The DesignInterference

The Scoville scale of dangerous questions

2007-07-26T17:21:00.000-07:00

Taped to the wall just next to where I am writing this is a cut-out from an old issue of "New Scientist" that describes the Scoville scale. This scale describes the hotness (spicyness) of food on a linear scale. The hotness is determined by diluting a known amount of a food item until you no longer can taste the burning sensation. The rating a food item gets on the scale is represented directly by the amount of dilution necessary. While a typical Jalapeno pepper measures a paltry 2,500-8,000 on this scale, the Guiness Book of record desribes a pepper that measure 580,000(!) and there is even one that measure 855,000!!!. Pretty hot. That's interesting and all, but what has this got to do with ID? Well, William Dembski proposes that we should ask some dangerous questions for materialism and grade them on the Scoville scale. Asks he:

What would happen if the general public not only disbelieved materialism (as it is, they disbelieve it now) but also decided to cease funding it out of their tax dollars?

I'll let the ID crowd worry about that question and ask a similar one on my own:

What would happen if the general public not only embraced non-materialism (even more than now) but also decided to cease funding materialistic science, instead channeling all those tax dollars into non-materialistic "science"?

- What would happen if prayer studies superceded drug trials?

- What would happen if divining became a legitimate scientific tool?

- What would happen if "God-did-it" became a valid scientific explanation?

I'd say that the above would rate fairly highly on the scale, some possibly coming close to the equivalent of pure capsaicin.

Small note: I just noticed that this is my 100th post on this blog. Hurrah for me.

I am so smart. S-M-R-T!

2007-07-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

With a bit of practice, that is.

Oh, the irony

2007-07-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute wonders:

Question: What do you do when a theory logically predicts both (a) and not (a)?
Answer: Apparently you heavily promote it.

Luskin is referring to a couple of evolutionary papers that appear to do just that. It would seem that a theory that can predict both one thing and it's absolute opposite would be absolutely useless as far as science goes. And he would be right - to an extent. There are some problems with Luskins argument, however. (1) Predicting both (a) and not (a) is NOT necessarily bad. To see why, consider this: if (x) then (a); if (y) then not (a). Both (a) and not (a) are predicted but the conclusion depends on the premises of the argument. So, predicting two opposite outcomes is not necessarily a bad thing at all. (2) Evolutionary theory on it's own doesn't make any predictions. It is the auxilliary propositions added to them that do. So in a scenario where hyposesis (x) predicts (a) and hypothesis (y) predicts not (a) and (a) is the outcome, hypothesis (x) makes the successful prediction. Fine, you might say, but if evolution can make contradictory hypothesis it would still be able to predict anything. What is important to note, however, is that there are restrictions as to which auxilliary propositions can be used - they must be independently supported. For a starter, we're not allowed to assume that the theory we are testing is true, for then we would be indulging in circular reasoning. Second, we can't use the observations that we based our auxilliary proposition on to test our theory, for if we did, we could simply have our proposition predict whatever is observed. Lets use this knowledge to explain why Luskin is wrong when he claims that evolution predicts both (a) and not (a). Writes Luskin:

The first article about the evolution of Waterfowl genitalia contends, “Scientists had speculated that male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge over those not as well-endowed when it came to successfully fertilizing females.” That makes sense, I suppose. But the article makes one admission that strikingly contradicts that little just-so hypothesis: “Most birds lack phalluses, organs like human penises. Waterfowl are among the just 3 percent of all living bird species that retain the grooved phallus…” If long phalluses are so advantageous for reproduction, why did so many birds supposedly lose them? Darwinists will look back retroactively and tell us that, in the environmental conditions for most bird species, long phalluses weren’t advantageous. The problem in so doing is that they now have a theory which can explain both (a) long phalluses, and also not (a).

The auxilliary proposition here (male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge) can be tested by performing a "simple" experiment. One can take two male populations of fowl; one has short phalluses, one has long ones. Allowing for mating with female fowl, one would observe which population was the most reproductively successful. If the population with the long phalluses was more successful then the proposition is strengthened since it predictied that this would happen. Notice that the proposition does not require you to assume that evolution is true what-so-ever. Neither are you recycling old "known" observations.

Let us now have a look at one of Luskin's favorite ID predictions, namely that ID predicts that the should be no junk DNA. Luskin has made this claim so many times that my eardrums (or should that be retinas?) are starting are going numb. Let's examine how ID would fare under the above conditions. First of all, can we avoid circular reasoning for reaching this conclusion? As it turns out, no, we can't. ID makes no assumptions what-so-ever about the supposed designer. (The following is taken virtually verbatim from an article I wrote previously) In fact, ID does not and CAN NOT tell us anything about the designer; It cannot tell us anything about the designer’s intentions or purposes any more than it can tell us anything about whether the designer prefers brown over blue. The "junk-DNA claim" seems to stem from the observation (by IDists) that when human designers design things, they don’t tend to put junk into their designs. We should then reasonably expect that the “intelligent designer” would not have put junk into the design of our DNA. So, the claim comes down to is that since we can predict, based on human behaviour that there should be little junk DNA, it also follows that ID would predict the very same thing. An observant reader might notice something iffy here – namely that ID does not say anything about the designer. More precisely, ID says nothing about the designer thinking and acting like a human and even if it did, it says nothing about the designer’s desires about junk DNA. In order for ID to predict something regarding the existence of junk in DNA or anything for that matter, it will have to add some form of assumption about the designer’s intents or purposes. That assumption would include something about the designer's desires to put junk into DNA. I.e. the conclusion would also be found in the assumptions - pure circularity. So, ID is just as happy to predict the non-existence of junk in DNA as it is happy to predict it's ample existence.

Let's now, as opposed to Luskin's circular argument, go full circle and return the reason for this post, namely Luskin's initial assertion:

Question: What do you do when a theory logically predicts both (a) and not (a)?
Answer: Apparently you heavily promote it.

Which theory does that sound like?

Edited to add: EVOLUTIONBLOG has also commented on Luskin's post.

A de novo-'Out of Nowhere'-Gene

2007-07-23T23:57:00.000-07:00

At uncommondescent, PaV find it interesting how "Darwinists" explain things. He is referring to a gene - hydra - found in various species of the fruit fly Drosophila that appears to not to be related to other genes in any known genome. What is interesting, according to PaV, is that since gradual accumlation of mutations in a duplicated gene is an unlikely source for this gene, the scientists that described it actually propose an alternative explanation for how this gene might have ended up in the flies genomes. The explanation proposed is that a virus which carried a transposon that inserted itself into an ancestral fly genome. PaV says:

While that’s, hypothetically possible, right now there’s no way of proving that since, per the author, “You cannot find any related genes in the fly genome or any species’ genome, and that is what is unique.” (my emphasis) Is this simply grasping at straws? Or, are they onto something? I guess time will tell.

Being that I have done some research into bacterial horizontal gene transfer, especially regarding integrons and gene cassettes, I don't find the researchers proposed explanation particularly far-fetched. To explain why, I must first give a quick explanation of what integrons/gene cassettes are. They all consist of a gene that codes for a protein known as an integrase. Near this gene is an attachment site where the integrase can either insert of excise something known as gene cassettes. Gene cassettes, in turn, consist of a recombination site (recognised by the integrase) and most often an ORF that is typically some hundreds of bases long. ORFs found in gene cassettes often carry adaptive traits such as antibiotic resistance but more to the point it is fairly common for them to not have any known homologues - just as in the case of hydra. So when the researchers propose that hydra was transferred from another organism, I don't think thay are grasping for straws at all. I'm more surprised that such genes are not found more often. Granted, integrons/gene cassettes are only known to exist in prokaryotes, but it not exactly unheard of that foreign DNA can insert itself into eukaryotes either (think HIV and herpes virus).

What I find interesting is that PaV finds it interesting how "Darwinists"explain things. Proposing a plausible explanation is simply good science and shouldn't be sneered at.

2007-07-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

Casey Luskin seems to have a bit of a problem performing probability calculations. His claim is that, for a mouse with a mutation rate of 2*10^-9 per base pair per generation, it would take 125 million years for every single base pair to become subsituted (in the absense of selection).

"Carroll claims that the mutation rate for mice is 2 x 10^-9 per base pair per generation, and other sources indicate that mouse generation time is 3 months. This means that a non-functional mouse 'pseudogene' should be completely rewritten in about 125 million years. According to Neo-Darwinists, humans and mice supposedly shared a common ancestor between 75 and 125 million years ago, which means that any such shared 'pseudogenes' could have been 60%-100% rewritten by neutral mutations. Could we still recognize a 'pseudogene' [were it] 60% rewritten? 75%? 100%?"
The calculation is fairly simple to perform, and I'll break it in 3 steps:
(1): Mutation rate = 2 * 10-9 mutated-base-pair / generation = 0.000000002 mutated-base-pair / generation.
(2): 0.000000002 mutated-base-pair / generation * 4 generations / year = 0.000000008 mutated-base-pair / year.
(3): Take the inverse to make the units "years per mutated-base-pair" (i.e., how long will it take to guarantee that a given base pair is mutated or "rewritten"), and you get 125,000,000 years per any given mutated-base-pair.
One can also frame the calculation slightly differently by recognizing that there are 4 generations per year for mice:
0.000000002 mutated-base-pair / generation * 125,000,000 year * 4 generation / year = 1 mutated-base-pair.

So, 0.000000002 * 125,000,000 *4 = 1 is his probability argument, which is, of course, extremely wrong. Casey Luskin, you can't simply add probabilites together. If you could, then you would be 200% certain that all bases would be substituted after 250 million years. This is obviously nonsensical. Using this "logic", Luskin should also argue that after six rolls with a dice, you are 100% certain to get a "1". A more correct calculation would be to take 1 minus the inverse of the probability of a substitution raised to the power of the number of possibilities for substitutions:

1-(0.999999998^(4*125,000,000))=0.63. I.e. after 125,000,000 years, there is a 63% chance that any given base pair has mutated once. (There is also a roughly 40% chance that any base pair has mutated twice and a 25% chance that it has mutated three times. Several mutations at the same site could potentially restore the original base pair.)

"Evolutionists" sometimes accuse creationists of not understanding probability calculations, something that sometimes is warranted and sometimes is not. In Luskin's case it certainly is.

This blog is rated:

2007-07-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

Well, not really. It's really rated:

The only offensive words that showed up on this blog, according to mingle, was 'dead' - three times. I wonder what would happen if I started writing more about sex, sex, sex and drugs, drugs, drugs. See, I couldn't even muster entering any ruder words than those. Rceommended for "general audiences" it is.

2007-07-08T15:43:00.000-07:00

Seems like the "tagging" that has been doing the rounds at a number of blogs has reached my corner of the blogosphere. In order for me not to be afflicted with eternal misfortune, having to sacrifice my first-born and having to eat only haggis for the rest of my life, these rules must be obeyed:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Rather than give a boring account of some boring aspects of my life, .... nah, I'll give a boring account of some boring aspect of my life - a short account of why this blog exists. It all started many years ago in this very galaxy when:

1. I started reading popular science magazines in my early teens.

2. I used to be a well-paid computer programmer.

3. While reading "New Scientist" some eight years ago, I came across a side bar saying something along the lines of "Creationism is alive and kicking in the US". Growing up in a largely secular society, I thought such religious devotion was virtually non-existent. Boy, was I wrong.

4. I got interested in the evolution vs ID/creationism debate and my interest in science switched from "general" to more biology-focused.

5. I left my lucrative job to pursue a career in science.

6. I started debating creationists in various forms in different internet fora such as Skeptic Friends and later Uncommon Descent.

7. I got banned from posting at Uncommon Descent.

8. I set up this blog so that I can moan all I want, without the risk of censorship, about some of the nonsense the ID/creationist crowd put forth.

The unfortunates I will expose to this chain-mail curse are as follows:

Fresh Brainz

Aude Sapere

Vetenskap & Förnuft

Rationally Speaking

Science Avenger

A History of Histrionics

decorabilia

I think that I will probably be the first to tag myself, leading to an infinite tag-loop (yeah, I know I have already been tagged, but that is not against the rules):

The DesignInterference

First denialism about the HIV/AIDS link, now...

2007-07-03T04:17:00.000-07:00

... we are told by a certain BobMort that antibiotic resistant bacteria are no threat to humanity, since

What they failed to notice was that each time a bacteria becomes immune to an antibiotic, it usually becomes dramatically weakened and less able to survive in other respects.
...

Evolutionist doctors believe that antibiotic resistance is a bad thing because in their world-view, the thing they fear the most is a strain of bacteria which is reistant to multiple forms of antibiotic; however what they have failed to comprehend is that such a bacterial strain would have been so weakened by evolution as to become hardly a danger to mankind.
...

Evolution is nothing to be afraid of, and can only practically weaken a strain of bacteria to the point where it is no longer a threat.

I've previously discussed that the acquisition of antibiotic resistance does not necessarily lead to decreased fitness in an environment where antibiotics are absent, so BobMort's point is dud from the word go. There is, on top of this, a notable irony in BobMost's writings as well. He claims:

In a nutshell, these podcasts explain that doctors have mis-understood the concept of antibiotic resistance, mainly because they have applied a materialistic, evolutionary world-view to this problem.

The irony is that, as detailed in his previous quotes above, he appeals to materialistic, evolutionary processes to argue that antibiotic resistance is NOT a problem. The fact that the topic of his post was about how ID was to lead to practical medical advances makes it all even more ironic.

ID awards coming your way

2007-07-02T17:47:00.001-07:00

The ID movement has for a long time been criticized for not conducting any research, instead spending all it's hard-earned cash on merely promoting it's philosophical position. Today, things are about to change. As of this year,

The Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center (IDURC) is proud to present the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award, presented annually to a deserving college graduate for excellence in student advocacy of intelligent design.

Oh, wait. The award is not awarded because of any research performed - it is awarded for promoting ID. Nothing new under the Sun then.

Interestingly, the recipient of the award is to be kept anonymous. The stated reason for this is:

The recipient of the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award will remain anonymous for the protection of the recipient. The many students, professors, and scientists who have been denied degrees or tenure, and removed from positions and jobs for no other reason than acceptance of—or even sympathy to—intelligent design theory is very telling of the importance of keeping these bright young minds out of the crosshairs of those opposed to open-minded investigation and critical thought.

Given that the award is given out to be people because they are already known to promote ID, I really don't understand what the secrecy is about. Even if the recipient posts anonymously on a blog, why not name the blog? Not that it really matters, I'm just wondering...

Darwinism hurts - but viruses don't

2007-07-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

IDists love to do a bit of Darwinism bashing when given, it seems like, ANY opportunity. Latest in line is PaV at uncommondescent who claims that Darwinism has been a hinder in the fight against cancer. He makes this claim based on an article written by Dr. Peter Duesberg that argues that aneuploidy rather than point mutations actually cause cancers. The illogic of Pav's claim was properly exposed in the comment section of PaV's post by Hermagoras and GeoMor so there is no need for me to say anything further on that point. Also, Orac at Respectful Insolence discusses the plausibility of Duesberg's claims.

The comments section takes a rather interesting turn when IDists DaveScot, PaV and scordova turn out to be "HIV causes AIDS denialists". This was something I only expected to happen in South Africa, but then science doesn't seem to be these guys strong point. The reason I bring this up is because PaV and nullasus argue that we should not rely so much on majority views (such as "Darwinism") but also take minority views into consideration. HIV not causing AIDS certainly qualifies as one of these. Minority views are, as these guys ocrrectly point out, sometimes correct and we ignore them at our own peril. This seems to be a popular argument for ID as well but, honestly, some views should not be given much attention - especially when they have VERY little going for them. We have to pursue avenues of research that are more likely than others to be fruitful. Some of these WILL be wrong and perhaps useless, but if we include outlandish ideas, what would the ratio for success/failure be then?

If IDists disagree with this, then perhaps they should also support Stefan Lanka - his views are certainly minority ones. In a 2001 book he claims that there is no proof of any medically relevant viruses at all. A gut reaction probably tells you that this guy is a true ignorant, but he is, in fact, a PhD-holding virologist and molecular biologist. Really, how big is the step from denying the "HIV causes AIDS" statement to the "medically relevant viruses don't exist at all" statement? How fruitful would research along these lines be?

Off topic: The worth of my dead weight.

2007-06-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

Alledgedly, if I sell my dead body to science, I could get no less than:

$3740.00

Mingle² - Online Dating

Might as well keep on living...

Link found through Pharyngula.

Egnor and dualism. Again...

2007-06-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

Michael Egnor is again talking about the sufficiency of matter to cause conciousness. This time around he doesn't actually come out looking completely silly. In his latest writings, he proposes a test how one could determine whether or not mere matter could be sufficient to cause mind. Egnor says that if a computer were to pass the Turing test, then he would accept the sufficiency of matter to cause mind. As Egnor writes:

Alan Turing, in 1950, suggested a test for consciousness in a machine. In the Turing test, an investigator would interact with a person and a machine, but would be blinded as to which was which. If the investigator couldn’t tell which one was the person, and which was the machine, it is reasonable to conclude that the machine had a mind like the person. It would be reasonable to conclude that the machine was conscious.

Unfortunately he seems to create a loop-hole for himself (if this should ever happen up to his standards) by invoking the Chinese Room thought experiment. Writes Egnor:

Imagine that P.Z. Myers went to China and got a job. His job is this: he sits in a room, and Chinese people pass questions, written on paper in Chinese, through a slot into the room. Myers, of course, doesn’t speak Chinese. Not a word. But he has a huge book, written entirely in Chinese, that contains every conceivable question, in Chinese, and a corresponding answer to each question, in Chinese. P.Z. just matches the characters in the submitted questions to the answers in the book, and passes the answers back through the slot.
In a very real sense, Myers would be just like a computer. He’s the processor, the Chinese book is the program, and questions and answers are the input and the output. And he’d pass the Turing test. A Chinese person outside of the room would conclude that Myers understood the questions, because he always gave appropriate answers. But Myers understands nothing of the questions or the answers. They’re in Chinese. Myers (the processor) merely had syntax, but he didn't have semantics. He didn't know the meaning of what he was doing. There’s no reason to think that syntax (a computer program) can give rise to semantics (meaning), and yet insight into meaning is a prerequisite for consciousness. The Chinese Room analogy is a serious problem for the view that A.I. is possible.

