I don’t see why there has to be a guiding intelligence with regard to biology (Not that I have a stand one way or the other with regard to ID).
Try this, Tyler.
I can’t find anything in this post that would challenge my lack of acceptance of ID or my acceptance of the Central Planner-God analogy as a useful analogy. In your lion-human analogy there, the lion is equivalent to a human locked up for his/her violent manner.
>>>The economy is amazingly complex and looking at what the process spits out at the end, shouldn’t we say that it must be a result of some kind of guidance, without which there is much disorder?
But there IS guidance in the free market: the intelligent planning, designing, and goal-pursuing of each individual actor in the market. That’s ASSUMED from the outset, explicitly in the Austrian tradition. Without individual intelligent-design in economic activity, you cannot even have a science of economics.
Mises himself made the point, though in a different context. In “Planning for Freedom,” he says that the issue is not “planning” vs. “no planning.” The issue is “WHOSE plan? One single plan by a central planner imposed on everyone? Or lots of individual plans, voluntarily dovetailed together by means of the price system?”
So economics — especially in the Austrian vision of it — assumes consciousness, mind, free will, intention, purpose, long-range goals (consumer goods) and shorter-range goals (capital goods).
>>>Doesn’t it make more sense to say if we can accept there is not any guiding intelligence that leads to the incredible outcomes regarding the market, there just as well might be no guiding intelligence with regard to cells and evolution?
Stuart Kauffman’s ideas regarding self-ordering properties of matter and energy I find unintelligible. Matter and energy don’t organize themselves for the sake of pursuing long-term goals, and then select from alternative short-range goals for the sake of the former, final goal. The heartbeat of economics is “purposeful activity”, not just “activity.” You have to explain “purpose.” And without a concept like “mind”, it cannot be done.
The 4-symbol code in the genome is obviously purposeful, as are ALL codes: natural languages are codes; computer languages are codes; crypotgraphic languages are codes; etc. None of them are law-governed; all of them are RULE governed by a set of completely arbitrary conventions: There’s no physical reason why three dots mean “S” in Morse Code; they do because the designer, Samuel Morse, said “Let three dots mean ‘S’.” There’s no physical reason why the three-letter codon “GCA” (Guanine-Cytosine-Adenine) means “grab a molecule of the amino acid Adenine”, and is so understood by the ribosome. Whatever (or whoever) designed the genetic code said “Let the triplet Guanine-Cytosine-Adenine mean Adenine”, and it, he, or she, programmed that into the DNA molecule and the ribosome, at the same time, so they could go about their business of sending coded instructions and decoding them into chemical chains.
With regard to your first point, I agree with what you’re saying, I wasn’t arguing to the contrary. I explicitly stated economics has planning when I said humans act with intelligence.
However, you’re confusing two topics (to my mind) when you start saying the heartbeat of economics is purposeful action and then assume that biological action must be purposeful, even if the biological organisms themselves are not being purposeful, but a divine creator is the one acting purposefully when he created CGA, etc.
I don’t see why it would follow there has to be a “purpose” somehow to biological action, thus lumping in biological activities as purposeful action (by the creator), meaning they fall under the scope of praxeology and then economics. If this is what you’re arguing, it is not convincing. Economics implies intelligence which further implies human activity, and attempting to apply economics to biological activity doesn’t add up since it relies on the underlying assumption that biological activities must have an underlying purpose, otherwise the theory is “unintelligible.”
With that said, I don’t have a position on ID versus evolution for one simple reason: just because we cannot fathom the complexity of the natural order and are astonished by the results it achieved, doesn’t mean that a divine being created them and give them purpose. Conversely, because we cannot fathom the complexity of biology, cells etc. it could mean that a divine being created them and gave them purpose. The same argument can be used both for and against ID and evolution so I have no reason to pass judgment on either. I don’t see any way to make an a priori statement for or against either theory without taking a leap of faith (no pun intended).
>>> even if the biological organisms themselves are not being purposeful, but a divine creator is the one acting purposefully when he created CGA, etc.
Given that biological organisms take extreme measures to avoid genetic copying errors and to correct them if they occur — lest natural selection weed the organism out of the population for being unfit — I would think it’s obvious that organisms act for the purpose of survival.
A large part of this survival is not just about the individual organism, but about reproduction and continuity of the species over time. This is mainly accomplished by means of the genetic code, and codes — universally — are constructs of Mind. The reason they are constructs of Mind, and not physical nature, is that they are not governed by physical considerations at all: they are not produced by physical events, nor are they destroyed by physical events; i.e., a fire might destroy every copy of the official Morse Code Handbook, but that’s simply destroying specific physical instantiations of Morse Code. The fire is not destroying the code itself.
Codes are not LAW governed, but RULE governed. A “rule” is an arbitrary convention — something like a “habit” but more conscious and intentional — and make their appearance only in contexts in which Mind is actively engaged (e.g., games, speech), or in which Mind was actively engaged, and which recorded the rules in some physical medium to preserve it (a rule-book for Monopoly, a Latin grammar book).
Like Morse Code, the genetic code is arbitrary and rule-governed: there is no physical or chemical reason why the nucleotide triplet, GCA, ought to correspond to the amino acid Alanine; after all, keep in mind a significant fact: at no time do the DNA nucleotides — even after transcription into RNA — physically touch or chemically interact in any way with amino acids, which are simply floating around the cell body. The triplet codon is a three-symbol instruction — a single line of an algorithm — which says to the ribosome, “retrieve a molecule of alanine.” The next triplet instructs the ribosome to retrieve some other amino acid, etc. Finally, a triplet ATG tells the ribosome, “stop.”
The main reason I broached the topic of purpose in economics is that many mistakenly claim the highly coordinated free market is proof that no guidance, or “invisible hand”, is necessary for a trait like coordination to emerge, and that, ergo, we should have no problem accepting biological coordination as being unguided. I don’t think it’s an apt analogy. The free market is not a single organism but a multitude of organisms — economic actors — each consciously choosing to play by the same rules. I don’t see the analogy with an organism, which, while comprising many elements, is nevertheless, ONE thing. Additionally, the elements — individual cells in a heart, a brain, a liver, muscle fiber, etc. — are not themselves conscious, and are not themselves choosing to play by certain rules. True, they are FOLLOWING certain rules, but they have no choice but to do so.
DT & Knox,
Thank you. You both illustrated the point from my earlier post. Embedded in both of your positions is an assumption that you have it all figured and that your understanding of the world / universe is omnipotent. Human hubris never ceases to entertain.
With all due respect – it’s just the opposite. I don’t think I “have it all figured out” – I’m just positive that you don’t.
“I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer. Unfortunately, the hubris you display is that not only are you entitled to an answer for everything but also that you already have that answer – in a fake supernatural being you call god.
How did the universe begin exactly? I don’t know. – My answer.
How did the universe begin exactly? God. – Your answer.
At lease my answer has the virtue of being intellectually honest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc2muGlQIlk
Thought I was replying to DT – not you Mike. Having said that – I think your allusion to a “higher being watching all of us” is an example of you going “full retard.”