Egnor finishes with his piece-de-resistance:

But imagine that artificial intelligence could be created, and Searle is wrong. Imagine that teams of the best computer scientists, working day and night for decades, finally produced a computer that had an awareness of itself. A conscious computer, with a mind! So, finally, P.Z. Myers and I could agree on something. Myers would be right. If a computer had a mind, we could infer two things:

1) Matter is sufficient, as well as necessary, for the mind. The mind is an emergent property of matter.
2) The emergence of mind from matter requires intelligent design.

It’s not easy being a materialist.

Seems like a catch-22 for materialists, doesn't it? Either mere matter is not sufficient to cause mind OR mere matter is sufficient to cause mind but while showing this, it is also proved that ID is true. It is a convincing argument - if you don't think it through.

#1: Egnor's claim is entirely negative. As he says, "If we can’t create A.I., my viewpoint would seem more credible". His null hypothesis is, therefore, that matter is not enough to cause mind even though there is no evidence what-so-ever that there are any disembodied minds out there.

#2: ID proponents are very fond of claiming that experiments in general, since they are intelligently designed, point to intelligent causes. Each and every A.I. experiment would be intelligently designed, no matter how trivial the input from any researchers was (yes, IDists like to point out the the chips in the computer was intelligently designed, after all). All Egnor is saying is that it is impossible, according to his standards, to use computers to to elucidate whether or not mind could arise in the absense of intelligence. So, if a machine was to become conscious, Egnor's seconds point above would be true by definition. Egnor is playing a silly "damned if you do, damned if you don't" game. Do the experiment and I win. Don't do the experiment and I win. Heads I win, tails you loose.

So, all Egnor has done is to say that even if he is wrong about the sufficiency of matter being able to cause mind, he is still right about intelligent design. Reminds me of something my brother used to say: "I'm always right and even if I'm not right, at least I'm not wrong."

Teleology and ID in physics

2007-06-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

scordova at uncommondescent comments that although teleology is rejected by evolutionary biologists, it is alive and well in physics. He supports this conclusion with a quote from a book about the history of physics that reads:

Fermat’s work led the German philosopher Leibniz to argue in a letter written in 1687 that in as much as the concept of purpose was basic to true science, the laws of physics should and could be expressed in terms of minimum principles
…….
The first such formulation was given by the French scientist Maupertuis who in 1744 presented a paper to the French Academy of Sciences showing that the behaviour of bodies in an impact could be predicted by assuming the product mvs, where m is mass, v is velocity, and s the distance, to be a minimum.

He also quotes Euler as writing:

All the greatest mathematicians have long since recognized that the [least action] method…is not only extremely useful in analysis, but that it also contributes greatly to the solution of physical problems…the fabric of the universe is most perfect, and the work of a most wise Creator

So, minimum principles point to a creator since they point to perfect design. Need I remind scordova that on uncommondescent's comment policy page appears this statement:

ID makes no claim that the source of complexity is a perfect God incapable of imperfection. Write that down.

The policy is right. ID says nothing about the designer. The alledged designer is free to design however many imperfect things it wants to. How, then, can scordova imply that the least action principles of physics are ID-inspired? The answer is, he can't. He can claim that the least action principles were "the-perfect-God-of-the-Bible-inspired", but in order to do that, one has to make something that ID doesn't - make an assumption about the designer. Why would scordova make such a mistake? The answer may lie in another quote he supplies:

Max Plank also felt the action formulation was a more fundamental view of natural phenomena than the mechanistic approach, primarily because he was partial to teleological explanations for religious reasons…..

Seems to me like scordova is implying that ID is a religious idea - or, perhaps, that the least action principles were religiously motivated rather than ID motivated. There is a difference, scordova just can't see it, though.

Eternal inflation solves all of biology's mysteries?

2007-06-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

In a peer-reviewed article published in the online journal Biology Direct, Eugene Koonin argues that the emergence of life is an extremely unlikely event - virtually impossible - but that life emerged anyway. It was able to do this, Koonin hypothesises, because it is possible that there are an infinite number of universes that all are different; And with an infinite number of universes follows the possbility of essentially infinitely unlikely events occuring with certainty. Events, Koonin argues, such as the emergence of life. I originally found this paper because it was mentioned by someone pro-ID at arn and it was also mentioned at uncommondescent. Here, I want to comment on some of the flaws this paper contains as well as pointing out the relevance of all of this to ID.

The hypothesis is scientifically useless

The entire idea of the paper is philosophical rather than scientific. Koonin argues that his hypothesis is scientific since it is falsifiable. Two ways to falsify his claim, Koonin says, is to show how an RNA world could give rise to a translation system or by the demonstration of life having emerged independently on different worlds. He seems to reach this conclusion since he claims that the above scenarions would be too unlikely to occur more than once. Writes Koonin:

In other words, even in this toy model that assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production, the probability that a coupled translation-replication emerges by chance in a single O-region is P <>-1018. Obviously, this version of the breakthrough stage can be considered only in the context of a universe with an infinite (or, in the very least, extremely vast) number of O-regions.

10^-1018 is admittedly virtually impossible and squaring this number would make the outcome even less likely. Unlikely it might be, but he himself is posulating the existence of an infinite number of universes. How can you possibly talk probabilites when you are given an infinite number of attempts to reach a certain outcome? It doesn't matter if the probability is 10^-1018 or 10^-9999 - applying any sort of probability calculation to Koonin's hypothesis is useless.

The hypothesis and intelligent design detection using the explanatory filter

To sum up the idea of William Dembski's explanatory filter (EF), it is, Dembski claims, a three step process for inferring design. The first two steps exclude the possiblity of natural processes alone (in the absense of intelligence) to explain an event. If no known law can account for an event and if the event is so unlikely as to be impossible, we are to proceed to step three. The third step, in turn, is a tautological question: could something intelligent have done it? The question is tautological since the intelligence in question could be anything - including an omnipotent god. The answer to question three is always yes.

The relevance of all of this to Koonin's paper is two-fold:
(1) There is no known law that would make life appear natually and as Koonin argues, it is an unlikely event. IDers would therefore apply the EF and state that something intelligent designed life. Koonin's paper would, however, render EF completely impotent since under his hypothesis, anything, no matter how improbable, is bound to happen. If one were to use both the EF in addition to Koonin's hypothesis, one would never get past step two of the EF; One would never be able to infer design.
(2) Although Koonin claims that his hypothesis leaves no room for intelligent design (for the above reason), this claim does not hold water. After all, with an infinite number of possibilites, it is not exactly impossibly that we should find ourselves in a universe where life was designed by something intelligent. We just wouldn't be able to infer it using the EF.

Final words

The paper is philosophical in nature and I can only really see it useful as the topic of discussion during a "mind-altering-substance-fest". Merely declaring the probabilites of extremely unlikely events as probable is as useful as claiming that something intelligent did it. These "techniques" are equivalent to merely throwing your hands in the air while exclaiming "we can't explain how this could have happened, so it must have been...".

Downhill from here...

2007-06-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

GilDodgen at uncommondescent is making some complaints about mutations (June 20th, 2007). Writes he:

Mutations break things. However, on occasion, with huge probabilistic resources, a broken thing can promote survival in a specific environment (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance).

I would like to analyze this comment in the light of a paper entitled "The biological cost of antibiotic resistance" (downloadable for free). This paper sums up the experimental results of quite a few papers and gives quite a good picture of the fitness costs associated with antibiotic resistance. As the paper says:

In the majority of studies performed, resistance caused by target alterations has been found to engender some cost tofitness (Table 1),

This would seem to support GilDodgen's point that mutations break things, but

but mutants with no measurable costs have also been observed. One example of a ‘no cost’ resistance mutation is the 42nd codon AAA (Lys)®AGA (Arg) substitution of the rpsL gene, responsible for resistance to high concentrations of streptomycin in S. typhimurium and other enteric bacteria

flat out contradicts his argument. Mutations don't have to "break" things. Even if a mutation does "break" something to confer resistance, this will not necessarily mean that the antibiotic resistant bacterium will be less fit forever. Other mutations might restore fitness while maintaining resistance:

Although occasionally, in the absence of antibiotics, drugsensitive revertants have evolved in most cases, adaptation to the costs of chromosomal resistance in vitro and in vivo has been through compensatory mutations (Table 2). In the majority, but not all cases, the second site mutations compensating for the cost of resistance have been identified. These occur by additional (or alternative) mutations at the same locus as the resistance gene, intragenic suppression, or at other loci, extragenic suppression.

So, mutations don't always "break" things, even when they yield a selective advantage, and even if they do, they can "unbreak" them while still maintaining the advantage. GilDodgen is nothing short of wrong. Do these mutations "require huge probabilistc resources"? Well, typically 1 in 10^8 cells acquire the required mutations, so they are fairly unlikely. But why does that matter? With lots of cells mutating and there being long amounts of time for them to do so, this is not necessarily a problem (unless you are a young earth creationist).

GilDodgen continues:

But broken things represent a downhill process, informationally, and cannot account for an uphill, information-creating process, not to mention the machinery required to process that information.

Well, by his own definition he is right I suppose. But then mutations don't necessarily mean broken, so his point is moot. GilDodgen finishes:

Understanding this is not difficult, unless one has a nearly pathological commitment to the notion that design in the universe and living systems cannot possibly exist.

It is diffcult understanding because it is WRONG. And who, exactly, claims that design cannot possibly exist? ID is rejected because it is unscientific and useless.

Is it a hoax?

2007-06-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

Dembski's sad attempt at showing that more and more non-religious people are turning to ID fell just a tad flat the other day. It was immediately noted by several anti-ID blogs, such as Stranger Fruit, that the web site Dembski linked to was less than underwhelming. Some commenters at Stranger Fruit openly suggested that perhaps Dembski had done a hoax to see just how much us anti-ID people are willing to believe about ID. I made a comment about that and thought that I might also reproduce it here. Although the comment was meant as a joke, it does present some valid points:

There actually exists a method for discerning whether or not a piece of text is a pro-ID hoax. It's a three-step process called the Imploratory Filter:

1. Does the text advocate a pro-ID stance?
2. Is it possible than someone could have written the text as a joke?
3. Does it look as if the writer is trying to hide the fact the the writing is a hoax?

Only if the answers to the first two questions are yes do we proceed to question three. This is important since we know that people do write pro-ID hoaxes. Pro-ID hoaxes just don't materialize from writings about Goethe or Homer. The third stage of the Imploratory Filter presents us with a binary choice: attribute the thing we are trying to examine to deliberate deception if it appears joke-like; otherwise, attribute it to self-deception. In the first case, the writing we are trying to examine is not only pro-ID, but also appears joke-like. In the other, it is pro-ID, but appears deluded. It is the category of joke-like writings having a pro-ID stance that reliably signals a hoax. "Non-funny" writings advocating ID, on the other hand, are properly attributed to self-deception.

The last thing we need to consider is the case of false positives and false negatives. This method can, unfortunately, yield false negatives. It is possible that some piece of writing might be labelled a non-hoax, when it in fact is a hoax. On the other hand, the method yields no false positives. I.e., when the filter claims that a writing really is a pro-ID hoax, it will will never turn out to be a non-hoax.

The Imploratory Filter faithfully represents our ordinary practice of sorting through things we alternately attribute to self-deception or hoaxes. In particular, the Filter describes:
* how Michael Egnor is still allowed to post for the DI.
* how Casey Luskin can keep repeating that ID can make predictions.
* how Dembski can claim that the explanatory filter yields no false positives even though it measures design via specified complexity of which irreducible complexity is a subclass. Irreducible complexity, in turn, allows for false positives.

Posted by: Hawks | June 17, 2007 11:10 PM

Commenter Hermagoras (has a blog at http://paralepsis.blogspot.com/) named it the best comment ever. It's official. It's got to be true then.

Dembski is a sore loser

2007-06-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

June 20th, 2007. Site: uncommondescent. No link provided. This is my reply:

But ID is not about religion, is it?

2007-06-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

We are constantly being told that ID has nothing what-so-ever to do with religion. How come then, that ID proponents such as Denyse O'Leary can say things like this at uncommondescent:

Mainstream media, covering the intelligent design (ID) controversy, warn you that most ID advocates are Christians or other theists. But how many have told you what I just did - that most of the people who strongly promote a no-design universe and no-design life forms are atheists?

This has been true, by the way, for the better part of a century, ever since James Leuba started his surveys in 1914. So now, do you understand at least one reason why there is an intelligent design controversy?

???

The obvious answer is that ID has something to do with religion. I freely admit that ID as such is not religious but rather that the motivation for pushing for it is.

For anyone intent on misinterpreting what I wrote above: I am not implying that since ID is not religious, it automatically means that it is scientific; it isn't.

Justifications

2007-06-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

Michael Behe is an intelligent design proponent who is also known as accepting common descent - the idea that most, if not all, of life shares one single common ancestor. For example, in a Q&A regarding his new book "The Edge of Evolution" he wrote:

So, if one looks at the data in the way that I do, then one can say simultaneously that: 1) CD (common descent) is very well supported;...

A question that arises from this is: how can Michael Behe justify holding this position? The easy answer would seem to be that he accepts the scientific evidence (fossil record, DNA sequences etc) for it. But this does not really answer the question as much as it evades it; the new question that arises is: how does Behe justify holding the position that scientific explanations are vaild? Or, more properly: Given that one accepts ID, how can one justify the acceptance of anything science has to say?

The question might seem moronic, but remember that a central tenet of ID is that it says absolutely nothing about the designer; it does say that certain features of the universe can't be explained by law and chance and should be properly attributed to intelligence (a la Dembski's Explanatory Filter) but this does NOT mean that things than can be explained by law and chance were not designed - these could be false negatives according to the Explanatory Filter. According to ID proponents, it seems that one is free to pursue investigation into these potential false negatives in any way one wishes. Attribute seemingly random mutations to intelligence if you want or attribute the apparent relatedness of extant organisms to either common descent or common design depending on your preferences. But in order for you to do this, you have to do something that ID does not - you have to make some assumptions about the designer. Behe seems to be assuming that the designer has been making lots of small modifications to creatures through the ages rather than, for example, creating everything from scratch a few thousand years ago. But how can he justify this assumption? The simple answer is that he can't. It's quite simply a personal preference and in this sense, when it comes to making inferences about the potential false negatives (should they be attributed to intelligence, scientific explanation or anything else for that matter?), ID is hard to distinguish from postmodernism (no one world view is more correct than the other). According to ID, just about anything goes.

Because of this, when someone makes assumptions about the designer, as Behe has done, that someone has gone beyond simply advocating ID. Given that there is no justifiable reason to make one assumption rather than any other about the designer, Behe's view should not be called ID as much as "Beheism" just like those that interpret the biblical genesis literally should be called creationists.

IDists sometimes like to distance themselves from creationsists - they should also distance themselves from Beheists. If they were consistent, that is.

Egnor...

2007-06-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

...is doing it again. This time around he is trying to set up a thought experiment to show why things like love and purpose can't be made from "material" stuff. I urge anyone to read the entire article, if nothing else, for the chuckle-value. Below is an excerpt which kind of sums up his argument:

“What if the cell phone is necessary for all of the noises, but only sufficient for some? What if some of the noises in the phone are actual voices of living people, and are merely transmitted through the phone, but not caused by it?”

1) The cell phone is necessary for all of the noises
2) The cell phone is sufficient to produce noises that only have properties — like frequency and amplitude — that are shared with the circuitry in the cell phone itself
3) The cell phone is insufficient to fully account for the noises (i.e., the voices) that have meaning, because meaning is not a property of matter. The only thing that can cause meaning is a person.

Funnily enough, voices are composed of changes in frequency and amplitude - properties that are shared with the circuitry of the cell phone itself. Also, substitute the cell phone for any of a number of other electrical appliances, such as an mp3 player, and it is quite obvious that things with material properties can certainly convey meaning, without merely transmitting it. So, Egnor's Verizon accepter would continue to be a Verzon denier. Supposedly, if it was not understood how the mp3 player made voices, Egnor's Verizon would conclude that the mp3 player was not sufficient to do it. Egnor wants the unknown to be ascribed to his own immaterial theories, by default - even in the total absense of evidence FOR his claim.

The Verizon accepter shows that there is a method of determining whether the mind can be caused entirely by matter. If the mind has a property, such as meaning, that is not a property of matter, then matter, while perhaps necessary to the mind, is insufficient to cause it.

Notice that while Egnor says that he has supplied "a method of determining whether the mind can be caused entirely by matter", in this paragraph, he totally sidesteps it in favor of merely defining it impossible. So, not only does he want unknown causes to be ascribed to immaterial causes by default, he is outright claiming that there CAN'T be any evidence to the contary. Heavy stuff!

I suppose that this is a good time to take some cheap shots at Egnor: where do you reckon the voices in Egnor's head come from?

Egnor. Hurrah!!!

2007-06-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

Michael Egnor is at it again. I've actually come to look forward to his writing for the Discovery Institute. They are all so wonderfully bizarre. And lacking in logic. In his latest attempt, again talking about altruism and the brain, he yet again manages to support dualism while at the same time claiming that it is impossible. He also does one better. And this one is nothing short of insane. The article argues against P.Z. Myers' claim that altruism actually resides in the brain. Says Egnor:

If altruism is located in the brain, then some changes in location of the brain must, to use a mathematical term, 'map' to changes in altruism. That is, if you move your brain, you move your altruism in some discernable way. And 'moving' altruism means changing its properties. It won't do to say that moving altruism changes its property of 'location,' because 'location' of altruism is the issue. That begs the question.

No, really. He really wrote this. This is Egnor's argument. Moving something means changing it's properties. And not the properties of location. You move your altruism in some discernable way. Not from A to B.