Knox,
The very essence of my first post is no one has it figured out, which by implication means my reference to a “higher being watching us” is by default, a theoretical jest to “nonbelievers” and “believers” alike. Apparently that nuance escaped you.
BTW, the “full retard” comment was very insightful thank you. Something only an evolved superior intellect can produce I’m sure.
Clearly, nuance is not your strong suit.
You claimed that “Embedded in [my] position[] is an assumption that [I] have it all figured and that [my] understanding of the world / universe is omnipotent.”
How you got that out of “I’m an atheist because there is no evidence that your god exists. It’s just that simple” is really odd. Saying that there is no evidence for something is not a positive claim for omniscience. I hope that isn’t too nuanced for you.
Building strawmen is your strong suit – not nuance.
“full retard”
I believe the phrase is “full metal retard”.
But ask Gene; he’ll know.
Ken B. you can’t even get your pop culture references right.
It’s a fair cop. For a long time I didn’t even know what a Tebow was.
>>.How did the universe begin exactly? I don’t know. – My answer.
So those who claim that the universe began with a quantum vacuum fluctuation in a Higgs Field leading to a Big Bang . . .
. . . they’re intellectually dishonest according to you?
Perhaps. But that would have to include most of astrophysicists today.
I think the “Big Bang,” as a general description, is the best explanation for the existence of the universe. You had me at “quantum vacuum.” I don’t think that astrophysicists are being intellectually dishonest. I do think their are different explanations for phenomena within the field which make “certainty” the goal but we aren’t there yet – hence “I don’t know.”
+1
I love EF’s implication that “I don’t know” is somehow not a scientifically repectable answer!
>>>I love EF’s implication that “I don’t know” is somehow not a scientifically repectable answer!
Oh, it’s respectable. So long as you don’t conflate it with “denial” for the purpose of protecting an ideological prior.
Bob Murphy:
“Yet Behe’s point is that when you look at what this process spits out at the end, you can’t deny that a guiding intelligence must be involved somehow.”
Only if you completely disregard the difference between phylogenesis and onto-genesis, between the predetermined biological evolution, for example from the fetus to human being, with the phylogenetic evolution which is not guided by any internal coherence, let alone driven by an Intelligence, such as origins and evolution of species. The basic mistake is to threat the macro-evolution as a onto-genetic process, which it is not. I am always flabbergasted how an Austrian economist who perfectly well understands the fact that the miraculous harmony and rational functioning of the markets was not created by a central planning Intelligence cannot accept the same simple concept in the area of biology and life, and searches instead all the time for some celestial central planner whose fingerprints are all over the place. Why is life so different than markets? Why the example of bushes could not be equally used against all those nutcases who argue that prices emerge as the unplanned and uncontrolled consequences of the millions of daily human decisions crystallized in the supply and demand of goods and services? Out of trillions mathematical possibilities, the market selects everyday the prices of everything which are just about right”to maximize everyone’s welfare and provide the abundance we have.If the relationship between various prices were just slightly different everything would fall apart (see under socialism, ABCT and so on). What do you think is the probability of such a fine-tuning? Not much greater than the probability of an intelligent life form being produced by a blind evolutionary process.
It’s actually not reasonable to suppose that billions of individuals seeking harmony and rational functioning of trade should result in chaos.
This is WHY the market doesn’t need central planning.
The whole point of trading is to make a profit; If neither party to a transaction is coerced, then the market tends toward prosperity. Where traders miscalculate, they are the ones who bear the cost of their actions, and are the ones who have the incentive to stop miscalculating.
(Of course, when the credit supply keeps increasing in excess of the money, this is going to make calculating in terms of credit difficult.)
>>>>between the predetermined biological evolution, for example from the fetus to human being,
“Predetermined?” You mean, “Preprogrammed.” It’s the genomically coded information that sends instructions on how, when, and where, cells should divide and differentiate. That’s NOT a given, natural, “predetermined” property of protoplasm. The question is: how did the program first come to be written? That it now works by itself, generation after generation, is great. That doesn’t answer how a set of instruction — “start here; now multiply there; now differentiate here – again – again – again; OK, now stop” — first came to be written and encoded within the cell.
>>>with the phylogenetic evolution which is not guided by any internal coherence, let alone driven by an Intelligence, such as origins and evolution of species.
WHAT phylogenetic evolution? You mean, the one that hasn’t ever been shown to exist? For which there’s no experimental evidence? For which the fossil record undercuts? THAT phylogenetic evolution?
Talk about question-begging! Phylogenetic evolution — “unguided evolution”, with no preprogramming or “front-loading” of information to give the process a goal — is precisely the thing to be proven. You cannot simply assume it as fact from the start.
Economic freedom: “Predetermined?” You mean, “Preprogrammed.” It’s the genomically coded information that sends instructions on how, when, and where, cells should divide and differentiate.”
However you slice it, the burden of proof is here on the one who would want to argue that the same kind of preprogramming that is clearly at play in the case of onto-genetic evolution functions in the evolution of species: that in the very first cell, or very first simply organism that emerged (however that happened) was pre-pragrammed that humans and other primates would evolve. I think that’s obviously false; you would have essentially to say that extermination of dinosaurs was a part of a single pre-programmed evolutionary process, in the same sense, the baby in the 4th week of gestation already has preprogrammed the entire physical and mental structure of the baby which is going to be born after 9 months. Really? God created life, and then destroyed 99% of life forms in a planetary cataclysm, and then finally recreated everything all over again, even more “intelligently” than before from the remnants, I suppose.
>>>However you slice it, the burden of proof is here on the one who would want to argue that the same kind of preprogramming that is clearly at play in the case of onto-genetic evolution functions in the evolution of species . . .
The burden of proof is on he who asserts the positive. You are making the positive assertion, “There has, in fact, been an evolution of species.”
Prove it.
I’m not asking for you to demonstrate a “cause” for your putative evolution of species. ‘m asking you to demonstrate that there’s even something to discuss. Prove that there has, in fact, been something called “an evolution of species.”
No, I don’t have to prove it at all, because that is the assumption that Behe accepts and Murphy seconds him; namely that there has been an evolution of species, but since we see intelligent structures resulting from it, there had to be some Intelligence involved.
This latter assumption is patently false and economics (irony, irony) is one of the fields in which you can very nicely demonstrate that it is false.
>>>No, I don’t have to prove it at all, because that is the assumption that Behe accepts
No, he doesn’t accept it. He merely accepts the idea of “change over time,” as do we all. What he shows in “Darwin’s Black Box” is that biochemical structures such as the bacterial flagellum, the vision and blood-clotting cascades in humans, and a few others, logically defy the breezy assumptions of Darwinism that they came about incrementally over time by means of random mutation and natural selection. Furthermore, he showed that the peer-reviewed literature on the subject merely ASSUMED it to be true, but actually never provided any empirically provable evidence.
>>>and Murphy seconds him
Murphy’s quote from Behe’s website shows that Behe accepts the notion of “universal common ancestry,” which has NO NECESSARY connection to the idea of “macroevolution.” No one would claim that the car and the horse-and-buggy are examples of “macroevolution”; but they are examples of a technological common ancestry brought about by intelligent agency. That’s precisely the sense in which Behe accepts universal common ancestry, and, frankly, the only sense in which it is intelligible.
You obviously haven’t read Behe and are simply unacquainted with the issues being debated.
Bobo Murphy:
“So yes, Behe is fine with the proposition that if we had a camera and a time machine, we could go observe the first cell on earth as it reproduced and yielded offspring. There would be nothing magical in these operations; they would obey the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. The cells would further divide and so on, and then over billions of years there would be mutations and the environment would favor some of the mutants over their kin, such that natural selection over time would yield the bacterial flagellum and the human nervous system.
Yet Behe’s point is that when you look at what this process spits out at the end, you can’t deny that a guiding intelligence must be involved somehow.”
Q.E.D. He agrees that the evolution, i.e. change over time from one species to another really took place just as Darwin explained, just believes that this process could not be spontaneous, that it requires some celestial central planner. He just adds this religious dogma over and above what we know from evolutionary boilogy.
Of course, that assumption (you always need an Designer) is patently false, as economics proves very nicely.
Hm…you now reminded me by link to a previous comment that you actually believe that Smith’s invisible hand was literally the hand of God, who directs everything down here. The fact that socialism did such a poor job had probably something to do with their Atheism, rather than with Mises’ calculation argument. 🙂
But, what about Chinese, Japanese and other followers of Buddhism, the essence of which is that the concepts of God-creator and immortal soul or self represent self-serving delusions and the source of all evil and suffering int he world? Why God does not punish them by economic stagnation, just he did with the commies? 🙂
guest,
I understand perfectly your point: I was not arguing for central planning, but just employing a reductio ad apsurdum of the argument that if you have an intelligent structure, you need an intelligent creator or designer of that structure..
I know you get that point; I think I forgot to add something. My bad.
What I mean to say is that it’s not the same thing. Production requires the transformation of resources against entropy; You expect that a structure that tends toward entropy will tend away from order.
Conversely, there’s no reason to think that billions of people trading in the free market would tend toward chaos.
Is economic freedom the same as major freedom? They have similar narrative style and also seem extremely knowledgeable and smart.
>>>Is economic freedom the same as major freedom? They have similar narrative style and also seem extremely knowledgeable and smart.
Many thanks for the compliments!
There’s actually a quasi-military hierarchy — a libertarian “chain of command” — amongst officers in the Libertarian Army (also known as the “101st Fightin’ Keyboards”). After being commissioned, the ranks, lowest to most exalted, proceed thus:
1. Lieutenant Freedom
2. Captain Freedom
3. Major Freedom
4. Colonel Freedom
5. General Freedom
6. Economic Freedom
As you can see, #3 still has a ways to go.
God is not an explanation for why the universe is suited for one planet to have life; he is merely an extra layer of improbability. There is a low chance a universe like this one exists. There is an even lower chance that a universe like this one exists with a god, as “universe like this one+God” is a subset of “universe like this one”. The probability that both God and this universe exist is like the probability the branches on the island would be arranged in the shape of an English sentence accidentally AND that a human not responsible for those words would exist on an island. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.
“… as ‘bloody pile of bodies like this one+criminal’ is a subset of ‘bloody pile of bodies like this one'”
Remarkably, Richard did manage to escape from the man who had, in fact, intelligently designed those bushes. After a while, he managed to hook up with William again, and they decided to kill some time by studying mathematics.
They idly fell upon what this question: For which primes p and q does the equation x^2-p=q y have a solution? There followed this conversation:
Richard: Hey, look at this. If we take p=29 and q=5, I can find a solution. Namely, I can solve it with x=2, y=-5.
William: What if you take q=5 and p=29?
Richard: I can solve that one too! x=11 and y=4.
William: I wonder if that’s always true. I wonder if, whenever you can find a solution for some p and q, you can also find a solution with p and q reversed.
Richard: Nah. I found a solution for p=7 and q=3 (namely x=1 and y=-2), but there’s no solution for p=3 and q=7.
After much more mucking around, they discover that whenever they find a solution for some p and q, they’ll always find a solution with p and q reversed — *except* when p and q both leave remainders of 3 when divided by 4, in which case they’ll definitely *not* find a solution with p and q reversed.
Then they discover that this is only the tip of the iceberg, discovering a series of increasingly complex “reciprocity laws” with far more underlying structure than any simple English phrase.
William, of course, offers this as convincing evidence that somebody *designed* the number system and is using it to send them some sort of coded message. Richard remains skeptical. Whose side are you on?
I’m on Richard’s side. But nobody is offering laws of physics or of math as evidence of God.
What’s being offered is the supply and configuration of materials. The configuration of letters in the example suggest the intent to communicate. The configuration of materials suggests the intent to support life.
But, like I said, I abandoned the Blind Watchmaker argument for the argument from Free Will.
Sorry to disappoint you, Steve… But for what it’s worth, back when I was an atheist, it would have been “obvious” to me too that the structure of mathematics couldn’t possibly be evidence in favor of an intelligent designer.
Bah. Your software broke a line right in the middle of a key expression and left it hard to read.
The equation is x^2 – p = q y .
http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/
“Entropy and Evolution,” Bio-Complexity, 2013.
“Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems,” proceedings of “Biological Information: New Perspectives,” Cornell University, 2011.
* * * * * * * * * *
From:
“A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” Math. Intelligencer, Fall 2000
“The other point is very simple . . . It is that to attribute the development of life on Earth to natural selection is to assign to it-and to it alone, of all known natural “forces”-the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to cause order to arise from disorder. It is often argued that since the Earth is not a closed system-it receives energy from the Sun, for example- the second law is not applicable in this case. It is true that order can increase locally, if the local increase is compensated by a decrease elsewhere, i.e., an open system can be taken to a less probable state by importing order from outside. For example, we could transport a truckload of encyclopedias and computers to the moon, thereby increasing the order on the moon, without violating the second law. But the second law of thermodynamics-at least the tmderlying principle behind this law-simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.
I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones, and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet (perhaps using random number generators to model quantum uncertainties!). If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs, and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much. Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.
And think how complex god’s designer must have been since something so complex had to have a designer, and that god’s designer, and so on and son on…
I guess i can learn more about this creationist theory in Of Pandas and People, the original book creationists used to use as a foothold into the school system as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
Say, economic Freedom, how old do you suppose the earth is? What is the position of IDers on this?
And if one were to want to know more about this creator you say must have been involved, I’m guessing you just happen to know exactly whom he is and where to read all about him don’t you?
>>>And think how complex god’s designer must have been since something so complex had to have a designer, and that god’s designer, and so on and son on…
The old infinite regress argument doesn’t prove (or disprove) anything. An infinite regress is tacitly assumed by advocates of a purely material universe, since every material effect must have had a prior material cause, and so on, ad infinitum. Purely materialist explanations of origins don’t resolve the regress issue.
>>>I guess i can learn more about this creationist theory in Of Pandas and People, the original book creationists used to use as a foothold into the school system as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
Don’t go to any trouble by actually purchasing the book; it would vex me to see you spend your last few dollars from your SNAP benefits card on something you can only consume with your mind. I own “Of Pandas and People” and can tell you anything you want to know about it.