Egnor continues:

But how does moving your brain change your altruism? ...If you walk around the room does your altruism change in a reproducible way? If you stand up, is your altruism different that when you're sitting?

For altruism to be located in the brain, changes in altruism must map, in some reproducible way, to changes in brain location. ... Altruism is completely independent of location, so it can't be located in the brain, or anywhere. It can't be 'located' at all.

:-o :-o :-o

Yes, his argument is that if altruism was located in the brain, then your altruism should change as your brain moves. :-o :-o :-o

Sorry, I can't really say anything more about this. It's pure insanity.

Added: P.Z Myers has also taken apart Egnor's claims at Pharyngula.

DDT-malaria

2007-06-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

BarryA at uncommondescent has written a short post regarding the use of DDT to kill malaria (June 12th, 2007). He makes some valid points. For example, DDT use, which is very effective at killing the mosquitos that transmit the malaria-causing organism, has been banned resulting in untold suffering due to acquisition of this dreadful disease. However, he then goes as says something quite extraordinary:

I also learned that everything I thought I knew about DDT was flat wrong. Not only is DDT safe, scientists have known this for decades.

Eeeerrrmm. DDT is safe? Not quite. DDT belongs to a class of compounds known as xenoestrogens - also commonly referred to as gender benders. Although there has been no experimental work to show that this should affect humans (for obvious reasons), epidemiological studies and experimental work on other organisms do point to the fact that DDT is not safe (I am aware that there has been a lot of controversy in the scientific community over the extent to which xenoestrogens actually have been a problem for humans). The effect on wild-life such as birds is well documented. An important point to note here is that DDT belong to a class of compunds that act on similar biological pathways and have similar effects. So even though it might be safe for a human to be exposed to DDT up to a concentration of X, this might not be true when exposure to other xenoestrogens are added to the equation.

The questions that arise knowing this is whether you would rather be a bit gender bent or be suffering from malaria? Would you rather that some birds of prey failed to raise it's chicks compared to you suffering from malaria? Personally, I'd rather not suffer from malaria.

BarryA has brought up a valid point, but I wonder why he filed his post under "intelligent design". Perhaps he didn't mean to, but a commenter couldn't resist turning this into a Darwinian eugenics(?) issue.

Edited to add:seems like the main reason DDT use dropped was not because of any environmental concerns, but rather that the mosquitos were developing resistance to the pesticide. See, for example, The DDT ban myth and Putting myths to bed.

Explore evolution

2007-06-09T13:57:00.000-07:00

A new anti-evolution book "Explore Evolution" has been released. Co-authored by ID proponenets Stephen Meyer, Scott Minnich and Paul Nelson, what is new about this book from an ID perspective is that it doesn't talk about intelligent design. That's right. The thinking is obviously that if there is no mention of god or ID, then schools should be free to use the book in science classes. They might even succeed. What I do want to do here, is examine this book in the light of William Dembski's concept of the "Explanatory Filter" (EF). Dembski claims that EF is a sure proof method for detecting intelligent design. Three criteria must be met in order for anyone using the EF before they can proclaim that something was intelligently designed:

1. Can scientific law explain the event?
2. Can chance explain the event?
3. Can intelligent intervention explain the event?

The object of the two first points is to exclude false positives. For example, we shouldn't explain the fact that a stone dropped from a height will fall down by invoking something intelligent. Law (gravity) will suffice to explain this. Neither should we invoke intelligence when something improbable occurs - unless it is too improbable (as in the writings in this post; the probability that the letters contained herein should occur in the order they do is virtually impossible). If law and chance can't explain an event, Dembski wants us to ask a third question: could something intelligent have done it? Given that ID doesn't say anything about the intelligent designer and that the potential designer could be an omnipotent god, the answer is ALWAYS yes - point 3 is, in essence, a truism. Previous books by ID proponents have always gone into some detail, not just about how evolution can't but, how intelligence can do this and that. As I've already stated, "Explore Evolution" has simply dropped the "but intelligence can do it" label - i.e. point 3 of the EF.

So what, you may ask. Well, previous attempts at getting creationism into science class rooms have failed because creationism was deemed to be religion. The creationists then tried to have stickers inserted into biology text books claiming that evolution was not a fact, but merely a theory with several gaps. The Explore Evolution book seems to be one of those stickers, albeit a rather big one. Also, I'm about to make a prediction: ID creationists will, if Explore Evolution becomes accepted course material, insert stickers proclaiming point 3 of EF - namely that intelligence can explain everything they perceive that evolution can't. That sticker will effectively sum all of ID theory: ID can explain anything and everything - hardly the measure of a scientific theory.

Edge of Evolution

2007-06-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

Michael Behe's new book "Edge of Evolution" is out and a review in the journal Science has been written by Sean Carrol. DaveScot at uncommondescent has started a thread to fisk this review (making it a rebuttal of a rebuttal, in essence).

From the review:

Here’s one glaring mistake in the author’s review (my emphasis):

In Darwin’s Black Box, he posited that genes for modern complex biochemical systems, such as blood clotting, might have been “designed billions of years ago and have been passed down to the present but not ‘turned on’”. This is known to be genetically impossible because genes that aren’t used will degenerate, but there it was in print.

DaveScot fisks:

It’s easily possible. Error checking to insure data integrity to any arbitrary reliability standard is de rigueur in computer memory systems. In my experience most things that human designers have come up with in electronic information processing has antecedents in biological information systems. I therefore anticipate things we’ve invented on our own to have parallels in organic systems and mechanisms for insuring any required level of data integrity is no exception.

Neither DaveScot nor Carrol is really right here. While it is not easily possible, it is neither impossible. Carrol should really have said that there is no evidence that unused genetic information will be retained over long time spans . The interesting bit here is that Carrol has made made the sort of argument that IDers commonly (and usually excusively) make - a negative one. IDers tend to claim that evolution can't do this and that. Even though DaveScot thinks there is evidence lacking that natural processes can account for the diversity of life we see today, he has no problem appealing to processes that there is no evidence for. Interesting... His appeal to error checking the way humans do it is interesting as well, given that in living organisms, "the error checking mechanisms" could change as well. And if they do, then unused genetic information would presumably change with it.

Like DaveScot, I have an anticipation as well: whenever there is any sort of parallell between living beings and humanly designed things, IDers will claim that this is evidence for ID.

Our priviledged planet

2007-06-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

Guillermo Gonzales, an as it seems descent researcher, who was recently denied tenure at a major university has written a book "The Priviledged Planet". In it, he argues, as Casey Luskin says:

But in reality, Dr. Gonzalez’s entire thesis argues for design based upon a convergence of the requirements for both habitability and scientific discovery.

The idea is that since Earth is habitable for advanced creatures such as ourselves compounded with the fact that Earth is great for making scientific discoveries*, Earth was actually created to have these characteristics. Gonzales argues (perhaps rightly so ) that there probably exists only relatively few planets that are habitable and even fewer of those would be suitable for advanced beings such as ourselves. Add to that the fact that our rare planet is most excellent for making really cool scientific discoveries and you should really draw the conclusion that the probability of these conditions to be met is incredibly small. So small, in fact, that it would be virtually impossible. The conclusion we should draw from this is that our planet was created the way it was - so that we can discover things. I might give a bit of a critique to this in a later post, but what I really want to do here is to critisize something else Gonzales claims in his book: that if complex life is found elsewhere in the universe, then the world on which it is found will also be great for scientific discoveries. Gonzales is, in other words, making a prediction.

As I've argued numerous times before, ID (and by extension any "theory" that postulates a designer without saying anything about the designer) cannot make predictions. Even William Dembski agrees with this as, "Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor.". The only way Gonzales would be justified in making that predictions (other than identifying his designer) would be if he assumed that his designer would make habitable worlds great for discoveries. But then his conclusion would be in his assumption, and circular reasoning is not how you want to justify anything. His prediction is, then, nothing but shoddy scholarship.

There are, of course, lots of books being printed and lots of these contain worse stuff than "The Priviledged Planet". The reason that Gonsalez's book is being singled out is because he is a bona fide astronomer. In this sense, the book carries a lot of authority - totally undeserved. I agree with one thing Gonzales says: our planet is a priviledged one. Too bad that an in other ways obviously clever man has come to some rather (from a scientific perspective) blatantly illogical conclusions.

* One of the reason Gonzales thinks that this is the case is because our planet sometimes experiences perfect solar eclipses (which, among other things, allowed us to test one of Einstein's more famous theories). As Gonzales say, there is no physical reason why the moon should be 400 times smaller than the Sun AND 400 times closer to us than the same Sun.

Egnor is at it. Again...

2007-06-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

Michael Egnor has written yet another piece for the Discovery Institute. This time, he wants to discuss:

Is altruism merely a matter of brain physiology- just the happy result of eons of evolution?

His answer is a resounding no, since

For one process to cause another there must be a point of contact, in the sense that the processes linked in cause and effect must share properties in common.

The brain is a material substance. It has location, dimensions, weight, temperature, and energy.

Altruism, in contrast, has no matter or energy. It has no ‘location’, no weight, no dimension, no temperature. It has no properties of matter.

There is no shared property yet identified by science through which brain matter can cause mental acts like altruism.

A satisfactory explanation of altruism intrinsically requires a method open to immaterial causes.

Egnor asserts that traditional science CAN'T explain altruism, because immaterial things can't interact with material things and altruism, unlike your brain, is immaterial. In philosophy, this stance is known as Dualism. The thinking in dualism is that thoughts are separate from brain matter and exists more or less independently of it. Dualism does away with the problem of things like consciousness (by sweeping it under the carpet) that science has a hard time explaining. The biggest problem with dualism is that there is no way for the thoughts to communicate with brain matter. To reverse Egnor's argument from above: There is no shared property yet identified by science through which immaterial altruism can cause anything to happen in the brain. And if immaterial "things" can't communicate with the material, they can hardly have any effects either. So, it is rather peculiar that while Egnor critiques dualism, this is also what he is asserting is actually happening. He, not science, claims that there actually exists dualism.

Egnor complains regarding how science explains these things:

To evade this conundrum, materialist neuroscientists evoke ‘emergence’, which is a materialist way of asserting ‘It happens. Trust us’.

Considering that there are studies being done to try to solve these kinds of problems, this is an interesting assertion. And very hypocritical considering that we are supposed to take Egnor and his ilk's word that there actually is something "immaterial". Why should trust them and not any actual real research that can count as positive evidence for their claim (this doesn't exist, btw)?

Egnor continues:

Altruism is obviously something very real; many people’s lives depend on it. We don’t know exactly what it is, but we know, by its properties, what it’s not. It’s not material. It shares no properties in common with matter. It can’t be caused by a piece of the brain.

That's a funny thing to say, considering that even slime moulds display altruistic behaviour. And they don't even need brains. So perhaps Egnor is right to some extent (I'm being generous here).

‘My altruism is three inches from the edge of the table’ is, like Egnor says, a nonsensical statement. 'Michael Egnor's reasoning is three inches away from ignorance' might not be.

2007-06-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

Mark Chu-Carroll at "Good Math, Bad Math" has posted a review of Michael Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution" under the heading "Behe's Dreadful New Book: A Review of 'The Edge of Evolution'". Mark makes the claim that Behe's book is based on bad math - "a mathematical argument that I've specifically refuted on this blog numerous times", as he says. Personally, I'm not brilliant at math and I haven't read Behe's book, so I can't really comment on the mathematics on said book. What I would like to comment on, however, is the comments that have been put forth at uncommondescent (June 2nd, 2007) regarding Mark's critique/review. William Dembski starts it all, by posting:

Mark Chu-Carroll* goes after Behe’s new book here. Judge for yourself whether this deserves to be called a review (Chu-Carroll thinks it does). Nick Matzke endorses Chu-Carroll’s blog post against Behe here. Are there any anti-ID writings, no matter how ill-conceived or mean-spirited, that PT won’t endorse? It might be an interesting exercise to attempt a Sokal-style hoax to see what exactly PT is prepared to believe about ID. I herewith offer a prize, worth up to $200, to anyone who can pull this off and afterward reveal that it was all a hoax (the precise amount to be determined by how cleverly it is pulled off).

The last thing Dembski writes is:

Perhaps I’m missing something, but Chu-Carroll’s expertise is in computer programming, where he has a Ph.D. How much math does he actually know?

And this is actually the biggest (and almost only rebuttal) that is made to Mark's review by both Dembski and subsequent commenters. No one attempts to defend Behe's math and no one attempts to rebut Mark's rebuttal. Almost unanimously, people critique Mark's authority as a mathematician. Complaints that Mark's PhD was in Computer Science, not math; DaveScot feels it is important to point out that Mark only managed to get two patents in 10 years; various ad hominems; his review should not be called a review since Mark does not work as a book reviewer and the review was posted on a blog. All in all, nothing that matters.

I have no idea how much math Mark knows. I have no idea how much math Behe knows either. And no one at uncommondescent seems to know either. All we are given is mere rhetoric.

All this CSI...

2007-05-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

A central claim for the ID movement is the notion that only intelligence can cause the appearance of CSI (complex specified information) such as that found in a computer program or a Shakespeare play. Biological systems in the absense of intelligence only has the ability to reshuffle already existing information but completely lacks the ability to create new such. I'm not going to argue anything about the validity of the claim that biological systems can't create new information but rather just give a quick note regarding the ability of intelligent agents to themselves to create new information. I think that what I am about to write about applies to just about anything ID proponents claim contains CSI.

Take the example of a Dan Brown book - such as "The Da Vinci code". It contains a lot of CSI. Individual letters of the alphabet are strung together into words which are strung together to make sentences that are found in paragraphs that are themselves found in chapters. All this writing describes a plot comprised of lots of different people, places and riddle-solving. Such a book obviously contains lots of information and we would not expect something non-intelligent to be able to produce such a work. But just how much of the information contained in one of Brown's books is new? If you - like me - have read more than one of his books (I must here admit that I'm not overly fond of his books and only really read them because I was given them as presents. Also I switched off the movie "The Da Vinci code" after roughly 15 minutes. It seemed terrible.) you will know that these are quite similar. "The Da Vinci Code", "Digital Fortress" and "Deception Point" all center around conspiracies and clever people who are good at breaking codes (and do it ad nauseum). It would, therefore, seem that each new Dan Brown book does NOT contain CSI proportional to the size of the book. A lot of the information contained within them has been "borrowed" from his previous work (this goes for most, if not all authors, btw). But even Brown's first work was hardly the 100% original CSI originator of all things. Conspiracies and code breaking featured in the literature long before Brown was even born. The people, places and plotlines outlined in his books have already been written about previously - maybe not explicitly, but at least these are similar enough to previous authors work that should best be described as reshuffling of already existing information. Certainly, Brown did not originate the words in his books - these he would have learned by reading. Again, nothing new. Is there anything in a Dan Brown book that could be classified as truly original - as being new information? Is there anything produced by any author that can be classified as being truly original? Does not every author base his writings on something he has previously learned, i.e. by taking pre-existing CSI and simply reshuffling it? I would like to answer a weak yes to these questions. Or at least a yes that allows for the odd, barely perceptible exception to the rule.

For those who are familiar with the intelligent design vs evolution debate, it is quite clear that whatever objections the ID crowd have against evolution, they really have nothing new to say. It has all already been said. Over and over again. They never produce any new CSI. And if we intelligent beings can't produce CSI, why would it matter what biological systems are capable of in the absense of intelligence?

It's in the code, don't you know?

2007-05-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

PaV at uncommondescent is excited because someone has encoded Einstein's famous equation and the year he thought of it, as "e=mc^2 1905!" into DNA. Let's look at how the researchers actually did this. A bit technical, the message "e=mc^2 1905!" was converted to hexadecimal code according to the Keyboard scan code (set 2) and binary code was generated by four-bit representation of each hexadecimal number. The four nucleotide bases DNA (A, C, G and T) were used to represent the actual binary number using a scheme where AA=0000, CA=0001, GA=0010 etc. With this in mind, PaV asks:

If You Found E=mc2 in DNA, Would You Believe in ID?

In order for us to find the relevant message (e=mc^2 1905!) in the first place we have to know what kind of code the designer used when encrypting his message. This is helpfully supplied in the article where this research was published. The question is, then, how are ID proponents supposed to find any messages encoded by their designer? This designer sure didn't publish anything enabling us to decrypt it's messages. Are they going to search all possible encryption mechanism until they manage to find something that remotely resembles a message we can understand? As the first commenter to PaV's post, russ, writes:

Yes, but then the guy who “solves the code” will be labeled a creationist, fired from his job, and labeled a fraud. That’s because nature is quite capable of encoding “E=MC2″ and “1905″ if given enough time.

Actually, nature could encode that in no time. With an arbitrary choice of code, ANYTHING could read "e=mc^2 1905!". Is this going to turn into a "Bible code" circus?

Where is the logic here?

2007-05-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

What are we to make of the following?

Writes Dembski:

I argue that the explantory filter is a reliable criterion for detecting design. Alternatively, I argue that the Explanatory Filter successfully avoids false positives. Thus whenever the Explanatory Filter attributes design, it does so correctly.

Writes Behe:

To falsify design theory a scientist need only experimentally demonstrate that a bacterial flagellum, or any other comparably complex system, could arise by natural selection. If that happened I would conclude that neither flagella nor any system of similar or lesser complexity had to have been designed. In short, biochemical design would be neatly disproved.
From "Debating Design" by Dembski and Ruse:

More generally, Dembski (1999, 2002) has argues that irreducible complexity is only a special case of complex specified information (CSI)...

Dembski's explanatoty filter yields no false positives.
The explanatory filter detects design by measuring CSI (complex specified information).
IC (irreducible complexity) is a special case of CSI.
The identification of an IC structure should, then, also yield no false positives.
If there was an IC structure found that could form in the absense of intelligence, then only more "complex" structures would be considered irreducibly complex.
But that would entail that the first IC structure that turned out to not be IC was a false positive. So, the explanatory filter, while yielding no false positives, is quite happy to accomodate false positives. Go figure.

Not that it matters...