For starters, I see no mention of “creation” or “creationism” in either the table of contents or the index. It does say this, however, about “intelligent causes”:
“In the world around us, we see two classes of things: natural objects, like rivers and mountains, and man-made structures, like houses and computers. To put it in the context of origins, we see things resulting from two kinds of causes: natural and intelligent.
How do we decide whether something is the result of natural processes or intelligent causes? Most of us do it without even thinking. We see clouds and we know, based on our experience, they are the result of natural causes. No matter how intricate the shapes may be, we know that a cloud is simply water vapor shaped by the wind and the temperature. On the other hand, we may see something looking very much like a cloud that spells out the words ‘Vote for Smedley.’ We know that, even though they are white and fluffy like clouds, the words cannot be the result of natural causes.
Why not? Because our experience — and that of everybody else — tells us that natural causes do not give rise to complex structures such as a linguistic message.
When we find ‘John loves Mary’ written in the sand, we assume it resulted from an intelligent cause. Experience is the basis for science as well. When we find a complex message coded into the nucleus of a cell, it is reasonable to draw the same conclusion. Science uses controlled experiments to determine what sort of results occur under given conditions. The results we observe to occur consistently and regularly are the basis of the laws we formulate.
In other words, when scientists probed the nucleus of the cell, they eventually stumbled upon a phenomenon akin to finding ‘John loves Mary’ written in the sand, or ‘Vote for Smedley’ written in the sky. The greatest difference is that the DNA text is much more complex. If the amount of information contained in one cell of your body were written out on a typewriter, it would fill as many books as are contained in a large library.
Are natural causes capable of producing these kinds of patterns? To say that DNA and protein arose by natural causes, as chemical evolution does, is to say complex, coded messages arose by natural causes. It is akin to saying ‘John loves Mary’ arose from the action of the waves, or from the interaction of the grains of sand.”
— Of Pandas and People
6th printing, 2005
pages 6-7
>>>Say, economic Freedom, how old do you suppose the earth is? What is the position of IDers on this?
To my knowledge, most ID advocates support whatever the evidence supports. The evidence supports an age of about 4 billion years, give or take a few million. The reason they support this conclusion is that geologists, geochemists, and geophysicists have provided evidence. Conversely, the reason ID advocates do not support the Darwinian hypothesis is that its supporters have not provided evidence.
>>>And if one were to want to know more about this creator . . .
You would have to do some investigation outside of biology and genetics; e.g., philosophy, religion, history (I recommend starting with classical literature and poetry. The key is NOT to treat it as entertainment). The most that science can tell you is the same sort of thing that forensics can tell the police department: did an event occur by chance? Or did it occur by design? Period. The identity and whereabouts of a designer might not be knowable by means of any laboratory test. Guess what the cops do? They ask other people. They try to gather a different kind of evidence from that made available through the laboratory. It might be “circumstantial” evidence; it might even be just “hearsay”; the point is that it is more qualitative in nature than that provided by ballistics, DNA tests, and fingerprints.
Biochemistry can provide some quantitative evidence of a designer — i.e., codes are not natural products, but tell-tale marks of intention, design, and purpose. As to the presumed identity of a such a designer, you’ll have to start doing what the cops do when looking for more evidence: ask.
You’re a fraud and liar, Economic Freedom. The early drafts of ‘Of Pandas and People’ actually had the words creationist and creator peppered throughout. in order to smuggle in this book into the curriculum without giving away their obvious intentions, they simply changed the words creation and creator to intelligent design and intelligent designer. Just a copy and paste job.
And the Discovery Institute, the leading proponents of ID Theory changed their logo to give them the veneer of a science-based institution. They used to have god and Adam in their logo, then removed adam and replaced him with a DNA double helix, and, I think later changed their logo to just the DNA double helix in the shape of something celestial. All this to hide what they really are, a group of evangelicals intent of smuggling in creationism back into schools.
“
>>>The early drafts of ‘Of Pandas and People’ actually had the words creationist and creator peppered throughout.
You mean, the early **unpublished** drafts. There are no published versions that use “creation” or “creator” because knee-jerk materialists like you would mistakenly conclude that it necessarily means “supernatural” as opposed to mere “intellgent agency.” Could’ve been martians.
Barbara Forrest, who testified against “Of Pandas and People”, looks pretty foolish during her cross-examination by the defense:
Questioned first by the Prosecution:
Q. What do you do for a living?
A. I’m a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Q. What subjects do you teach at Southeastern Louisiana?
A. I teach philosophy 301 and philosophy 302, which are introductory courses. I teach philosophy 310, critical thinking. I teach philosophy 315, the philosophy of history. Philosophy 417, intellectual history. I teach an independent studies course, philosophy 418. I teach history 630, which is a graduate seminar in the history of western thought, and I teach western civilization.
Q. Did you write a dissertation?
A. Yes.
Q. What was that dissertation about?
A. It was the study of the influence of Sidney Hook’s naturalism on his philosophy of education.
* * * * *
Then Questioned by the Defense:
Q. Good morning, Dr. Forrest.
A. Good morning.
Q. You’re not an expert in science, correct?
A. No, I’m not a scientist.
Q. And you have no formal scientific training?
A. No.
Q. You have no training in biochemistry?
A. No.
Q. You have no training in microbiology?
A. No.
Q. You’re not trained as a biologist?
A. No, I’m not a biologist.
Q. So it would be true to say that you don’t know whether Darwin’s theory of evolution has provided a detailed testable rigorous explanation for the origin of new complex biological systems, would that be accurate?
A. Actually that is the kind of knowledge that any person that has some understanding of science would know, an educated person would know that that is an established theory.
Q. But with regard to my question, do you know whether or not Darwin’s theory of evolution has provided a detailed testable rigorous explanation for the origin of new complex biological features?
A. As my understanding is, yes, it has.
Q. Do you know whether the theory of evolution, in particular natural selection, can explain the existence of the genetic code?
A. Excuse me, repeat the question, please?
Q. Sure. Do you know whether the theory of evolution, in particular natural selection, can explain the existence of the genetic code?
A. My understanding is that natural selection does offer some explanation for that. I could not give you the explanation as a scientist would give it to you of course.
Q. Do you know whether the theory of evolution, in particular natural selection, can explain the development of the pathways for the construction of the flagellum?
A. As I understand it there is work being done on that as of now, yes. It does offer some explanation.
Q. Do you know whether the theory of evolution, in particular natural selection, can explain the existence of defensive apparatus such as the blood clotting system and the immunity system?
A. All of those things are being addressed, yes.
Q. You have no particular scientific expertise to be able to address those questions, is that correct?
A. No, sir, that’s not my area of expertise, no.
Q. So it would be fair to say that you’re not qualified to give an opinion as to whether the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex, meaning whether or not it can be produced by a step-by-step Darwinian process?
A. That’s not my area of expertise.
Q. And it would also be true that you wouldn’t be qualified to — I’ll repeat that question. Is it also fair to say that you’re not qualified to give an opinion as to whether the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex?
A. That’s not my area of expertise.
Q. And you’re also not qualified to give an opinion as to whether the immune system is irreducibly complex, is that correct?