2007-05-14T19:33:00.000-07:00

No doubt due to his failure to propose any valid scientific work in the area of evolution and intelligent design, William Dembski is now attempting to use an argument from authority - or rather an argument from lack of authority. The subject of Dembski's inquest is Richard Dawkins, one of a myriad of intelligent design opponents. Dembski is (as per usual, actually) mostly quoting someone else (I'm not sure whom, but the person in question talks about a Dr Greg Clarke) who claims that Dawkins should not call himself a scientist since he only has one publication under his belt and that this publication only has been cited once. Dembski calls for others to check if this is true. Why not. I'll take a stab at it. After a three-minute search, I found someone who has compiled a list of Dawkins' writings. A selection is included here:

The ontogeny of a pecking preference in domestic chicks. Zeitschrift fŸr Tierpsychologie 25, 170-186. (1968)
Bees are easily distracted. Science 165, 751. (1969)
Selective neurone death as a possible memory mechanism. Nature 229, 118-119. (1971)
Hierarchical organisation: a candidate principle for ethology. In Growing Points in Ethology (eds P. P. G. Bateson & R. A. Hinde), pp. 7-54� (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1976)
The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)
Replicator selection and the extended phenotype. Zeitschrift fŸr Tierpsychologie 47, 61-76. (1978)
In defense of selfish genes. Philosophy 56, 556-573 (1979)
Twelve misunderstandings of kin selection. Zeitschrift fŸr Tierpsychologie 51, 184-200. (1979)

The actual list is probably about ten times longer.

After a quick look at scholar.google.com I also found some more:
"Arms race between species". Dawkins & Krebs. Proc R. Soc. Lond. 1979
"Parental investment, mate desertion and a fallacy". Dawkins & Carlisle. Nature. 1976

It has to be said that most of these writings do NOT entail original research. A few are book reviews. Some are not in peer-reviews journals.

Greg Clarke is right about one thing. Dawkins does not appear on ISI. Seems that ISI doesn't list all of Dawkins' publications.

Why does this all matter? Well, as Dembski's anonymous friend writes: "He (Dawkins) has no more scientific authority than a suburban school teacher."

Apart from being mostly irrelevant, the above claim is also wrong. It is irrelevant because the weight of science rests on the arguments, evidence and hypotheses proposed, not on who proposes them. It is also wrong since Dawkins surely knows more about science than your average suburban school teacher. So Dawkins ability to speak authoritarily about scientific matters is also greater than that of said teachers.

What is the reason for Dembski to go over this? Apart from obviously attempting to discredit Dawkins, he also states:

Richard Dawkins, in his recent videos and books, portrays himself as justified in taking the hard line he does against religion because he is a scientist.

I don't know if Dawkins does this. Taking a hard line against religion is not a scientific endevour but a philosophical one and so one's scientific standing in such an instant is irrelevant.

An interesting observation is that after performing a quick check of Dembski's scholary achievements using scholar.google.com, searching for "author:Dembski, wa" gives 83 hits. Most of these are from our Dembski. If you exclude writings published in religious material and his books, I could only find one paper published in a peer-reviews journal:

"Uniform probability". Journal of Theoretical Probability. Volume 3, Number 4 / October, 1990. 4 citations.

Does this mean that Dembski should not be able to talk authoritatively about science?

Edited to add: Seems like the offending page I based this post on has been deleted. I take it that rather than admitting that he made a rather illfounded attempt at character assasination, Dembski took the easy way out and tried to erase all signs of his lack of ability to do a simple search for someones publication list. Go figure. (Yes, I see the irony in this statement if I am wrong in my assumption)

Luskin is SO predictable!

2007-05-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

Duracell bunny. Broken record. Bushism. Some things just never stop going on and on. Yet again, we have Casey Luskin claiming that ID predicts something about junk DNA:

Science wouldn't publish his letter, but it now appears that another prediction of intelligent design has been validated.

As I've stated numerous times, intelligent design "theory" is incapable of making predictions. Even William Dembski thinks so:

Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability.
Perhaps Luskin didn't get the memo?

Edited to add: John Pieret at "Thoughts in a Haystack" still has the energy to explain in detail what is wrong with Luskin's claim.

The most asinine design argument award goes to...

2007-05-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

DaveScot at uncommondescent has presented a beautiful fairytale (May 5th, 2007):

A interesting thing to think about is that bacteria, along with all other life on the earth, is doomed in another several billion years when the sun turns into a red giant and fries the earth to a crisp. That means the bacteria that have survived for billions of years have lived about half their lifetime. The only way bacteria could survive longer is if they can somehow find a new habitable planet and translocate to it. This seems to require telescopes to locate habitable planets and spacecraft to get from here to there. Maybe that’s why we are here - to make sure all life doesn’t die when the earth is no longer habitable. Maybe that’s been the “plan” all along and this has happened before many times on many other worlds with ours just one more link in the chain. Why else would be building telescopes that can find planets around other stars and spacecraft that can escape the solar system? There’s no practical benefit in it except perhaps for this. Maybe it’s a biological imperative and we really have no choice about building telescopes and spacecraft.

A few question pop into my mind when I read this:
1. Why can't DaveScot do a quick search on the internet and find out that bacteria can survive extremes of pressure, temperature and radiation - perhaps even those existing when rocks are, after a meteorite-impact, ejected from an Earth-like planet and scattered through the universe (all without using telescopes and rockets)?
2. Why would the bacteria have to survive the death of the Sun at all?
3. Why didn't the designer just seed these other worlds straight away without using us as a vehicle?
4. How inane can one be in one's suggestions for the designer's intentions?
5. How much empty rhetoric can DaveScot espouse in the name of intelligent design?
6. Why should I go on asking more questions?

The irrelevancy of evolution to medicine

2007-05-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

uncommondescent's scordova is adding on to Michael Egnor's claim that evolution is irrelevant when it comes to medicine. He claims that Catriona MacCallum, senior editor of PLoS Biology supports agrees with this sentiment. In her editorial, she wrote (emphasis added by scordova):

Charles Darwin, perhaps medicine’s most famous dropout, provided the impetus for a subject that figures so rarely in medical education. Indeed, even the iconic textbook example of evolution—antibiotic resistance—is rarely described as “evolution” in relevant papers published in medical journals. Despite potentially valid reasons for this oversight (e.g., that authors of papers in medical journals would regard the term as too general), it propagates into the popular press when those papers are reported on, feeding the wider perception of evolution’s irrelevance in general, and to medicine in particular

Writes scordova about this (emphasis added):

Darwinists claim how important Darwinism is to science, but MacCallum’s editorial makes an embarrassing admission of Darwinism’s irrelevance to medicine.

MacCallum says no such thing. She says - and you can read this in the quote that scordova supplies himself - that the term evolution is seldom used and that the gives a certain perception. What scordova didn't quote from MacCallum's writing (and probably for a rather good and obvious reason) is the sentence that follows immediately her writing above:

Yet an understanding of how natural selection shapes vulnerability to disease can provide fundamental insights into medicine and health and is no less relevant than an understanding of physiology or biochemistry.

The only thing that is embarrasing is scordova's lame attempt at quote mining.

Let this be the last time...

2007-05-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

The ID crowd has been quite fond of saying that ID predicts this or ID predicts that. A recent example has been that of the supposed ID prediction that junk DNA should have function. One reason mentioned for this is that there tends to be little junk in human designs. Before I yet again claim that this is nonsense, let me delve deeper into the junk DNA issue. The journal Nature has an article (2007, vol 446, number 7138, p864) that describes how certain large non-coding sequences (previous "junk") in Drosophila appear to act as silencers to parasitic genetic elements known as transposons (more "junk" DNA). Off the top of my head, the best analogy to this that I can think of in terms of human designs, would be the case of an architect/builder building a wooden house, filling it with termites and then adding the odd anteater to stop the house from crumbling. Do you reckon any IDists predicted this?

As I - and anyone who has actually looked at what ID actually states - have frequently said, ID predicts nothing. It seems that some ID supporters agree with me, most notably William Dembski. In a document, "Is Intelligent Design Testable?", dated Jan 24th 2001 he writes (emphasis added):

But what about the predictive power of intelligent design? To require prediction fundamentally misconstrues design. To require prediction of design is to put design in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience. This is to commit a category mistake. To be sure, designers, like natural laws, can behave predictably (designers often institute policies that end up being rigidly obeyed). Yet unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor. Intelligent design offers a radically different problematic for science than a mechanistic science wedded solely to undirected natural causes. Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability. But this represents no concession to Darwinism, for which the minimal predictive power that it has can readily be assimilated to a design-theoretic framework.

I'm glad we finally got that out of the way.

What's wrong with a little argument from authority?

2007-04-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

ID creationists like to claim that scientific evolution and that even scientific materialism is going to meet it's early demise at some point in the near future. They have various justifications for holding this view, one of them being that more and more scientists are deserting "evolutionary dogma" and realising the truth of intelligent design. They even make list of scientists who doubt evolution. Well, to show that IDers assertions are false, a list of scientists - all named Steve - who support evolution was amassed (as an ongoing project). As of April 24th, 2007, no less than 800 people are on that list. Given that ONLY people named Steve (in various languages) can sign and that roughly 1% of the population has this name, this would in effect represent some 80,000 signatories. IDers lists typically contain a few hundred signatories - no name restrictions.

Yeah, scientists are really starting to lean towards ID.

Theistic predictions? Materialistic predictions?

2007-04-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

I encountered a ... well, I'm not sure just what to make of this guy. In PandasThumb, he uses the name Philip Cunningham and posted this little tidbit:

1. Materialism did not predict the big bang, Yet Theism always said the universe was created.
2. Materialism did not predict a sub-atomic (quantum) world that blatantly defies our concepts of time and space, Yet Theism always said the universe is the craftsmanship of God who is not limited by time or space.
3. Materialism did not predict the fact that time, as we understand it, comes to a complete stop at the speed of light, as revealed by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Yet Theism always said that God exists in a timeless eternity.
4. Materialism did not predict the stunning precision for the underlying universal constants, for the universe, found in the Anthropic Principle, Yet Theism always said God laid the foundation of the universe, so the stunning clockwork precision found for the various universal constants is not at all unexpected for Theism.
5. Materialism did not predict the fact that the DNA code is, according to Bill Gates, far, far more advanced than any computer code ever written by man, Yet Theism would of naturally expected this level of complexity in the DNA code.
6. Materialism presumed a extremely beneficial and flexible mutation rate for DNA, which is not the case at all. Yet Theism would have naturally presumed such a high if not, what very well may be, complete negative mutation rate to an organism’s DNA.
7. Materialism presumed a very simple first life form. Yet the simplest life ever found on Earth is, according to Geneticist Michael Denton PhD., far more complex than any machine man has made through concerted effort. Theism would of naturally expected this.
8. Materialism predicted that it took a very long time for life to develop on earth, Yet we find evidence for photo-synthetic life in the oldest sedimentary rocks ever found on earth (Sarah Simpson, Scientific American, 2003). Theism would have expected this sudden appearance of life on earth.
9. Materialism predicted the gradual unfolding of life to be self-evident in the fossil record, The Cambrian Explosion, by itself, destroys this myth. Theism would of expected such sudden appearance of the many different fossils in the Cambrian explosion.

Someone called bornagain77 managed to post the same drivel at uncommondescent (26th April, 2007). Perhaps some people over there might actually think that this guy has anything to say. Rather than going through them all and pointing out all the flaws, I will just point out the blatant illogic that almost all of them suffer from. First of all, to say that materialism predicts anything is plain non-sensical. Materialism is not a hypothesis, it is a philosophical stance that says that matter is all that exists. Second, theism doesn't predict anything either. Given that theism includes any conceivable god that can do any of an infinite set of things, you can't predict what any of those "things" are. Third, it is claimed that materialism does not predict x, YET theism predicts y. x and y are half of the time not even remotely the same thing. There is no opposition, as bornagain77 would have us think.

This has got to be the most logic-deprived 9 point list I have seen in my life (although, I would be happy [and frightened] if someone pointed out an even worse example than this). I would suspect a troll, but then I've seen worse arguments from ID creationists before.

Da da dum dum dum another one bites the dust?

2007-04-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

DaveScot at uncommondescent is in a tis. Write he:

Another icon of evolution, the world famous fossil “Lucy” was found to not be in the modern human lineage at all. The interesting part of this is that this is extremely newsworthy but because it casts a very unflattering light on so many scientists who, uncritically it seems, placed Lucy in the modern human line of descent, you won’t find it widely reported except in the Darwin-denier blogs and websites. This strategy is common when embarrassing mistakes are found in widely accepted evolutionary dogma. Keep it mum and let the embarrassing news become common knowledge over a long span of time. Haeckel’s embryos are a fine example of it.

You can always count on DaveScot to make some far-reaching and yet unsupported claims. First of all, what is embarrasing? The researchers were able to draw this conclusion based on the find of a new specimen of Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy's kin). The data available before that were in accordance with the notion that Lucy's kind were our ancestors. The new data supports another conclusion. It is not embarrasing to change your view in light of new evidence; What is embarrasing, is seeing someone claim this very thing, though.

The article states:

They should therefore, the Israeli researchers said, “be placed as the beginning of the branch that evolved in parallel to ours.”

So, as opposed to Lucy being our direct ancestor (which no one thought anyway), it seems that she was a very close cousin to our human ancestors.

About "evolutionists" not shouting about this from the roof tops: This "strategy" is common when, to the ID/evolution discussion, insignificant new observations that don't affect evolution are found. No one thinks to bring it up, because it doesn't matter to the discussion at hand.

ID fits the evidence!

2007-04-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Columbia Medical Professor John Marshall, a signer of the ‘Dissent From Darwinism’ document, likes intelligent design. Says Marshall:

“It’s as much science as Darwinian evolution is science,” Marshall said. “And as a theory, I believe that intelligent design fits the evidence of biology better than Darwinian evolution.”

OK. Given that ID says NOTHING about the designer, it also follows that the designer could be - just to name a few from an infinite list - your next-door neighbour Albert, an intelligent gas cloud, God or Howard the Duck. For the same reason, a potential designer could have designed ANYTHING and make things look ANYWAY it wanted. So, when Marshall says that "intelligent design fits the evidence of biology better than Darwinian evolution" he is not totally wrong for the simple reason that ANYTHING and EVERYTHING can count as evidence for ID. And as anyone who even knows he tiniest bit about scientific evidence, this goes TOTALLY against Marshall's claim that “It’s as much science as Darwinian evolution is science” . Real scientific theories have to be testable and in order for them to be so, we can't have every single observation possible count as evidence for them.

If ID is science, then so is my claim that "everything is because of qwerty ".

Common ancestry

2007-04-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

Logan Gage at evolutionnews is wondering "What Exactly Does Genetic Similarity Demonstrate?". Given the 98.8% DNA sequence similarity between chimps and humans, Gage writes:

Some design proponents think the evidence for common ancestry is good (e.g., Michael Behe), while others—citing the fossil record, especially The Cambrian Explosion—do not. But neither group thinks that sequence similarity alone proves either common ancestry or the Darwinian mechanism, as so many science writers of our day seem eager to assume.

That last sentence is nothing but a straw-man. The strength of the evidence regarding evolution does not rely on any one particular field of study or observation but it is the combination of evidence, often from hugely disparate fields, that supports the notion that all extant life-forms share common ancestry. What Gage seems to be forgetting is that the idea of common ancestry didn't start after DNA sequencing became common practice (heck, he even mentions fossils in the previous sentence), but actually predates it by at least 100 years - and Darwin wasn't even the first person to propose it. Although not making any suggestions of common ancestry, Carl von Linné set the stage by classifying living organisms based on purely phenotypic criteria. It wasn't a huge leap of the imagination (by today's standards, anyway) to suggest that the similarities found between different organisms was due to common ancestry. The sequencing of genetic material - including entire genomes - has confirmed what we already suspected - common ancestry. Using evolutionary theories, we would have expected the DNA of phenotypically similar organisms to be similar. The case for common ancestry was, therefore, strengthened. Using ID theory, we would have expected... well, we wouldn't expect anything in particular. Even if all organisms share common ancestry, there is no reason, under an ID theory sceneario, to predict that phenotypically similar organisms should also be genotypically similar. After all, "the Designer" might have changed the DNA to whatever he/she/it wanted. And no, this suggestion does not go against ID and there is NO reason for ID supporters to think it preposterous. Remember, ID theory says NOTHING about the designer, so it is quite a plausible ID scenario if we speculate - as we can - about the "mysterious ways" of the designer. No wonder the ID folks can't agree on whether they believe that all extant life forms share common ancestry.

Summa Summarum: No scientifically minded person claims that DNA sequences alone "prove" common ancestry - although it certainly strengthens the case.

TOTALLY OFF TOPIC: KEVIN BACON!!!!

2007-04-24T17:00:00.000-07:00

I must have totally gone of my rails. Two off-topic posts - the only ones ever - in one day! This one should give anyone a reason to stop doing all that thinking/worrying about intelligent design. It's the game of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to link any actor you wish, through their roles in films, to Kevin Bacon. Me and a mate in our lab used to do this all the time (until he managed to finish his MSc and left). In our version of the game we didn't link to Kevin all that often - any two actors would do. As an example of how the game works, consider this:

We want to link Bruce Willis to Christian Slater.
We can start with Bruce in "Ocean's 12". In "Oceans's 12" we find Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt was also in "Interview with the Vampire" with Christian Slater. Tada! Linked.

This has to be done using at most six links (movies). Let me tell you, it's scary just how good you can get at this game with a bit of practice (we had LOTS). Even though we weren't allowed to use any of the actors in "Ocean's 12" or "Austin Powers: Goldmember" we would still crack just about any combination of actors we both knew in under one minute (we used to name one actor each and then compete for who could find the solution first). Why did we not use "Ocean's 12" or "Goldmember"? For the simple reason that it just got too easy. These movies contain some (read loads of) actors that are so well-connected that we hardly had to name the actors at the start of the game before someone came up with the solution.

Give it a go!!!

ANZAC day!