A. That is not my area of expertise.
Q. So, ma’am, you’re not qualified to give an opinion as to whether the claims made by intelligent design advocates such as Michael Behe are scientific, is that correct?
A. I have relied on the work of established scientists such as my co-author Paul Gross, and they have a tremendous amount of expertise, and that is what I have relied upon.
Q. But in terms of your particular expertise, you’re not qualified to give that opinion, is that correct?
A. No, sir, and I have never claimed to be.
Q. Ma’am, you’re not an expert in religion?
A. No.
Q. You’re not an expert in the philosophy of science?
A. I’m not a philosopher of science.
Q. You’re not an expert in the philosophy of education?
A. No. That’s not the area that I practice in as a philosopher, no. Although I did do quite a bit of work on my dissertation with respect to Sidney Hook about that.
Q. Ma’am, you’re not a mathematician?
A. No.
Q. You’re not a probability theorist?
A. No.
Q. You do not possess formal training in mathematics, is that correct?
A. No.
Q. You have no – –
A. Well, college math.
Q. Certainly. And you have no doctorate in mathematics, is that correct?
A. No, my Ph.D. is in philosophy.
Q. So, ma’am, you’re not qualified to give an opinion as to whether Dr. Dembski’s claim of complex specified information is valid, isn’t that correct?
A. That is not my area of expertise and I have not offered opinions on that.
Q. Ma’am, this is a concept that he wrote about in a book published by Cambridge University Press, correct?
A. The Design Inference, yes.
Q. So you’re familiar with The Design Inference?
A. Yes, I know that he’s written that book, uh-huh.
Q. And Cambridge University Press is similar to like the Oxford University Press is a peer reviewing academic press?
A. Yes.
Q. And again the book that Dr. Dembski wrote, The Design Inference, explains his ideas of complex specified information, correct?
A. Well, Dr. Dembski has written that that book does not address the implications of design theory for biology, so — but that book is a highly technical book that is not within my area of expertise.
Q. And that book does discuss the concept of complex specified information, correct?
A. Yes, I believe it does.
Q. I want to explore your understanding of intelligent design as it relates to the opinions you intend to proffer in this court. Ma’am, is it your understanding that intelligent design requires adherence to the claim that the earth is six to ten thousand years old?
A. No, it doesn’t require that, although there are young earth creationists integrally involved in the intelligent design movement.
Q. But again your answer is intelligent design does not require adherence to that tenet?
A. No, they themselves do not make that a requirement.
Q. Is it your understanding that intelligent design does not require adherence to the six day creation event that is a literal reading of the account in the Book of Genesis?
A. No, it does not require that. Intelligent design is a broader type of creationism.
Q. But it doesn’t require a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, correct?
A. It does not.
Q. In fact, it doesn’t require a literal reading of any scripture, correct?
A. It does not require a literal reading of scripture, but it is based on scripture.
Q. Is it your understanding that intelligent design requires adherence to the flood geology point of view advance by creationists?
A. It’s my understanding that it does not require that.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day6am.html
She goes on to claim that, in her opinion, Intelligent Design does require a belief in a supernatural creator, based, apparently on statements by leaders in the ID movement. There is no such requirement, of course, and any statement by any well known supporter of ID regarding the supernatural are simply personal opinions and speculations that lie outside of what science, mathematics, and “the design inference” have to say on the matter.
I will point out a few problems with the story, most obviously these guys are not on the island by dint of choice. If they could leave they would do, and if they can’t leave they are vulnerable regardless, and should be cautious as best as they can, but simply running in the other direction probably won’t help much. That’s the problem with being trapped on an island. What I’m saying is, the practical utility of some potential warning is quite small under the curcumstances.
Probably you will say that’s just beside the point, but not completely. Suppose I agree the world was designed by some Great Architect, what has this realization achieved for me? Can I now do thing I was unable to do without that knowledge? How do I ask this guy for advice? How do I know he would give me good advice?
There’s another problem with the example, if you have seen a lot of beaches with plants and normally they are scattered pretty randomly, but just today they happen to be laid out in a clearly recognizable pattern, then you do have a valid empirical comparison to work with. On the other hand, if this is the first an only bunch of plants you have ever seen, and ever will see, how can you say what is weird here? What are you comparing it to?
A more accurate version of the island story would be William seeing the plants arranged in a complex, but novel pattern. He is able to construct a series of pictograms or letters in a new language in which the plants spell out the message. How could such complexity have arisen without design?
One of the “interesting” aspects of these threads is the really quite impressive displays of scientific ignorance.
— life violates the second law of thermodynamics
— evolution by natural selection cannot make simpler things from more complex ones
— cells do not communicate
— survival of the fittest is circular
— cellular biologists do not use the idea of natural selection
These are all just simple errors akin to thinking heat is a fuild called caloric or that oxygen molecules are comprised of 7 atoms. They are not worth arguing. There’s a saying im poker, if you can’t recognize the sucker, you’re the sucker ….
>>>One of the “interesting” aspects of these threads is the really quite impressive displays of scientific ignorance.
Pot-Kettle-Black
>>> – life violates the second law of thermodynamics
Straw-man. I don’t know anyone on this thread who made that claim. My own claim was that PURELY MATERIALIST THEORIES OF CHEMICAL EVOLUTION — THEORIES OF LIFE’S ORIGIN — all, necessarily, smuggle in a violation of the 2nd Law in order to solve the unsolvable: discriminated sequencing of chemicals for the sake of instructing amino acids how to correctly form functional proteins. Thermodynamic energy from starlight alone can’t do it. The energy has to be “directed” and be able to discriminate among alternatives, otherwise it will have to performa a random walk, trying this alternative, then that alternative, etc., until it accidentally hits on the right one. Sorry, but even with 14 billions years, there’s not enough time for this sort of blind search and plausibly hit on the right sequence. I can even prove that to you, since it’s a very simple calculation.
However, once life has begun and it’s already living and reproducing, then there’s no violation of the 2nd law. It’s only the question of the FIRST living organism arising through some imagined “self-sequencing” of nucleic acids or amino acids that entails a violation.
>>> – evolution by natural selection cannot make simpler things from more complex ones
All ID supporters agree that if you START with complexity, you can corrupt it enough through chance mutations to allow natural selection to separate out a simpler functional component.
To move from simple to complex without front-loading something like a goal is a different story entirely.
>>>– cells do not communicate
As a matter of fact, they do.
>>>– survival of the fittest is circular
As a matter of fact, it is. Even the Old Guard Darwinians admitted it. Here’s a quote from one of the big names of the era, J.B.S. Haldane:
“. . . the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest,’ is something of a tautology. So are most mathematical theorems. There is no harm in stating the same truth in two different ways.”
— 1935, “Darwinism Under Revision”, Rationalist Annual, 19—29.
[Haldane actually meant that the phrase is circular, not that it is a tautology, because these two fallacies are not identical. However, “tautology” and “circular reasoning” are often confused with each other]
Another very big name from the Old Guard was Ernst Mayr, who wrote the following:
“[I condemn] such trivial and meaningless circular statements as, for instance, ‘the fitter individuals will on the average leave more offspring.”