2007-04-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

Off topic:
Today is ANZAC day in New Zealand. As the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services Association describe it:

ANZAC Day (25 April) is observed in New Zealand as a day of commemoration for those who died in the service of their country and to honour returned servicemen and women.

It's always good to keep in our minds that in wars, whether they be justified or not, people suffer and die. And the suffering doesn't stop the day the war does...

New "One the ID World Article".

2007-04-21T22:03:00.000-07:00

I have written another article "Dembski's Complex Specified Information (CSI) and the Universal Probability Bound - a critique" on "On the ID World". Enjoy.

Design in nature is self-evident!

2007-04-21T02:31:00.000-07:00

GilDodgen at uncommondescent is complaining, because:

Even the most vociferous and vehement ID opponents (e.g., Richard Dawkins) admit that design in nature appears to be self-evident. Why then, the heroic efforts to explain design away, with such silliness as random variation and natural selection providing the engine that produced highly sophisticated biological software and information-processing systems?

Is GilDodgen serious? Yes, most people (including me) would argue that design in nature is self-evident. I know of no one that is trying to explain design away. What is being constantly criticized is the idea of intelligent design. In science, the apparent design of living organisms emerges due to various evolutionary mechanisms, such as selection. I can see why someone that is new to the ID/evolution debate might not have realised this, but GilDodgen has been doing this for some time now. He should really know better.

Eugenics revisited.

2007-04-20T02:35:00.000-07:00

Egnor postings and admissions that eugenics is not Darwinism have hardly "left the presses" before another IDist (John West) feels the need to chirp in and claim that 'eugenics was in reality a reasonable deduction from Darwin’s theory and is properly described as “Darwinian.”'. It's about time that the ID crowd stared getting their shit together. They have for ages been claiming that teleology - read goal-directed selection - of any kind is not Darwinism but clearly intelligent design (this is how they keep on claiming that there is soooo much ID research going on. Just about every experiment on biological organisms is goal directed). Eugenics is clearly goal-directed.

The ID crowd are at a cross-road and it's time to make their minds up. Either selective breeding is not evidence of ID or eugenics is applied ID (notice how I didn't say eugenics is either ID or Darwinism).

Darwinian eugenics? No, it's not. It's official!!!

2007-04-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

I've blogged previously about some ID supporters' claim that Darwinism led to eugenics. More properly, since eugenics is selective breeding and since ID supporters like to claim that selective breeding is, in fact, intelligent design, it follows that eugenics is actually applied intelligent design. As it turns out, even Michael Egnor (the Discovery Institute's latest darling) agrees. Writes Egnor:

The experimental selection of "desirable" bacterial variants is bacterial eugenics, using the same empirical principles that eugenicists applied to human breeding. Eugenics is human breeding, and is every bit as much of a misapplication of Darwin’s theory as are Dr. Cartwright’s examples of bacterial breeding.

Maybe, as opposed to what several pro-evolution bloggers say, Egnor isn't such an "egnorant" after all. But then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like:

Modern eugenics arose from a philosophical proposition. The basis for eugenics was philosophical materialism, which denied the inherent dignity and sanctity of every human life. Denial of transcendent ethical standards eventually leaves "because we can" as the sole ethical standard.

Sigh. Even the absense of philosophical materialism (I assume he meant naturalism) can deny any "inherent dignity and sanctity of every human life". The fact that some "supernaturalists" see "inherent dignity and sanctity of every human life" is because of their arbitrary choice of philosophical supermaterialism that see "inherent dignity and sanctity of every human life". And, of course, an arbitrary choice of philosophical materialism can also give "inherent dignity and sanctity of every human life". Point being: there is only "inherent dignity and sanctity of every human life" if you claim that there is.

Where art thou from, Mitochondria?

2007-04-19T02:19:00.000-07:00

At a Darwin vs Design conference at Southern Methodist University the other day, some protesters held up a banner asking “Why do the ribosomes (protein synthesizing machinery) in our mitochondria match those of bacteria?”. William Dembski has two major points to make against this banner:

1. ...the more interesting question for me is what causal powers were required to produce ribosomes in the first place.

This is, of course, a very common IDist type of question which is usually followed by a certain type of statement. E.g., since science has yet to produce a satisfactory explanation of something complex (the question [that actually doesn't read like a question the way I wrote it - never mind]) it automatically means that something intelligent designed it (the statement). Nothing new under the Sun here.

2. Since I’m happy for the sake of argument to allow common descent, ... But the poster, even taken on its own terms, is problematic. Eukaryotic, prokaryotic, and mitochondrial ribosomes are all quite different (see here), and it’s not clear whether mitoribosomes, as they’re called, are closer to prokaryotic than to eukaryotic ribosomes by any reasonable metric. In any case, to say that bacterial (prokaryotic) ribosomes “match” mitoribosomes seems false on any reasonable construal of the term.

Interestingly, the link he provides has no sources after 1996, which means a 1998 paper that examined various DNA sequences found that the alpha-protobactrium Ricksettsia had the best match to mitochondria. Was it a "match" (as required by Dembski)? It was the best match that had been obtained so far. Given that Dembski is happy to allow for common descent I would say that that makes for a reasonable metric.

Additional:
Even though the protestors seemed to think that the question "Why do the ribosomes (protein synthesizing machinery) in our mitochondria match those of bacteria?” was evidence against ID, this is NOT the case. In fact, no possible observation can count as evidence against ID - and this is, of course, why ID is totally vacuous.

T. rex was vegetarian - I kid you not!

2007-04-18T02:34:00.000-07:00

Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis is opening a creation museum in Kentucky, USA. In it will displayed typical creationist propaganda regarding the wrongness of evolution and the rightness of the bible. In an interview with BBC News, Ken is claiming that Tyrannosaurus rex - the rather iconic bad-ass carnivore - was in fact vegetarian. Before you wet yourself laughing/pick your jaw up from the floor/recover from fainting/etc, let's hear Ken out. He does give an argument for why this could actually be the case. From the article:

Most geologists would say humans and dinosaurs were separated by more than 60 million years. And those dinosaurs have very sharp teeth!
"So do bears", says Ken, "but they eat nuts and berries! Remember, before the sin of Adam, the world was perfect. All creatures were vegetarian." One of the dinosaurs lets out a rather contradictory roar.

Wow. Ken does have a point. Bears do have fangs and they do eat "vegies". Could Ken be on to something? Of course not!!! Are you kidding? Even a 12 second search on the web should give you enough information to dispell any such notions. For example, Wikipedia has this to say:

Bear teeth are not specialized for killing their prey like those of cats. Normal canine teeth in a carnivore are generally large, pointed and used for killing prey, while bears' canine teeth are relatively small and typically used in defense or as tools. Bears' molar teeth are broad, flat and are used to shred and grind plant food into small digestible pieces.

(emphasis added)

Look at the teeth of a T. rex (as per above) and you will see a complete lack of broad, flat molar teeth that can be used to shred and grind plant food. What you do see - exclusively - is the large, pointed type used for killing prey (or at least tearing meat).

Now you may continue laughing...

Ozzy Osbourne and Michael Egnor - what is the connection?

2007-04-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

Rather than leaving you in limbo I'll give you the answer straight away: paranoid. For those not in the know, Michael Egnor is the Discovery Institute's latest media darling and Ozzy is, of course, Ozzy... The reason Ozzy is paranoid is simply because he wrote the song "Paranoid". The reason Egnor is paranoid is his latest writings at the evolutionnews.org site - "Airbrushing the Evidence for Reverse Engineering in Biology: Darwinist Makes Wikipedia Reference 'Disappear'". Before I get into explaining why Egnor is paranoid, I just want to examine some of the claims Egnor makes in the article, but before I do, let's see what it means to reverse-engineer something. A common thread for most definitions is as follows:

The process of learning how a product is made by taking it apart and examining it (copied from here).

So, in an sense, when one is elucidating the workings of a biological organism by examining it's "components", one is reverse-engineering - although, more properly, one is engaging in reductionism. The term reverse-engineer implies that whatever one is reverse-engineering was "engineered" in the first place. Which is perhaps why Egnor makes the following claim:

Reverse engineering in biology is an inference to design, even if the inference is implicit and not explicit, and even if the scientist using the reverse engineering methodology doesn’t agree with the philosophical implications of the design inference. Much of modern molecular biology is the reverse engineering of biological molecules.

First, reverse engineering in biology is no inference to design. That is just plain silly. The fact that something can be broken down into smaller components in order to understand the workings of the whole simply means "that something can be broken down into smaller components in order to understand the workings of the whole ". Unless, of course, one assumes that whatever one is examining was designed in the first place - in which case the design inference is simply a circular argument. Good one, Egnor. In reality, the examination of biological workings of organisms could be called reverse engineering only if one assumes that the biological organism was "designed" in the first place. Let's leave the term outside of biology.
Which brings us back heading of Egnor's article for this post. Egnor is upset because the WikiPedia entry for reverse-engineering has had any mentioning of biology deleted from it. Well, as I've argued, so it should.

Which leaves us with me explaining why Egnor is paranoid. Writes Egnor:

Looking a little further, is seems that DrLeeBot (the person that modified the Wiki entry) has an agenda. He has repeatedly modified Wikipedia articles on "pseudoscience" and modified articles on President Bush in ways that that make them more critical of the President.Darwinists felt so threatened by my mundane observation that they actually airbrushed out the relevant part of the Wikipedia link for reverse engineering. This is how Darwinists debate. I made the simple point that
much of modern molecular biology is biological reverse engineering, and that the implicit inference to design may be helpful in guiding biological research.
Their reply: delete the evidence.
What are Darwinists afraid of? Intelligent Design scientists try to help people see the evidence. Darwinists are afraid they'll see it.

First of all, I find it interesting that, since DrLeeBot has previously changed articles on pseudoscience and President Bush(?), Egnor immediately comes to the conclusion that DrLeeBot has a "Darwinian agenda". Is Egnor implying that ID is pseuodoscience? What has Bush got to do with anything? Maybe DrLeeBot's agenda was simply to correct the definition of the word.
Notice how Egnor writes:

Darwinists felt so threatened by my mundane observation that they...

Who are THEY? It was one guy. He was right. Egnor is paranoid.

Second, why does Egnor feel that "Darwinists" are out to get him? The definition of a word was altered so that it actually reflected it's meaning better. No evidence was deleted. Egnor's claim the "Darwinists" are afraid that people might see evidence is a non-sequitur since we are not talking about evidence here. We are talking about the definition of a word that, the way Egnor uses it, makes a perfectly circular argument that biological things were intelligently designed. Circular reasoning is only evidence to pseudo-scientists... such as Egnor. Feeling that people are out to get you for the simple reason that someone corrects the definition of a word is paranoia.

Patron Saint of ID!

2007-04-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

Did you know that ID has a Patron Saint?

Will falsifying IC falsify ID?

2007-04-15T15:39:00.000-07:00

IDists like to think so. For example, Michael Behe has said that if it could be shown that the bacterial flagellum could be shown to arise through darwinian mechanisms, then his irreducible complexity (IC) argument would fall. Some people see this as proof that ID is falsifiable - and that, because of this, ID is science. This conclusion is, however, a non-sequiteur - for two reasons:

1: It doesn't matter what Behe says about falsifying IC. The falsifiability has to be built in to the IC hypothesis. It isn't. Even if the bacterial flagellum was shown to arise "naturally", there is still a long list of other "IC" structures to examine. IDists could play that game 'til the end of time.
2: Falsifying IC does no falsify ID. There are more criteria by which IDists recognize intelligent design such as Dembski's CSI. Some of the IDists arguments even go outside of biology, such as the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants. If these were different, life (and depending on how they are set - even matter) could not exist.

So the question in the heading should really be: is there really any way to test ID? Under what circumstance could we show that ID is not a good "hypothesis"? This is a question to IDers, btw?

What is wrong with Luskin's attack on Sober? Part III.

2007-04-12T02:05:00.000-07:00

I have already detailed what was wrong with part II and part III of Luskin's "rebuttal" of Elliott Sober's article "What is wrong with intelligent design?". Here is my take on Luskin's fourth attempt. As per previous, it helps to have read both Sober's article and Luskin's "rebuttal" before reading this.

This time around, Luskin's states his mission as:

In this final installment I will show that Sober is wrong to claim that ID is not testable because he bases his argument on the false claim that ID permits the possibility that a designer produced a universe where natural processes can produce novel specified complexity on their own.

Luskin takes offense at Sober's statement:

If a newspaper contains complex information, ID proponents are not obliged to say that the press used to print the newspaper is intelligent; presumably, the press is just as mindless as the paper it produces. Rather, their claim is that if you look back further along the causal chain, you'll find an intelligent being. And they are right -- there is a person setting the type.

Luskin responds:

But the printing press gives an inappropriate example because of course we know that printing presses are designed, and we do not find printing presses in nature. The question is not “can processes which we know are human-designed re-transmit information and complexity?” but rather “can processes we find at work in nature generate novel specified and complex information?”

First of all, the printing press is not that an inappropriate example. While we don't find printing presses in nature (for the simple reason that they don't reproduce), what they have in common with humans and life in general is, at least according to IDists, that they are ALL designed. In this sense, humans could very well be like printing presses - they only do what they were designed to do. The question could very well be "can processes which we know are intelligently designed re-transmit information and complexity?".

What the question is NOT (despite Luskin's protestations) is "can processes we find at work in nature generate novel specified and complex information?” (CSI). Remember, ID says nothing at all about the designer or it's modus operandi. The designer might, according to ID, just have made the universe so that nature was primed to generate CSI. The fact that Luskin gives a quote from William Demski that agrees with what Luskin is arguing means nothing, since this is simply just another case of an ID proponent claiming something that ID does not.

Luskin finishes with:

This is an eminently testable claim, and again it seems that Sober attacked only a straw-man version of ID.

Actually, Luskin is defending a straw-man version of ID. So, I'm afraid that my not-so-high hopes that Luskin might actually have had something real to say against Sober's writings have been dashed. Shame.

ID predicts... again...

2007-04-11T19:48:00.000-07:00

scordova at uncommondescent has a post (11 Apr, 2007) where it is yet again claimed that ID predicts that "junk" DNA should not be junk, but actually have functionality. The quote is from ID supporter Andras Pellionisz (a published scientist, no less) who says:

Most Darwinists erroneously predicted that 98.7% of the DNA was devoid of function (“junk”), while the ID/ET theory correctly predicted some yet to be decoded function of junkDNA.

Why is it that ID proponents don't understand their own theory? Intelligent design theory does NOT predict this! Some ID supporters might have claimed to have predicted this (or more likely, postdicted), but ID does NOT - and I repeat NOT - predict this.

What is wrong with Luskin's attack on Sober? Part II.

2007-04-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

I already covered part II of Casey Luskin's "rebuttal" of Elliott Sober and this time around I want to go over part III. Again, it helps to have read both Sober's and Luskin's writings beforehand.

In part III, Luskin claims that Sober ignores the positive predictions that exist for intelligent design. He quotes from Michael Behe's "Darwin's black box" wherein Behe writes:

[I]rreducibly complex systems such as mousetraps and flagella serve both as negative arguments against gradualistic explanations like Darwin’s and as positive arguments for design. The negative argument is that such interactive systems resist explanation by the tiny steps that a Darwinian path would be expected to take. The positive argument is that their parts appear arranged to serve a purpose, which is exactly how we detect design.

The way I see it, the positive argument is entirely circular, which only leaves the negative one. In order for ID to predict ("positively") that "intelligence" generates irreducibly complex (IC) systems, ID would have to say why intelligence did do so instead of not generating IC (for a more in depth discussion of so-called ID "predictions", see my article at "On the ID World"). Here, Luskin shoots himself in the foot. Writes he:

He (Sober) wrongly expects ID to identify the "goals" of the designer, but then fails to recognize that ID identifies the "abilities" of the designer.

Since the designer, according to ID, could do ANYTHING, claiming that ID can identify the designer's abilities means absolutely nothing. On top of that, ID's inability to identify the goals of the designer means that ID cannot predict whether or not the designer should have used IC or non-IC when designing life. Luskin's claim that it does is a pure ad hoc explanation, something Luskin claimed, in part II of his rebuttal, to oppose.

On top of discussing why he thinks that IC is a positive indicator of design, Luskin also brings in Dembski's CSI. But, just as for IC, CSI is no positive indicator of design - and for the same reason.

Is there anything wrong with Sober's writings on intelligent design? If there is, Luskin has failed to point it out in parts II and III of his rebuttals. Part I of his rebuttal deals mainly with the history of intelligent design, something of which I am not terribly interested, so I can't really comment. Luskin has, however, also written a part IV, and maybe, just maybe he might be on to something there... Stay tuned.

Darwinian eugenics?

2007-04-10T20:21:00.000-07:00

It is farily fashionable among IDists/creationists to complain that Darwinism led to eugenics - they are claiming that "weeding out inferior" (selecting "fitter") humans is something that comes out of accepting "Darwinism" (as William Dembski did, for example). But does this claim really stand up to scrutiny? On April 10th, 2007, William Dembski writes on his blog:

In reading Reuland’s critique, try to keep track of “rational design,” “directed evolution,” and “Darwinian methods.” Reuland conflates the last two. In so doing, Reuland completely misses the boat. So let me spell it out: DIRECTED EVOLUTION IS NON-DARWINIAN. DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS NON-DIRECTED. I’ve been saying this now for close to a decade (see ch. 4 of my book No Free Lunch). Just because the word “evolution” is used doesn’t mean that that homage is being paid to Darwin. “Directed evolution” properly falls under ID.

Follow Dembski's logic here:
Premises:
DIRECTED EVOLUTION IS NON-DARWINIAN.
Directed evolution properly falls under ID.
Eugenics is directed evolution.
Conclusion:
Eugenics is NON-DARWINIAN.
Eugenics properly falls under ID.

Uncommondescent regular poster bFast is halfway to understanding the logic above when he responds to Dembski:

Directed evolution requires a director. Any director that I can envision uses intelligence in the process of directing. Directed evolution is unquestionably an ID position.