— 1961, “Cause and Effect in Biology”, Science, 134, 1501-1506
Now . . . what were you saying about not recognizing who the sucker is?
“survival of the fittest is circular”
It is indeed circular when “fitness” is defined in terms of survival. That’s not science, that’s just simple logic.
Tel, the modern synthesis is about genotypes. Survival of the fittest is about phenotypes.
If it’s circular it cannot be wrog. But it can be. As an example a mutation that makes you irrestible to the other sex but leaves your children sterile could make you the fittest, but the gene won’t spread.
“These are all just simple errors akin to thinking heat is a fuild called caloric …”
Whatever. You know perfectly well that this has nothing to do with the definition of circular logic.
I find asserting a creator simply because there’s no other “acceptable” explanation to be very thin ice on which to stand.
Much like justifying taxation because of “market failure” since I couldn’t get what I wanted at the price I think is “acceptable”.
Indeed. You can’t ever prove A via trying to disprove B. Creationists pretending that Biblical Creation must be the only alternative if they think they can disprove evolution is the product of faulty logic.
True. But if evolution can be disproven, SOME version of intelligent creation would be the only alternative – even if it wasn’t the Biblical one.
One of the fallacies that ID supporters work under is that anyone who dismisses or questions Intelligent Design in an ‘atheist.’ The reality is that just as many religious belivers and theologians have deep problems with what Intelligent Design argues for.
Regal wrote:
One of the fallacies that ID supporters work under is that anyone who dismisses or questions Intelligent Design in an ‘atheist.’
Regal, this very post is me clarifying the ID position, because even a theist like Ed Feser doesn’t seem to appreciate ID. Maybe you meant other defenders of ID, but I just wanted to point out that in this very post I’m not doing what you are saying “ID supporters” do.
>>>One of the fallacies that ID supporters work under is that anyone who dismisses or questions Intelligent Design in an ‘atheist.’
The opposite is just as true.
One of the fallacies that Darwinists work under is their assumption that anyone who dismisses or questions Darwinism is a creationist, or even just a theist. The reality is that just as many atheists have deep problems with what Darwinism argues for. That was, in fact, what first started the ID revolution back in 1966 at the Wistar Institute: it was mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and computer scientists, who couldn’t believe that their biologist and evolutionist colleagues in academia would naively accept certain conclusions when the mathematics, in their view, was clearly agains them.
See also a list of scientists — many atheists among them, no doubt — who have signed a petition voicing their skepticism of Darwinism:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=660
And finally, ponder this statement from atheist Fred Hoyle, a noted astrophysicist:
“. . . the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems . . . cannot in our view be generated by what are often called ‘natural’ processes . . . There is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible . . . The correct position we think is . . . an intelligence, which designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carbonaceous life . . . This is tantamount to arguing that carbonaceous life was invented by noncarbonaceous intelligence. . .”
He didn’t identify this “non-carbonaceous intelligence”, but also noted:
“. . . the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner . . . Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.”
— 1981, “Evolution from Space”, 24-148
There’s a certain parity between Darwinist Biology and Economics.
In both cases what you have is basically summarized by, “What happens is what happens,” but in order to impress the punters you need to come up with flowery explanations. Listen to the economics roundup on the nightly news, some guys knits forehead and explains how this stock when down because of an important correction in earnings and that stock went up because of enthusiasm, and somewhere else was profit taking — he doesn’t know that! He’s just saying whatever. Next week he will mix it around a bit and say all the same stuff in different order.
You hear the same type of explanations in biological circles about how this thing develops because of this and that pressure, but in neither case do you get a useful predictive methodology. At the end of the day, what happens is what happens… and by the way, God wanted it that way.
Oh yeah I forgot to say, Climate Science has the same characteristic… useless for predictions, but makes plenty of very well thought out explanations after the fact (give or take some data adjustments where necessary to tidy things up).
http://www.sierraclub.ca/en/AdultDiscussionPlease
Exhibit A: one bozo who predicted an ice free Arctic this year under the heading “Adult Discussion”. What is this, a VSP (Very Serious Pierrot) or something?
I also happen to think the Efficient Market Hypothesis is circular. Given that the only measure we have of a fair price is whatever the market does, we then go and decide that markets always result in a fair price.
Or in other words, what happens is what happens.
And if I do go out there and “beat the market” and come back with a profit, then the EMT conclusion is I must be doing a valuable job assisting to make the market more efficient… but if I’m unable to “beat the market” that’s because the market is indeed efficient.
What happens is what happens. Guaranteed to be right every time.
Landsburg is frustratingly dense on this topic, and in the past has shown to be utterly incapable of understanding the criticisms of the view no matter now you phrase them. I just want to focus on a new error he makes in the post (I’d say it on his blog, but good criticisms annoy him too much):
Dawkins: Irreducible complexity requires evolution. (This is Dawkins’s stated position in his book The God Delusion.)
This is not what Dawkins believes at all. His position, rather, is that evolution *doesn’t* produce irreducibly complex structures, and nothing in biology is irreducibly complex, though some man-made things are.
I haven’t read The God Delusion, but I’ve read Greatest Show, and he lays out the distinction pretty clearly there, using the example of jet engines vs propellor engines: that the latter can’t improve into the shape of the former via evolutionary processes (because you would have to go through worse designs as a substep), while biological structures (in every case we know of) could have come about by evolution because each step is a (fitness) improvement (which necessarily means sacrificing global optima for local ones).
In other words, contrary to the naive “Internet atheist” Bob criticizes here, Dawkins accepts the validity of the concept of irreducibility, but simply claims that organisms in biology don’t have it.
Of course, when you’re Landsburg, getting these things right isn’t all that important when you’ve got a good zinger you wanto use…
Yeah, I was so frustrated that Steve was ignoring my own zingers, that I wasn’t worried about being fair to Dawkins…
Silas wasn’t there some other problem you had with this approach by Landsburg? Something like people can build houses, but that doesn’t prove something about complexity? I can’t remember your analogy but I know it seemed like a good one.
The analogy you’re referring to was something like: if you build X (eg a house) out of Y (eg bricks), then X is at least as complex as Y. But Landsburg was saying both that a) certain things are made out of the natural numbers, and that b) the natural numbers are more complex than anything.
Silas is much too dumb to understand this, but you can also make bricks out of a house by dismantling the house. This doesn’t prevent the house from being more complex than the bricks. Or, to put this in a more precise context, given a model of Peano arithmetic with addition and multiplication, one can construct from it a model of Peano arithmetic with addition only, just by throwing away the multiplication. The latter is (in a quite precise sense) less complex than the former, and it is “made out of” the former in exactly the sense that I was referring to in the writings that Silas objects to.
I expect him to make some characteristically idiotic reply that simply ignores what I’ve said, but I hope this will clarify matters for everybody else.
You could go that route, sure. But since you only need a tiny portion of Peano arithmetic to implement/explain the universe (enough to allow you to implement a universal Turing machine and the relevant program), then the universe is not (necessarily) instantiating he full complexity of Peano arithmetic. (Not the first time I’ve explained this to you.)