How long will it be before the IDists wake up and realize that, according to their own logic, they are actually claiming that eugenics is an ID endeavour?

What is wrong with Luskin's attack on Sober?

2007-04-02T20:01:00.000-07:00

In "What is wrong with Intelligent Design?", Elliot Sober details why ID can not be considered to be scientific. Casey Luskin has responded to this article in four separate posts and I want to give a response to the second of those. In order to understand my writings, it would help if you have read both Sober's and Luskin's writings beforehand.

Writes Luskin:

Thus, in Sober's view, ID must make predictions with respect to neo-Darwinism in order for ID to be testable: “If ID is to be tested, it must be tested against one or more competing hypotheses.” His method might be called "relative testability," and it has clear implications for the scientific status of ID: Since Sober measures ID’s testability by comparing it to neo-Darwinism, the implication is that Sober should measure the comparative testability of neo-Darwinism by trying to test it against ID. The unavoidable conclusion is that under Sober’s methodology, ID and neo-Darwinism must have equal, relative testability with respect to one-another. Obviously Sober believes that neo-Darwinian evolution is a scientific theory, so doesn't that mean ID must also qualify as a scientific theory? Yet Sober implies ID is not a scientific theory, revealing a possible double-standard.

Luskin's claim that Sober applies (possible) double-standards regarding the scientific validity/testability of ID vs "neo-Darwinism"(ND) is wrong. While comparative testing is a good thing, it does not follow that ND should be tested against ID at all or that ID is science. What Luskins seems to fail to realize is that there are more hypoteses (although ID is not a hypothesis, of course) than ND and ID (this is a common IDist fallacy, btw). Lamarkism, for example, can be tested against ND. In fact, Lamarkism has been tested and found wanting since ND explains observed phenomena better. So, the unavoidable conclusion is NOT that ID and ND have equal, relative testability with respect to one-another or that ID is a scientific theory - although a lack of a logical train of thought might make you think so

Writes Luskin:

Sober writes: “It is crucial to the scientific enterprise that auxiliary propositions not simply be invented. By inventing assumptions, we can equip a theory with favorable auxiliary propositions that allow it to fit the data.” Auxiliary assumptions, when misused, are like the epicycles used to defend the long-discarded geocentric model of the solar system: they are post-hoc explanations used to square a theory with contrary data. I agree with Sober's statement here, which makes it all the more curious that Sober fails to recognize how often Darwinists have made auxiliary propositions to square their theory with the data:"

First of all, auxilliary assumptions are not post-hoc, although they could potentially be ad hoc (as when they are simply invented) - hopefully Luskin knows what the difference between these terms is. As Sober writes, the auxiliary propositions we use have to be "independently justified" in the sense that our reasons for accepting them do not depend on (i) assuming that the theory being tested is true or (ii) using the data for arriving at the hypothesis. Luskin agrees when Sober says that auxiliary propositions should not simply be invented which is interesting - mainly for the reason than Luskin doesn't even try to deny that IDists do anything but "simply invent" them (as Sober argues, they have to). Instead Luskin gives what he thinks are instances of Darwinists making "auxiliary propositions to square their theory with the data". Luskin simply throws out a few instances of new scientific discoveries and doesn't even try to justify why these are not justified propositions (how ironic). Problem for Luskin is that the examples he give are "independently justifiable" (and I would say that the third one he lists is simply a straw-man; Co-option and exaptation don't replace natural selection - the features that were "co-opted" and "exapted" would have been subject to selection.).

So, if you accept Sober's writings regarding auxiliary propositions, it would follow that you don't consider ID to be science. Given that Luskin doesn't even try to deny that ID simply invents it's auxiliary propositions (and given that he thinks that that they shouldn't simply be invented) it is quite safe to say that Luskin doesn't think that ID is science either. He doesn't seem to care about that and instead tries to claim that evolution is not science either. Here, as I noted above, he fails. Luskin's attempt at responing to Sober's claims seems to have failed as well.

Deniers Bad; Herd Followers Good???

2007-03-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

BarryA at uncommondescent is complaining because IDists are sometimes called evolution-DENIERS. But he reckons that the ongoing "witch hunt" can be used to their own advantage. He lists quite a few examples of of people who, through the ages, have been deniers themselves and claims that without deniers there could be no progress in science. Writes BarryA:

There were a couple of doctors who were “stress deniers” in that they denied that stress caused peptic ulcers. They had the audacity to suggest that ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection. As a result, they were marginalized and scoffed at and (so I understand) heckled and laughed at during presentations. The end result: they won the 2005 Nobel Price in medicine for the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. The take home message that we should shout at every opportunity: today’s “deniers” are tomorrows heros.

Consider also the following:
Copernicus - geocentrism denier
Pasteur - spontaneous generation denier
Darwin - inheritance of acquired traits denier
Einstein - absolute reference frame denier
Gould and Margalis - Darwinian gradualism deniers
Hawking - Steady State Model denier
Conway Morris - purely random evolution denier
Woese - universal common descent denier
etc.

BarryA is hopelessly confused about something that is quite fundamental to all the examples he gives. These people didn't "deny current dogma" just for the sake of it. They came up with BETTER scientific explanations for observed phenomena. Darwin denied inheritance of acquired characteristics only in the sense that selection would be a better mechanism to explain adaptation. Copernicus denied geocentrism only in the sense that heliocentrism would better explain the apparent movement of stars and planets. I assume that BarryA included Gould because he somehow thinks that puctuated equilibrium somehow goes against "gradualism" (it doesn't) and he most certainly included Morris because his view towards evolution is highly teleological (something that is more than just slightly unaccepted [for scientific reasons]).

So, unlike the ID movement, these people didn't stick their fingers in their ears and shout "The designer did it! The designer did it!". They actually contributed to science. They were/are not deniers. IDists are.

Evidence FOR design? Finally???

2007-03-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

Under the heading "Germ Free Animal Lifespan Evidence of Design" (26th Mar, 2007), uncommondescent's DaveScot thinks he might have found some good evidence for intelligent design. Animals that live under germ-free conditions (i.e. they are infected by no viruses, bacteria or any [other] parasites) can live twice as long as "normal" animals. Writes he:

This got me thinking about evolution vs. design. The animals raised germ-free could not have evolved in the natural world without exposure to bacteria but they could have been designed for GF life. The fact that they live twice as long in a GF environment when eating a diet that is nutritionally complete except for being sterile seems to be favorable evidence that animals were created in and for a germ-free world.

What DaveScot fails to realise is that this would not be evidence for design but simply evidence that animals can live twice as long in a germ free environment. DaveScot has used the typical ID creationist tactic of taking an observation, make a "hypothesis" and then claim that his hypothesis supports the observation. Well, duh. I would have to, wouldn't it. But imagine the hypothetical scenario where the germ free animals only lived half as long; DaveScot could still "hypothesize" that the animals did this because they were designed to do so. And given that ID gives you no clue as to which of these two "hypotheses" to choose from, we are left with choosing the one that the observations fit (see my article regardig ID predictions for more info). I.e., ID supports whatever is observed; anything can be evidence for ID. And if there is no evidence against ID, you can hardly claim that there is any meaningful evidence for it.

So, I guess we got no evidence for ID in the end. All we got evidence of was an ID creationist's failure to understand what can be counted as evidence. Surprise, surprise.

Who Designed the Designer?

2007-03-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

This post comments on an article that appears on the "ID the future" website - "Who Designed the Designer? (A Lengthier Response)" by Jay Richards.

In it, Richards argues that there is no need to ask the question "Who designed to designer" since science only deals with proximate and not ultimate causes. He states that we can infer design even if we have no idea about who the designer is.

I agree, but then that is not the reason for asking who designed the designer. The real reason is this:

ID claims that, since it does not identify the designer, it is agnostic regarding the identity of it. It can not say whether or not the designer was God, Darth Vader, a blob of slime, x or anything else for that matter. The only thing it says is that the designer was intelligent. And intelligence is the only thing that can generate Complex Specified Information (CSI); material undirected processes (MUP - the usual ways things happen in the world) can not. From that it would seem to follow that MUP can not generate intelligence (e.g. via any evolutionary processes) for then MUP would be able to generate CSI. So, either (1) intelligence or CSI will have had to been injected into our universe at some (or several) point(s) in the past OR(/and) (2) intelligence is really a separate entity from the material world that, for all intents and purposes, "just is".

Bill Dembski seems to argue something alongs the lines of point (2) in his upcoming book "The Design of Life" where he writes:

There are now good reasons for thinking that no such causal mechanism exists and that mind is inherently irreducible to brain.23 This is good news for intelligent design, which treats intelligence as irreducible to material entities and the mechanisms that control their interaction. At the same time, it does not mean that intelligence should be regarded as something “supernatural.” Supernatural explanations invoke miracles and therefore are not properly part of science. Explanations that call on intelligent causes require no miracles but cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations. Indeed, design theorists argue that intelligent causation is perfectly natural, provided that nature is understood aright.

Bill is claiming above that his view of intelligence should not be considered supernatural, because supernatural events invoke miracles. But given that intelligence cannot be reduced to materialistc explanations (i.e. mind is really a separate entity from the brain in which it emerges from [according to Bill]), it also follows that there is no way we can scientifically test for it and thus intelligence is outside the scope of science and is for all intents and purposes supernatural.

Point (1) from above fares no better. MUP are, according to Bill, the only natural events that can take place and thus the insertion of intelligence/CSI into out universe would, by definition, be supernatural.

So, the real reason why we should not be asking the question "who designed the designer" is because logically, ID is not agnostic regarding the nature of the designer; ultimately, according to ID, there has to have been a supernatural designer.

Racism - sexism

2007-03-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

Following up on my comment regarding William Dembski's "revelation" that Darwin was a racist (March 21st, 2007), I would just like to mention that, since Dembski is a "Southern Baptist" and since Southern baptist's wives must submit themselves graciously to their husband's leadership, it would follow that Dembski is a sexist.

Dembski finished his original post with :

Okay, all together now with feeling: “WE LOVE DARWIN. WE LOVE EVOLUTION. WE LOVE THE STATUS QUO.”

Okay, all together now with feeling: “WE LOVE DEMBSKI. WE LOVE INTELLIGENT DESIGN. WE LOVE HYPOCRISY.”

It's a happy Darwinian world after all...

2007-03-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much lately for the simple reason that all that seems to be coming out from the ID camp now-a-days is mere random moaning about ... whatever they feel like moaning about. I keeping with their fashion of not proposing any positive evidence for their "theory" they seem to even having stopped attacking evolution and are now merely attacking the irrelevant personal opinions of "evolutionists" - dead or alive.

The latest in line to do so is none other than Bill Dembski. On march 20th, under the heading "It's a happy Darwinian world after all..." he quotes a passage from Darwin's "The Descent of Man" where Darwin presents some rather interesting views regarding the traits that should be passed down in human societies (as a side note, the entire book "The Descent of Man" can be read online). Darwin's views were no doubt wrong much for the simple reason that he seems to have thought that in regards to "nature vs nurture" human traits (he was mostly talking about behaviour in this particular chapter) seem to have been firmly decided by nature (i.e. behaviour is passed along from parent to offspring genetically/deterministically not because it is learned). Bill, of course, brings this up not because Darwin was wrong but because it is an easy target for "evolution-bashing". Bill, like many of his ilk, seems to have a hard time separating the scientific hypotheses/theories proposed (that have changed in the last 150 years, btw) from the views expressed by the theory's originator. The validity of a scientific explanation does not rest on the niceness of the person proposing it, but on the evidence supporting it.

Why is that so hard to understand?

QUIZ-time

2007-03-15T00:59:00.000-07:00

Take the "On the ID World quiz" and test your knowledge about Intelligent Design.

New website - expansion of The DesignInterference

2007-03-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

After blogging about the predictions that ID supposedly make (Nov 12th, 2006) and then engaging in a debate about the very same point at overwhelmingevidence, I decided that I would, now and then, write articles that are a bit more formal than my usual blogs. These articles will deal with some of the more fundamental problems with ID and will also be a bit more "meaty" than my posts at "The DesignInterference". I have created a separate web-site, On the ID World, for these articles (this site will also contain some other writings that are not ID related). The first ID article, No, Intelligent Design Theory can NOT predict!, is on now online.

The new site looks HIGHLY similar to my other web-site, "In an ID World", from where the code was taken and some of the menu-options of "On the ID World" still link there. I will change this as soon as I have the time available.

Enjoy.

The tree of life

2007-02-23T00:02:00.000-08:00

DaveScot at uncommondescent (22nd Feb, 2007) is a bit perplexed because the tree of life (i.e. a representation of the relatedness of species) changes over time. This is, as anyone who knows even the tiniest bit of science, how things go as new observations are acquired and taken into account. DaveScot, however, thinks that this is something worthy of ... actually, I'm not really sure what he is trying to do. As lots of ID proponents keep pointing out, common descent is in fact compatible with ID. The two trees of life he shows pictures of are both compatible with ID. ANY tree of life is compatible with ID. In fact, your average boreal forest and even a random smackering of dots on a piece of A4 paper is compatible with ID. Heck, ANYTHING is compatible with ID (apart from the obvious exception where intelligence has never played any part in anything). And this is, of course, why ID is useless.

Did we descend from apes?

2007-02-11T17:24:00.000-08:00

DaveScot at uncommondescent blogs (Feb 10, 2007):

You know for many years I’ve been taking care
to avoid saying men evolved from apes because the pedant dominated science
establishment is quick to point out that we and apes descend from a common
ancestor and anyone who thinks we evolved from apes clearly doesn’t understand evolution. So now we
have arguably the most recognized living name in paleontology, Richard Leakey, blurting
out the proverbial “I’m so stupid I don’t know what common ancestry means”. What
are we to make of that?
I’m sure our good pedant friends in the science establishment, through Panda’s
Thumb or some member blog, will let us know upon reading this.

What are we to make of this. Is it true that when someone claims that we descended from apes, then that someone doesn't understand evolution? Can we therefore claim that Richard Leaky does not understand it? The answer to both question would be no. The common ancestor of humans and chimps/bonobos would have been an ape-like creature, just as the common ancestor of humans/chimps/boobos and gorillas would have been. Saying that we descended from apes would, therefore, not really be wrong. (HOWEVER, if you were to claim that we descended from a chimp, you would be saying that we descended from a modern(ish) animal and THEN you would be wrong and your understanding of evolution would be sub-par - The only example I think I have seen of ID creationists claiming that we descended from a modern organism is when the odd fellow claims that we descended from amoeba.) I think that the problem here is that, when an ID creationist says these things, "evolutionists" automatically assume that the ID-folk refer to modern apes as being our ancestors.

I don't think that I have ever seen anyone actually protest when it is claimed that our ancestor was an ape. What I HAVE seen is some "evolutionists" complain when the ID creationist claims that we descended from monkeys. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with this either. The common ancestor with humans and monkeys would most likely have been "something like a monkey". You could also claim that we descended from fish, since the last common ancestor we had with a fish would probably have been "something like a fish". The same thing applies here as in the ape example above - as long as the claim is NOT that we descended from a modern animal (say a spider monkey or a flounder respectively), there is nothing terribly wrong in these claims.

Global warming

2007-02-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

The folks at uncommondescent seem to quite unanimously think that global warming is not due to human causes. I'm not going to advocate neither for or against the extent to which humans are contributing to rising temperatures but merely point out what I find interesting with the ID-crowds conclusion. Intelligent design proponents tend to make a "design inference" (conclude that something has an intelligently designed cause) whenever they feel that mere known natural processes are not enough to account for a certain outcome. And yet, in the global warming debate, there seems to be evidence that causes such as changing levels in solar output are not enough to account for the increase in global temperatures. Because of this (and given that CO2 which we pump out quickly is a green-house gas), climate scientists have made a "design inference" and are claiming that humans are responsible for at least some of the warming. Usually, the ID crowd loves when scientists think that they can detect intelligent design of any kind (think archaeology and SETI), but in this instance, they seem to flat out refuse to even consider the possibility that intelligence might be at work. Why would this be? Comments such as:

"Global Warming: why it is the Left’s last best chance to gain a
stranglehold on our political system and economy… and how we can fight
back"

and

"Given the way Darwin defenders go about defending evolution, why should we
expect the science of global warming to be any different. "

seem to imply that the exisence of evidence of design is secondary to other agendas.

Genetic entropy...

2007-01-25T17:35:00.000-08:00

scordova writes at uncommondescent about genetic entropy, the idea that genomes are degrading:

For example, a fundamental consequence of Sanford’s Genetic Entropy thesis is that there will be an unabated rise in Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) per generation per individual. If confirmed, this data will be more nails in Darwin’s coffin, and then Darwin Day might have to be renamed Darwin Bashing Day...

It would seem that scordova claims that ID predicts that there will be an increase in SNPs (single bases in DNA are changed) between generations and that this is bad for evolution. Why this would be bad news for evolution, I don't know. After all, if there weren't any mutations, evolution would be quite difficult. Rather than being a nail in the coffin, it would be a confirmation of something that evolution requires. Or maybe I have misunderstood what the heck scordova is on about...

Peer-reviewed testable ID claims?

2007-01-25T14:07:00.000-08:00

Quizzlestick at overwhelmingevidence asks if ID has provided any peer-reviewed testable claims. The answer appears to be yes and a link is supplied to an article (written by a Kazmer Ujvarosy) that appears in an online magazine that is not peer-reviewed(!). OK you might say. Maybe the article is not peer-reviewed - but surely it provides testable claims. I'll give you five predictions the article makes:

•By virtue of its eternity human intelligence constitutes the cosmological constant.
•Human intelligence has quantum properties because it exists in both particle and field states. Human intelligence in its potential or seed state is a particle, but in its state of expression takes on field characteristics, and thus provides the morphogenetic field or quantum vacuum of the universe for the development of the creatures it has in mind.
•Dark energy, that drives the expansion of the universe, is one of the deepest and most exciting puzzles in modern science. We posit that dark energy is the field manifestation of the parent seed of the universe, just as the cosmic vacuum’s zero-point energy. They all originate from the cosmic seed’s biophoton emissions, which blackbody radiation provides a holographic biofield for the generation of the physical universe. Based on the fact that the biophotonic radiation emitted by DNA is coherent, we predict that the cosmic seed's biophotonic field or "dark energy" is equally coherent.