So where *is* the universe instantiating the full complexity of Peano arithmetic, considering that all of observable reality can be explained by that Turing-complete subset? Nowhere, except perhaps where intelligent beings have proven theorems …
… Oh wait, then you lose the claim about PA having “always existed” and not arising from something previous over time.
You could (as usual) claim you’re just talking about some more Platonic sense of PA existing, but then you’re back to either:
a) making your argument dependent on a controversial claim about Platonism , or
b) defining math in terms of the counterfactual set of results from applying operations, and even further removed from anything Dawkins has talked about.
If your argument stands still long enough, all of this becomes obvious, which is probably why…
Silas: Thanks for confirming how dumb you are! I see that you still don’t understand the difference between Peano arithmetic and the standard model thereof, even after I and others have explained it to you a thousand times or so. (Note the reference to the wholly irrelevant “complexity of Peano arithmetic”.) And I see that you think you can refute the statement that A is a substructure of B by pointing out that A might not instantiate the full complexity of B. And I see that you’re still going to keep saying the same stupid things forever.
Steven Landsburg wrote:
Silas: Thanks for confirming how dumb you are!
Uh, Steve, if you can’t say something nice…
Sorry. Replace “Peano arithmetic” with “the standard model of Peano arithmetic”, get over yourself, and try again. (This isn’t the first time you’ve used a mislabeling error as an excuse to evade the point. )
Silas
*As a mathematical object* the natural numbers are a complex beast. That’s just true. The Peano Axioms are just a tool we use to describe and help order our thinking about these mathematical entities. You cannot carve out just “enough to allow you to implement a universal Turing machine and the relevant program” and claim to have something that as a *mathematical entity* is non-complex. Becuase even if you could perform that surgery the resulting beast would be complex enough for the Turing theorems.
Note I say mathematical entities. Am I by using a modifier suggesting these are not entities in the way frogs and atoms are. You betcha. (That’s where Steve goes wrong. )
Ken: Thanks (in your second paragraph) for saying something thoughtful that I disagree with, and for the clarity of your first paragraph, which is true, uncontroversial and relevant, although I guarantee that Silas will not understand it.
although I guarantee that Silas will not understand it.
Silas has free will!
I like Silas, and I think he often makes really good arguments. But on this issue I must say he does sometimes seem like an example of that theoretical impossibility: the man who *chooses* what to believe.
I choose to believe that I have free will. I don’t care much about theoretical impossibilities, I’m only bothered by practical impossibility.
Yes, you could Ken: the moment you’re encoding the universe (or anything) as a computer program, you’ve carved out a something non-complex. Although one should really drop the charade at that point and just admit one doesn’t need the full complexity of (the standard model of) the natural numbers to explain the universe.
@Landsburg: I’ve made the point in Ken’s second paragraph (and with justification!) to you many, many times before. Funny how only when other people say it do you regard it as responsive and intelligent…
Though it doesn’t stop you from ignoring it and characterizing the argument as saying “herp derp, how do we know I exist?”, as you did in your post “False ID”.
Silas wrote:
Though it doesn’t stop you from ignoring it and characterizing the argument as saying “herp derp…
Silas, I realize Steve was rude to you, but there’s never any justification for writing like you’re Noah Smith. Please, there are innocent people who read this blog.
Does “irreducible complexity” even have a tangible definition?
What makes some complexity more irreducible than other complexity? I mean, it’s all made of something right?
Actually I think Behe has a legitimate notion here. A machine of many parts in complex interactions such that the removal of any part of alteration of any arrangment leaves the residue useless. If he could demonstrate the existence of such a thing he’d have a strong argument against Darwinism. But he hasn’t, and can’t.
This is a slightly sloppy statement actually. He has to show I mean that there is no way the other remaining bits could have served a function and so evolved by natural selection.
That’s silly, I mean take the battery out of your mobile phone and it stops working. Does that mean a mobile phone is “irreducible complexity” ?
No one designing phones would see it that way, nor anyone using the phone… they would just buy a new battery.
>>>Does that mean a mobile phone is “irreducible complexity” ?
Yes, just like Behe’s simple example of a mouse-trap.
A power source for the mobile phone was part of the initial design plans, and was obviously taken into consideration from the start by the intelligent designers known as “engineers.”
It’s pretty obvious that a piece of intelligently-designed technology such as a smartphone could not have evolved in a Darwinian fashion via chance mutation and natural selection; rather, the DESIRED END RESULT was taken into consideration (a procedure known as “front loading”) at the outset by the intelligent designers, and the necessary elements — circuit design, materials, power source, aesthetics, etc. — brought together intentionally.
Exactly. I can understand why a professional biologist might object and say that a bacterium’s flagellum isn’t irreducibly complex, but if you guys can’t see that a smart phone is, then you don’t even understand what the term means.
Huh? Guys, plural? Who falls under that plural Bob? I after all pointed out that Behe has a legitimate notion here, a good test of Darwinian theory. If there are sufficiently complex machines that are irreducibly complex then that is a big big problem for us Darwinists. So (I agree with you on this not Tel: Darwinism is real science that makes falsifiable predictions!)
>>>A machine of many parts in complex interactions such that the removal of any part of alteration of any arrangment leaves the residue useless.
Straw-man.
Behe never claimed that the “residue” would be useless in an absolute sense. He claimed that the “residue” would be useless for its current function, and that, ergo, it could not have appeared incrementally, since the current function requires all of the parts at the same time.
True Believers in the Darwin faith pretend that the “residue” COULD have had some OTHER function, in some OTHER context, and was then “co-opted” for use in its present function. Aside from the fact that this is simply a matter of faith on the part of Darwinists — as in, there’s NO empirical evidence that this has occurred in the past or even can occur — Behe shows that co-opting in the direction of increasing complex-specified-information requires intellgent intervention and could never happen by chance. What MIGHT, perhaps occur by chance is moving in the direction of decreasing complex-specified-information through natural deterioration. You can possibly move from a mouse-trap to a tie-clasp to a door-stop by chance and natural deterioration of the original elements in the mouse-trap; but you can never move from the door-stop to a tie-clasp to a mouse-trap by that means: you could only do so if an intelligent agent intentionally added elements for the intentional purpose of co-opting its use for something other than its current use.
Thus, you could conceivably move from a pre-existing bacterial flagellum to a degraded form of the flagellum whose residual elements now act as a pump (in fact, molecular dating shows that the flagellum appeared first and the pump appeared later); but you’ll never move from the simpler mechanism of the pump to the more complex-specified mechanism of the flagellum.
If you’re going to criticize Behe, at least grasp his argument correctly.
“If you’re going to criticize Behe, at least grasp his argument correctly.”
If you’re going to criticize me then at least grasp when I am agreeing with Behe.
>>>If there are sufficiently complex machines that are irreducibly complex then that is a big big problem for us Darwinists.
>>>If you’re going to criticize me then at least grasp when I am agreeing with Behe.
You appear to have no clear idea of what Behe actually wrote, probably because you’re too busy surfing puerile (and factually incorrect) videos on YouTube to bother reading his books.