•The universe is a living system, dynamically managed by the parent seed’s unbounded and conscious holographic biofield, and regulated by the process of information feedback.

•The elusive Higgs boson – so vital to the Standard Model of particle physics that it is dubbed “the God particle” – is identical with the genotype of the phenotype universe, and each human genome is its reproduction. Based on this identification we posit that mass-giving is life-giving because the elementary particles that come into contact with the cosmic seed's biofield or quantum vacuum receive their mass and property as a result of that interaction.

I would be keen for either quizzlestick or Kazmer himself to (please do) tell us how we are supposed to test these predictions. Myself, I have a hard time separating this from most other new-age clap-trap.

quizzlestick says this of Kazmer:

I would like to introduce Dr. Kazmer Ujavorsy, chief scientist of the Frontline Science Institute, one of the most prestigious research organizations dedicated to Intelligent Design.

From what I can see, the Frontline Science Institute has published six articles - all in American Chronicle. From what I can see, none of the articles provide any testable claims and of course, none of them appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. So, the claim that it is a prestigious research organization would appear to be nothing short of a big fat lie.

A commenter (HaEris) has this to say about Kazmer:

.....What can I say other that I am glad he is on our side.

Given the nonsense prediction he supplied (above), I'm glad he's on your side too.

So, all in all, no peer-reviewed testable claims are supplied, which is bizarre, given that that was the reason quizzlestick wrote the article. Oh, well...

Bad poetry

2007-01-25T13:14:00.000-08:00

In his book "Unweaving the rainbow", Richard Dawkins explains how the use of analogies and metaphors can be a useful tool to understand scientific ideas and concepts. He also describes why doing this can sometimes be bad and actually make something more difficult to understand and even make you understand things wrong. Dawkins himself refers to this as using either good poetry (when better understanding is reached) or bad poetry (when understanding is hindered) respectively. Reading through intelligent design (ID) material on the web, it strikes me that ID proponents are quite fond of bad peotry. Most importantly, they seem to think that analogies are actually a good descriptor of the way things really are. The analogies become, then, not mere analogies but literal truth. The best example I have seen so far is from none other that William Dembski:

William Dembski quotes an Ivan Amato who talks about mutations that are usually thought to be silent (i.e. have no phenotypic effect): "The more scientists study the genetic code, the more it reads like poetry. In a poem, every word, every line break, even every syllable can carry more than a literal meaning. So too can the molecular letters, syllables, and words of the genetic code carry more biologically relevant meanings than they appear to at first." Amato's poetry is "good" (heck, he even used poetry as an analogy) IMO, but of course Dembski has to take it literally. The reason is obvious: poets write poetry. Poets intelligently designed the poems. But it's just an ANALOGY. Bill took a good piece of poetry and presented bad poetry to his readers.

Gollum... no GOLEM!!!

2007-01-17T17:28:00.000-08:00

William Dembski at uncommondescent writes (Jan 17th, 2007):

Does the following point up disconfirming evidence against the creative power of unguided evolutionary processes? What has become of this project to vindicate standard evolutionary theory?

The golem@Home project has concluded. After accumulating several Million CPU hours on this project and reviewing many evolved creatures we have concluded that merely more CPU is not sufficient to evolve complexity: The evolutionary process appears to be hitting a complexity barrier that is not traversable using direct mutation-selection processes, due to the exponential nature of the problem.

Well, from what I have seen in ID writings, evolutionary algorithms all fail to mimic Darwinian processes for some reason or other. One common objection is that these programs strive for a preset goal - i.e. they have teleology. Teleology, they claim, is what an intelligent designer has and evolution doesn't, so all these algorithms really show is that intelligent designers are able to design the algorithms that lead to the solution - i.e. the programs really support ID.

Golem basically works as follows:

The organism will attempt to move across an infinite plain, and its fitness is determined by how successful it is at locomotion. The construction details are then stored, and another creature allowed to develop. The fitter "robots" can pass their "genes" on to the next generation, and as time passes, the more successful combinations are permitted to survive.

Golum's teleologic goal is thus to be able to move better than before. The success of this approach would thus (by ID standards) have been support for ID and this is what IDists would have claimed had the program been successful. But the program failed and thus the project really points up disconfirming evidence against the creative power of intelligently designed processes.

If IDists were consistent, they should read the above as:

The golem@Home project has concluded. After accumulating several Million CPU hours on this project and reviewing many intelligently designed creatures we have concluded that merely more CPU is not sufficient to intelligently design complexity: The intelligently designed process appears to be hitting a complexity barrier that is not traversable using direct intelligently designed mutation-selection processes, due to the exponential nature of the problem.

Well, this is what IDists themselves should be saying.

Designing iterated

2007-01-16T17:39:00.000-08:00

Uncommondescent has a list of arguments they don't want commenters to use. One of these is:

Who Designed the Designer

This argument points out that, by inferring a designer from complexity in machines, the designer must also be complexity. Why? Well just because it seems like he/she/it would. This of course then plunges into an infinite loop of who designed the designer. This infinite loop makes Intelligent Design somehow impossible. The really weird part is the argument is broadcast to us using a computer that was the result of intelligent design. Intelligent design does not speak to the nature of designers anymore than Darwin’s theory speaks to the origin of matter.

More properly, the argument is that it takes (by ID's definition) intelligence to build complexity (well, specified complexity, at least). Idists would be foolish to suggest that intelligence is not complex. So, the question remains: how did the designer become complex? Dembski et al often claim that intelligence is non-material - so maybe non-complex non-material stuff can design complex material stuff? If the designer would not even have to be complex, then we would have complexity arising from non-complexity - which is pretty much what evolution (and abiogenesis) claims anyway. So why the need for ID?

This issue can be debated back and forth - and it should be!

All these ID reasearch papers...

2007-01-14T18:57:00.000-08:00

idnet.com.au at uncommondescent claims (re certain papers he reads in Nature):

Almost every time I read the abstracts and even the titles, or spend more time delving into the detail, I hear “Intelligent Design” silently screamed from the pages. Am I deluded, or do others hear it too? Here is a recent example.

He then quotes from an article about cell signalling and leg morphogenesis in Drosophila. He seems to think that the article in question screams design since it contains words such as "specifies", "signal" and "information" (well, he bolded these words and added no further comments). But how on Earth does presenting some research that examines something complicated containing a few ID buzz-words support ID? The answer as far as I can tell is "I think something looks intelligently designed, so therefore it was intelligently designed". So, I guess that the article supports ID just because an ID supporter thinks it does.

Maybe I'm deaf, or maybe I'm reading this in outer space, because I can't hear the screaming. Or maybe idnet.com.au really is deluded(?).

Beating that old dead ungulate

2007-01-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

William Dembski at uncommondescent wonders (Jan 8th, 2007) why, with the publication of two new anti-intelligent design books, do evolutionists keep beating a dead horse. I assume that Dembski asks this question after having heard some evolutionist claiming that ID as a science is dead in the water. Well Bill, ID as science is dead (or rather, it was never alive in the first place) - but it is alive and kicking in the religious, political and commercial arena. This is of course where ID is trying to get a legitimate standing, hence the beating.

Or maybe....
...
...
maybe the horse is non-materialistic and every time it dies it reincarnates in some other form...
...
(sorry, just rambling)

Evolution says nothing about...

2007-01-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

Dembski's pal Denyse O'Leary is quite amusing. She seems to have very little understanding about logic and science. The post of interest is again the one dated (Jan 5th, 2007). Writes she:

In Commentary magazine, Eric Cohen's "The Human Difference" offers to explain why most North Americans do not accept the current science pundits' vision of the world:

On the evidence provided by nature, Darwin’s claim of common descent seems undeniably compelling; man’s emergence via genetic mutation and natural selection seems likely; and the possibility of man’s never emerging seems all too possible. Yet for all its insights into the development of complex life, the theory of evolution ends before the most interesting questions begin. Where did matter come from in the first place, and with it the latent possibility of man? What is the source of nature’s fixed laws, by which the chance process of evolution plays itself out? Why do animals seek to survive and reproduce at all, hungering for life even with its manifold sufferings?

To these questions, modern Darwinian theory has no compelling answer, and its methods are poorly equipped even to initiate the right sort of inquiry. Evolution may explain the mechanisms of man’s descent, but not the mystery of his ascent, including the wonder he exhibits about the origins and destiny of the cosmos—a wonder that serves no useful animal function. A theory of man’s origins is not yet a theory of man, let alone a theory about why there is something rather than nothing.

She ends with a comment of her own: "Well, exactly". Well, exactly, Denyse, it's true. Darwinian theory has no compelling answer to these questions. Neither should it. Neither should the theory of gravity, theories about electromagnetism, theories about material stress, theories about the change in global temperatures, theories about... Well, you get the picture. Intelligent design creationists like Denyse seem to seriously think that a theory has to answer ALL questions for it to be valid. This is simply nonsensical and only shows her willful ignorance about science in general. I can only assume that Dembski lets her share his blog because she shares his conclusions and he really couldn't care less how she reached them.

ID says nothing about the designer...

2007-01-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

A central tenet of intelligent design (ID) is that it does not address the nature or identity of the designer in question. With this in mind, one has to wonder why ID proponents (Dembski included) constantly claim that there is more to the universe than materialism. For example, Dembski's pal Denyse O'Leary writes in her blog (Friday 5th Jan, 2007):

I wonder how Dyson would feel about materialist scientists just leaving the ID guys alone to just get on with their work: One of them wrote me recently, saying poignantly, "If only they would just leave us alone, but they can't and won't." Of course not. If ID is right in any particular, materialism is dead. (bolding added)

Bearing in mind ID refusal to say anything about the designer, O'Leary's (bolded) comment above rests on bad logic. Since ID says nothing about whether or not the designer is material or not, even if ID is right, materialism would not necessarily be dead. Unless of course ID does say something about the designer...

Evolution: An idea on the verge of extinction?

2007-01-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

You can always count on intelligent design creationists to predict the in-the-not-too-distant-future demise of evolution. The lastest(?) to do so is SBWillie at overwhelming evidence. One of his arguments for this is that he claims that evolution is a tautology (i.e. survival of the fittest leads to the fittest surviving). This is simply wrong. Fitness is a probabilistic term where those that are better adapted, compared to others in the same population, are more likely to reproduce and pass on their traits (as an aside, I would personally like to call it "survival of the fitter"). In order for it to be a tautology, the consequence would always have to follow from the premise (also see claim CA500 at talkorigins). Even Answers in Genesis recommend that this argument should not be used. So, the answer to SBWillie's question:

Could Darwinists have been so silly to have based their entire field of study on a glaringly obvious tautology?

would appear to be no. He continues:

What if "Survival of the fittest" were the "engine" that drives life on? Do we really live in a selfish world where only the most ruthless competitors stand a chance of survival? Fortunately this is not the case. When Darwin originally wrote his "Origin of Species" he was completely unaware of the many forms of symbiosis, co-operation and even generosity in the animal kingdom. The only way a Darwinist can continue to believe in this core dogma is by closing his eyes to the last hundred years of biological research.

The only one's who think that Darwinists believe this are strawman-wielding ID creationists. After all, there is nothing quite like misrepresenting your opponents positions, attacking it and then claiming victory.

Unlike Evolutionists, we Proponents of ID do not pretend that we have all the answers. We only wish to humbly point out that scientists who refuse to accept Intelligent Design may be risking lives. For example, it is widely acknowledged amongst AIDS researchers that the reason why the virus is so hard to fight is because it "evolves". Millions of dollars are being spent on researching how this life-form evolves and where has it got us? Perhaps the reason for failure of conventional research has less to do with "bad luck" or "lack of budget", but a fundamentally wrong approach. Is it not possible that life cannot evolve in the way that Darwinists think, but that it only adapts in precisely the way predicted by the theory of Intelligent Design?

And now, Darwinists are risking lives as well. I don't think I've come across a ID creationist claiming this before (not in the sense it's used here anyway [they usually say something along the lines that Darwinism leads to Nazism]). SBWillie, HIV does evolve - no doubt about it. I would love to see SBWillie explain just how scientists have got it wrong and more to the point just how ID theory is getting it right. Of course, no such explanation is given.

There is much work still to do, but as yet mainstream science has not yet managed to argue away this new science. I think this may be proof that our ideas are valid.

Methinks he must mean apart from pointing out that ID is not science, thus showing that his ideas are not scientifically valid.

All we need to do in order to win this debate is to keep making clear arguments that show the inherent contradictions and absurdities of Darwinism.

And all we get from SBWillie is false claims and strawmen instead.

I believe that ID provides exactly the scientific framework to help simplify the complex problems that continue to puzzle mankind. I personally predict that one or more of the bigger commercial research organisations will come over to our side of the debate within a matter of months: Why wouldn't they accept the truth when there is so much of their own money at stake!

I'm sure someone will continue to issue a few more ID books. There is, after all, money to be made from that.

It looks to me as if SBWillies prediction of evolution's demise is based on rubbish reasoning.

Naturalism: An Obstruction of Justice?

2007-01-02T18:05:00.000-08:00

A certain TRoutMac at overwhelmingevidence claims that IDists by necessity oppose methodological naturalism (Definition from wikipedia: Methodological naturalism (MN) is the philosophical tenet that, within scientific enquiry, one can only use natural explanations - i.e. one's explanations must not make reference to the existence of supernatural forces and entities. Note that methodological naturalism does not hold that such entities or forces do not exist, but merely that one cannot use them within a scientific explanation.) and also states:

...but far from relying on "supernatural" causes, this opposition to naturalism merely enables one to objectively weigh the evidence and make rational conclusions based on that evidence. Naturalism actually stacks the deck and only allows evidence for one possible explanation for life to be explored. That's hardly science, and it's hardly objective.

TRoutMac seems to have some problem with definitions here. First of, if you reject MN, you by by necessity rely on supernatural causes - by definition. TRoutMac's claim that naturalism only allows evidence for one possible explanation for life is simply wrong. While the explanation does indeed have to be naturalistic, there can of course be a plethora of these. TRoutMac's second definitional problem is claiming that using only naturalism is not science, is also wrong - by definition (obviously, since science only deals with natual explanations).

TRoutMac continues:

To illustrate the absurdity of the naturalist's position regarding origin-of-life issues, just imagine you're a lead detective in a law enforcement agency, and you've been assigned by your captain to investigate a murder. Due to circumstances around the murder, it's already apparent that there are two prime suspects for the crime. But one of those suspects is your captain's close personal friend. Your captain approaches you privately and instructs you that you are NOT permitted to build a case against his friend and that you must build your case to charge the other suspect.

This is a really bad analogy - just as ID analogies usually are. There are several reasons for this, but the most important one is that we know that people sometimes commit murder and we know that people were around at the time of the murder. What we don't know is whether or not there was anything intelligent around when life first arose on this planet. And if there was, did it design life here or at all. Other reasons for the bad analogy is that he complains about the naturalists position and then only supplies natural explanations. A better analogy would have been to have two other suspects; John Doe and the other something supernatural (call it God, gremlins or leprechauns if you wish). I think that most captains would not entertain the idea of spirits commiting a murder - and neither should they.

TRoutMac finishes:

Naturalists have to explain why they feel compelled to frame the other suspect. They have to explain what they're trying to protect. They have to explain why they wish to obstruct the investigation. I'm glad I'm not in their shoes.

A naturalist would not be framing anyone. He would just reject supernatural explanations. What is being protected? Is rationality enough? Is this obstructing the investigation? No, obviously not. TRoutMac should perhaps try to wear some other shoes.

Front loading???

2007-01-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

A pro ID blogger (Nathan) states in one of his posts:

As the articles states, "sea urchins are echinoderms, marine animals" and
the purple sea urchin, "has 7,000 genes in common with humans, including genes
associated with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases and muscular
dystrophy." Of great interest to intelligent design advocates of front loading
is the fact that although the sea urchin has no eyes, nose or ears it does have
genes that are homologous to genes found in humans that are involved in vision,
hearing and the sense of smell.

Are we actually to accept that this is evidence of one-of-many-ways-in-which-the-creator-could-have-done-it? The thinking here is that the common ancestor of mammals and sea urchins would have had these genes and since (the ancestors of) mammals later did develop eyes, the case for front-loading is strengthened. Let's examine that, shall we?

The assumption you have to accept here is that these genes are only useful in vision, hearing and smell (if you do not accept that assumtion, you would reject irreducible complexity, which is after all a cornerstone of ID). Under this assumption, these genes in the sea urchins would have been conserved for some 500 million years (since the last common ancestor of mammals and echinoderms was alive) in the absense of selective pressures to maintain them. That is an extraordinary feat that would be nothing short of miraculous. But maybe you could argue that these genes will become important for the sea urchins in the future when they will acquire vision, hearing and smell themselves. Problem is, this does not get rid of the problem. Since the sea urchins have not got these abilities today, there is no selective pressure to maintain the genes (and again, don't try to argue that maybe the genes also have other functions since this still is an argument against irreducible complexity).

Maybe we should just accept a scientific explanation for why these genes have been conserved instead. Like, the genes have slightly different functions in the two lineages of organisms.

Bored of the Games

2006-12-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

William Dembski blogged at uncommondescent (Dec 29th) about a new board game (Intelligent Design vs Evolution) and commented:

You know you’ve arrived when you’re the topic of a board game (look for “ID — The Movie” next).

Given that one of the creators of the game has a web-site for the game that is full of straw-men and that creationist whacko Ken Ham writes about it:

"Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are doing much more than revealing the bankruptcy of molecules-to-man evolution. They have a greater purpose: proclaiming biblical authority and reaching the lost with the precious gospel message. Enjoy this wonderful family game as you also become better equipped to defend our precious Christian faith." -- Ken Ham, President, Answers in Genesis.