Behe’s model for irreducible complexity is a simple mousetrap; there’s nothing especially complex about it. What makes it “irreducible”, however, is a certain kind of logical necessity that each individual part bears to the whole device, such that if we remove any one part, the whole device loses all of its original function. That it might afterward be “co-opted” for some other function is not contest by Behe; he merely points out that such co-opting could only work in a Darwinian fashion (chance mutation plus natural selection) if we remove parts, one by one, and flow in the direction of decreasing complexity: mousetrap > tie-clasp > door-stop.
But you’d never be able to start with doorstop and by chance add a spring, a catch, a clasp, and the nails or screws to attach everything to the original base. That would require “front loading” by a designer who was INTENT on achieving a goal of having a functional mousetrap.
Stop glomming onto the word “complexity” and focus, instead, on the concept of “irreducibility,” which is, after all, the gravamen of Behe’s argument.
As an extreme measure, you also might want to read Behe — as well as many other authors I could suggest — so that you could at least fake an impression of knowing what you’re talking about.
Yes, it does, Tel. Dawkins actually goes over it pretty well in Greatest Show, although the discussion is lost on Internet atheists who are content to claim (contra Dawkins) that the very concept is incoherent.
One way to put it is that a mechanism is IrCon if each iteration in its construction is an improvement (with respect to some functionality metric). In evolution, the iterations are generations, and we have reason to believe they are not IrCon because a) they would have been weeded out, and b) we can identify continuous improvements in the “incomplete” versions of the design.
In contrast, with (complex) man-made mechanisms, there are sharp dropoffs in functionality between design iterations, like in the example of improving from a propellor to a jet engine.
So far in the future when humans have been defeated in battle by robots and those robots have gone out into space and forgotten all about Earth, they will say to each other:
“We all know Robots are built by other Robots, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise.”
“But who put the first battery into the first Robot, since obviously a Robot without a battery cannot operate.”
Murphy’s genius is that he can get the atheists to argue amongst themselves! Well played Bob!
Dawkins is talking about things Dr Johnson can kick. Landsburg is talking about mathematical objects. Until you can kick the number 4 ….
Ivan and Economic Freedom:
See my UPDATE at the bottom of the post. I think I slightly botched my treatment of Behe originally.
This post puts me in mind of the similarity on these issues between two regulars here: Gene Landsburg and Steven E Callahan.
Both use the word “existence” in a wider sense than I like to.
As illustration, let’s consider if Bob Murphy has a mind. (I tackle the hard questions.)
I say, when you take away Bob’s brain you take away his mind.
No brain no mind, Bob’s mind has no existence apart from his brain.
I don’t much care about the ontological debates we could have on the topic.
If Bob’s mind exists when his brain exists then does that existence exist?
Does the existence of that existence imply the non-existence of its non-existence, and hence imply the existence of the non-existence of the non-existence?
Or conversely does the non-existence of the existence imply the existence of the non-existence?
And then what about the existence of the existence of the non-existence of the non-existence of the existence of the mind?
Don’t get me started on the persistence of the existence!
I think the issues Steve and Gene raise and debate belong to this kind of metaphysics, and aren’t really relevant to the question, did brains evolve?
A human brain can sustain quite a gut wrenching amount of damage and still operate at least in some capability.
Yes, and mental capacities are impaired too.
>>>No brain no mind
An ideological bias.
No one understands precisely what the relation is between brain and mind.
And quite a few scientists claim that mind can, in fact, exist apart from a physical brain. Not just “can, in fact,” but “does, in fact.”
Read “The Self and Its Brain,” an anthology of dialogues between Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles (Nobel Laureate, medicine).
I know you’re a creature of habit, but do try to break your knee-jerk habit of simple, naive, 19th-century-style reductive materialism. Science and philosophy have moved beyond it; you should too.
This is hilarious. The comon complaint from people like you and Callahan is that brain scientists just blindly assume that the mind is a function of the brain, ie that the notion is amongst scientists quite quite uncontroversial.
Look EF, you are appallingly ignorant of biology and science. You just aren’t worth talking to, and won’t be until you learn some basic stuff. Like entropy.
>>>until you learn some basic stuff. Like entropy.
This should learn you some basic stuff like entropy:
“Order can increase in an open system, not because the laws of probability are suspended when the door is open, but simply because order may walk in through the door…. If we found evidence that DNA, auto parts, computer chips, and books entered through the Earth’s atmosphere at some time in the past, then perhaps the
appearance of humans, cars, computers, and encyclopedias on a previously barren planet could be explained without postulating a violation of the second law here…. But if all we see entering is radiation and meteorite fragments, it seems clear that what is entering through the boundary cannot explain the increase in order observed here.
Suppose you and your wife go for a vacation, leaving a dog, a cat and a parakeet loose in the house . . When you come back, you will not be surprised to see chaos in the house. But tell her some scientists say, “but if you leave the door open while on vacation, your house becomes an open system, and the second law does not apply to open systems… you may find everything in better condition than when you left.” I’ll bet she will say, “If a maid enters through the door and cleans the house, maybe, but if all that enters is sunlight, wind and other animals, probably not.”
Imagine trying to tell my friend’s wife that, provided her house is an open system, the fact that chaos is increasing in the rest of the universe — or on the sun, provided sunlight enters through the door — means that chaos could decrease in her house while she is gone. Even if the door is left open, it is still extremely improbable that order in the house will improve, unless something enters that makes this not extremely improbable — for example, new furniture or an intelligent human.”
— from “Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems”
proceedings of “Biological Information: New Perspectives,” Cornell University, 2011.
by
Granville Sewell
Professor of mathematics
University of Texas, El Paso
http://www.humanevents.com/2008/04/18/connecting-hitler-and-darwin/
Connecting Hitler and Darwin
Human Events
By: David Berlinski
4/18/2008
One man – Charles Darwin – says: “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. …”
Another man – Adolf Hitler – says: Let us kill all the Jews of Europe.
Is there a connection?
Yes obviously is the answer of the historical record and common sense.
Published in 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said nothing of substance about the origin of species. Or anything else, for that matter. It nonetheless persuaded scientists in England, Germany and the United States that human beings were accidents of creation. Where Darwin had seen species struggling for survival, German physicians, biologists, and professors of hygiene saw races.
They drew the obvious conclusion, the one that Darwin had already drawn. In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. German scientists took the word expense to mean what it meant: The annihilation of less fit races.
The point is made with abysmal clarity in the documentary, Expelled. Visiting the site at which those judged defective were killed – a hospital, of course – the narrator, Ben Stein, asks the curator what most influenced the doctors doing the killing.
“Darwinism,” she replies wanly.
It is perfectly true that prominent Nazis were hardly systematic thinkers. They said whatever came into their heads and since their heads were empty, ideas tended to ricochet. Heinrich Himmler proclaimed himself offended by the idea that he might been descended from the apes.
If Himmler was offended, the apes were appalled.
Nonetheless, even stupid men reach their conclusions because they have been influenced in certain ways. At Hitler’s death in May of 1945, the point was clear enough to the editorial writers of the New York Times. “Long before he had dreamed of achieving power,” they wrote, [Hitler] had developed the principles that nations were destined to hate, oppose and destroy one another; [and] that the law of history was the struggle for survival between peoples … ”.