, you can be pretty sure that the claim:

We are very excited about this game because it presents both sides of the creation evolution argument,...

really means that they are presenting - not evolution - but rather their twisted illogical crap version of it. Oh, yes Bill, you've arrived alright. It's just that you have totally failed to arrive at anything worthy of consideration.

PS. The object of the game is to collect rubber brains, something which would actually be a good description of Dembski et al.

Best science blog 2006

2006-12-14T18:39:00.000-08:00

I couldn't resist it. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy will link to me if I vote for him in the upcoming blog awards. How could I not. I read his darned site after all. Everyone, vote for Phil!!!

The less we know...

2006-12-14T12:44:00.000-08:00

This is just a minor observation, but I have seen several remarks in uncommondescent and other ID sites that, as we learn more and more about how organisms work, we realise that there increasingly is even more that we don't know. I agree with this sentiment. But then the ID folk go and state (as, for example, commenter gpuccio did at uncommondescent under "Ultraconserved Phenotype", Dec 13th) that this is support for ID. The reationale seems to be that unintelligent forces can't shape all this newly complexity, and only intelligence can. But that seems to be the exact opposite of what they should be arguing. Given that it gets harder and harder for intelligence to explain all this new information, it would be harder and harder for intelligence to design it. In other words, this is actually an argument against ID.

My overwhelming experience

2006-12-10T17:26:00.000-08:00

I have, for the last month (I just looked back on the dates- it's been a month!), been engaged in a debate at Overwhelming Evidence about whether it's possible or not for evolution to cause increases in information and functions or if this would require intelligence. The ID stance (represented here by Mario, Patrick and TRoutMac) is, of course that this is impossible. Judging by the length of the discussion you would have thought that there would have been a lot of topics covered, but looks are, in this instance, deceiving. Most of my discussion with Mario is just trying to pin down exactly what he meant by increases in information and functions (and just by information and functions as such, whether new or not). I will not recount everything that was said in this debate since it can be read in full at the link above, but I do want to give a summary of what was stated (and small bits that were never said as the thread was closed down prematurely). When I write "ID claim" below, I am referring to what the corresponents at Overwhelming Evidence wrote.

ID claim: Only intelligence can create new information and new functions. Evolution can't. Mutations can only degrade information and functions.

After a LONG session with Mario I managed to get a fair understanding of what he actually meant by function (and what would constitute a new one). It's an interesting defintion he uses: At the level of a catalytic enzyme, two enzymes, one that ligates the molecules a and b to make c and another that ligates d and e to make f, would not be functionally different. That's right, even though two different enzymes perform different functions, they are not functionally different! Instead, the enzymes would have to DO something different like, for example, transport instead of ligate. Why this is an important distinction, I'm not sure.

Their defintion of information, it was finally mentioned after quite some time, seems to be William Dembski's CSI.

ID claim: "An increase of info. can only be the product of gene duplication..."

Mario was quite hung up on the idea that a gene would have to be duplicated before it mutates and creates new info/functions. His reasons seem to be that unless there is a prior duplication, the mutations would destroy the info/function of the old gene and thus there would be no NET increase in information. The horizontal transfer of said gene into an organism that retained to original gene would not count as this would only be information/function TRANSFER (not origin of). I have to regress a bit and state that there was, to the aforementioned, a highly related I point which I never pursued (because the thread was closed down). The point being how they use the terms creation (or new) versus destruction (or loss) when discussing information. In their minds, new information and a new function is created once. For example, let's say that we get a new enzyme (by their definition) with the ability to make x from y and z in organism A. When organism A reproduces or when the new enzyme horizontally transfers to another organism, this would not constitute the creation of a new function/information. Fair enough - under some circumstances, I would agree. However, when they talk about the destruction (loss) of information/function they do not mean the opposite of creation/new as one would expect. Destruction occurs when ANY organism loses it's info/fuction, EVEN THOUGH GAZILLIONS of organisms might still have them. So, if organism A (with it's new function) above multiplies to become 10^10 organisms, we still have a singular event of info/function creation. But if 10^9 of those organisms lose that info/function we have 10^9 events of info/function destruction (even though the information/function still exists. Even more bizarely, if an organism loses a gene it's a loss, but if it regains it through horizontal gene transfer, it is not a gain. Even though overall no change has taken place, there has still been a loss of something, they seem to think. And most bizarely perhaps, the creation of a new info/function gene by destruction of an old gene and then the subsequent transfer of that gene into another organism that still has the old gene, creating an organism that has a new gene with new info/function does not count as an increase in info/function). If these guys were to be consistent, the destruction of information/functions should only be counted when the LAST of it disappears. (All this is so strange that I wonder if I might have misunderstood what they wrote, but i don't think so. And we will never know, either).

Moreover, claiming that the horizontal transfer (and genetic recombination, leading to changes in genetic code) of genetic material can never be considered an increase in information whereas an actual duplication (with subsequent changes) apparently can, seems to me to be applying double standards. The rationale seems to be that horizontal transfer is only a transfer of existing information, but then so is a duplication. I would have liked to see a clarification on this point.

ID claim: It is IMPOSSIBLE for non-intelligence to create new information.

Unfortunately, I never made them back this claim up. Their conclusion seems to come from the fact that it has never been observed (as per their definition of information and what they constitute as evidence). Unfortunately for them, no intelligence has ever been seen to create the information necessary for the complexity of living organism from DE NOVO either. But that doesn't bother them (they wouldn't even call that little problem an extrapolation. Go figure).

Regarding evolutionary algorithms:
TRoutMac used an analogy between the destruction of biological information and the destruction of information if you were to mutate some text editing software. The analogy is pretty useless, so i simply responded that he might want to look up evolutionary algorithms instead. I got two responses to this. One from Patrick and one from TRoutMac. Patrick's was simply a link to some piece he had written earlier. Wrote he:

There are computer models that attempt to simulate biological evolution, and they are so vastly oversimplified and divorced from the biological reality they attempt to imitate that claims made on their behalf should be considered very carefully.

He wrote a lot actually, but the first paragraph included the above. Evolutionary algorithms are indeed oversimplified, but they are a heck of a lot better at modelling evolutionary processes than TRoutMac's hypothetical text editor is. I think this was lost on TRoutMac.

TRoutMacwrote:

You're going to now argue against Intelligent Design by invoking Intelligent Design? Who devised those evolutionary algorithms, Hawks? Are you saying those people are stupid? That's not very nice… I suspect they would feel rather insulted.

One has to wonder why he wrote this. ANY sort of simulation will be programmed to some extent. At the very least, to simulate a biological system, even at the most basic level, you would at least have to have rules regarding the way atoms and molecules bond together. Would these rules in nature imply intelligence? (I would not be terribly surprised if TRoutMac answered yes, btw). If you wanted to simulate processes of information gain going on in organisms that are already "full of information", you would start of with a model using organisms that already are "full of information". This seems to be have gone straight over TRoutMac's head. TRoutMac, I would not call any of THOSE people stupid.

That was a long entry, and that's not even all. The rest will have to wait until a later date. Stay tuned.

Predictability

2006-12-05T13:05:00.000-08:00

DaveScot at uncommondescent (Dec 5th) has (again) been moaning about whether or not evolution can make predictions. Says he:

Essentially, ToE predicts nothing. It explains history after the fact which is a whole lot different than predicting something before it happens. Of what value is a theory with no predictive power? Why do we bother teaching our children a valueless theory of history that more often than not is disbelieved and causes so much strife? Just the facts, ma’am, please.

Later in a comment he also says:

Evolution doesn’t make predictions of ANY grain. The source of change in evolution is purportedly random mutation. Random mutations are by definition unpredictable. The theory cannot predict what mutations will occur, when they will occur, or what effect they will have. It’s without predictive value.
If
you buy the theory of evolution having predictive power you probably also believe that someone who has predictive power puts the lottery numbers on the slips of paper found in Chinese fortune cookies.

Apart from anything else, I think that DaveScot might be a tad confused about what a prediction actually is. What has to be predicted is a future observation. Whether or not the events that enabled us to make those observations happened 1, 1000 or a million years ago does not matter. So, given that evolution explains the diversity of life by the fact that life-forms share common ancestry we would predict that, for example, animals that are similar (say a cat and a dog) would have more of their genetic material in common than would animals that are less similar (say a cat and a cow). Evolutionary theories predict this, DaveScot. ID, on the other hand, can not make this prediction. A designer might have created all life-forms separately (it might have borrowed bits and pieces from other life-forms it already created or not as well when doing so) so that the genetic material of a cat could actually be more similar to an Amanita mushroom than it is to a dog's. Bottom line, evolution can predict, ID can't. Get with it, DaveScot.

In school, DaveScot also wants to teach only facts, no theories. That is extremely interesting.
Fact: people who smoke are more likely to die of cancer. Theory: smoking causes cancer. Should we not teach that theory?
Fact: The Sun rises and sets. Theory: the Earth rotates. Should we not teach that theory?

Let's elect DaveScot as minister for education. Schooling would be great.

The enlightenment...

2006-12-05T13:02:00.000-08:00

'Tis the seaon to not write much it would seem. My additions to this blog have been few and far between as of lately. The reason is that there hasn't been that much to comment about. uncommondescent et al might have written a bit, but none of it has been that interesting - it's just been a bit of random moaning. Including the latest by William Dembski (Dec 4th). Under "Doubts about Darwinism" he quotes something someone wrote in 1920, where "Darwinists" are described as "fighters for a lost cause" and "He will inform you of your ignorance; he will not enlighten your ignorance". As per usual, Dembski doesn't add any comments on his own. I, however, would like to comment on "He will inform you of your ignorance; he will not enlighten your ignorance".

I’m not sure from where Dembski gets all his information, but when claiming that the “Darwinists” don’t enlighten, he must have his head stuck up somewhere the Sun doesn’t shine. A cursory glance through the peer-reviewed published literature, the multitude of popular-science books and not to mention the vibrant internet community (e.g. talkorigins) would show Dembski that there is indeed a lot of enlightenment going on. He might have to look for it, but he would not have to look hard.

How much enlightenment does ID provide? Dembski would supposedly have us believe that “the intelligent designer did it” outputs more candelas than the average star. In fact, most of ID is actually summed up in the previous sentence.

Bill, get real!

Evidence against evolution - part 10000000.....

2006-11-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

DaveScot at uncommondescent (Nov 28th) thinks he has found some compelling evidence against evolution. Under the headline "The sound of a nested hierarchy shattering" he writes:

Chromosomal sex determination in the platypus discovered to be a
combination of mammal and bird systems. The resemblance to birds is now more
than just superficial.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6568

From this he seems to want to claim that there is a problem with the idea of common descent. Why? I have no idea. DaveScot, how about this for possible explanation: birds and mammals shared a common ancestor and modern mammals retained certain genes, modern birds retained some other genes and the platypus retained a combination of genes. Why not? Mammals diverged from birds 300 million years ago and montremes diverged from other mammals 150 million years ago.

How desperate do IDists have to get?

Edit: a couple of comments were added to the above thread, and I felt compelled to address these as well.

"J" adds a list of five reasons under the headline "Refutation of the Dinosaurian Origin of Birds" from Mayr's "What evolution is" and "Jehu" responds with "What? Ernst Mayr doesn’t believe birds evolved from dinosaurs? ". "J" and "Jehu" are doing the old wedge strategy where "if scientists are not in complete agreement over something, then science is wrong" argument. In this case, the impression one is left with is that either birds evolved from dinosaurs OR evolution is wrong.

But , the reason that list was in Mayr's book was because there has been a debate whether birds evolved from archosaurian reptiles or from theropod dinosaurs. Scientists supporting the reptile connection supplied the list as evidence for their position. "J" and "Jehu" of course want to see this as some form of confirmation that evolution is in trouble, when it in fact is just part of the normal scientific process. In fact, more recent evidence has shed light on the debate and in a National Geographic interview, Mayr stated:

Archaeopteryx, therefore, is closely related to the theropods. This in turn means that theropod dinosaurs are the ancestors of the modern birds that followed Archaeopteryx.
The find, according to Mayr, "not only provides further evidence for the theropod ancestry of birds, but it blurs the distinction between basal [the earliest] birds and basal deinonychosaurs," their fearsome-clawed ancestors.
"I do think that the question of a theropod
ancestry of birds can now be considered settled once and forever," Mayr said.

So, there you go. The evidence does seem to point to a dino-bird connection.

One last point, and though it might seem minor, I think it is actually quite important. After detailing the five objections mentioned, "J" states the reference as: (Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is: Now Everyone Please Stop With This Dinosaurs-Became-Birds Nonsense. (2001), p. 68.). The "Now Everyone Please Stop With This Dinosaurs-Became-Birds Nonsense" is NOT in Mayr's book. "J" made that up. It is NOT there. "J" effectively told a LIE. (All in the name of the wedge, no doubt).

Again, How desperate do IDists have to get?

Massmurder will occur

2006-11-23T18:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not particularly interested in advocating atheism but sometimes, like after reading the thread that GilDodgen at uncommondescent started (22nd Nov, with it's following comments), I feel the need to. The discussion starts out fine enough, but quickly degenerates into a "if there is (or if people believe there is) no absolute morality then people will kill eachother indiscriminately" kind of argument (as argued by for example DaveScot). I'm not going to write an exhaustive rebuttal to this, but instead just supply some points for you to consider.

1. Isn't this a rather grim view of humanity? Whether you are christian, muslim, buddhist, atheist or jedi, think about it. Are we to believe DaveScot and friends when they say that the only reason we don't kill indiscriminately is because we know someone is watching our every move and has the capacity to severely punish us? The reason you don't kill that annoying workmate, person at school or guy on the cellphone is hardly because you think that you will burn in hell for it. You don't do it, for the simple reason that you KNOW that it is wrong (or more likely, perhaps, it never even occurred to you). Whether or not that knowledge is based on something supernatural or is a result of evolutionary forces (and/or lots of other possbilities) hardly matters. DaveScot's friends would have us believe that only the threat of severe punishment deters murder. That's the reason sociopaths don't do more bad things than they do. The rest of us just don't do them.

2. If you compare theory (atheism->evil) to reality, an interesting picture emerges. In the US, around 75% of the total population is christian. Around 75% of the prison population is also christian. No surprises there. In the US, around 3-8% (depending on source) of the population describe themselves as atheists. Around 0.2% of the prison population also describe themselves as atheists. It would actually seem like atheists are LESS likely to indulge in criminal behaviour. Why would that be? You can always argue that maybe atheists are less likely to go to prison because they are less likely to get convicted (you can even insert your favorite conspiracy theory to account for this, if you wish). You can argue that atheists commit more serious crimes (but if you do, you'd better back that up with some data). You could argue all sorts of things - maybe even the thought that atheists simply are NOT evil and that atheism does not lead to bad behaviour. Do you reckon we would ever find DaveScot et al doing that?

Michael Behe and astrology

2006-11-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

In the Dover trials, where intelligent design was found not to be science, ID proponent Michael Behe stated that astrology could be considered science under his definition of it. It now seems that Michael wants to clarify what he actually meant.

From deposition statement:

17 Q. Using your definition of theory, is Creationism -- using
18 your definition of scientific theory, is Creationism a
19 scientific theory?
20 Behe. No.
21 Q. What about creation science?
22 Behe. No.
23 Q. Is astrology a theory under that definition?
24 Behe. Is astrology? It could be, yes.

Michael Behe clarifies:

I was not thinking of the modern superstition of astrology, but of the idea of astrology in the middle ages, when people were trying to discern what forces actually were in play in nature.
...
...
No, not modern astrology, as practiced by card readers with bandanas on their heads and such. I had in mind astrology of centuries ago, when educated people thought it might really have explanatory power.

Are we to believe that Behe considers something science just because it was considered science centuries ago. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and examine that claim by looking at the court transcript from above. There, Behe claims that creationism is not science. But, centuries ago when astrology was considered science, creationism was also considered science (in the sense than "people were trying to discern what forces actually were in play in nature. "). So, logically, creationism should also be considered science (at least, that is what he should have said in the trials - or he should have said that neither were). The fact that he didn't speaks volumes.

The Behe crowd are now eager to point out that Behe does not support astrology. They claim that more careful reading of the court transcripts not only show that not only does he does not support astrology, he never meant that modern astrology is to be considered science in the first place. In the trials, Behe stated:

Under my definition, a scientific theory is a proposed explanation which focuses or points to physical, observable data and logical inferences.There are many things throughout the history of science which we now think to be incorrect which nonetheless would fit that -- which would fit that definition. Yes, astrology is in fact one, and so is the ether theory of the propagation of light, and many other -- many other theories as well.
...
...
Nonetheless, we can't go back and say that because they were incorrect they were not theories. So many many things that we now realized to be incorrect, incorrect theories, are nonetheless theories.

Discarded scientific theories are, as Michael points out still theories. But, modern science would not call these old astrology theories scientific in the first place, while under Behe's definition they actually would be. And this opens up a whole can of worms. The thrust of the questions asked to Michael was not whether or not he believes in astrology - it's in the type of research that is considered valid under his definition. Astrology would be. And presumably ghost-hunting, Reiki and faith-healing as well.

Reconsider your scientific ideas - part 2

2006-11-19T00:19:00.000-08:00

Not content with criticizing "Darwinists"for not challenging their ideas enough (see my blog from Nov 15th) , ID followers also LOVE to point out when scientists do so. Paul Nelson at Id the Future
does just that:

A friend who works at a national biomedical facility told me recently that he now finds it impossible to keep up with all the scientific literature challenging neo-Darwinism (i.e., textbook evolutionary theory). "The stuff just piles up in my office," he said. "I glance at the abstracts, download the pdfs, but can't read it all." We agreed that during 2005-2006, while the intelligent design controversy has been soaking up headlines and media scrutiny, leading evolutionary theoreticians themselves have been quietly uttering heresy in the halls of Darwin. It's easier to misbehave, you know, when someone else (ID) is really acting up and drawing off all the attention.

So not only do scientists sometimes challenge Darwinism, they do it all the time. Evolutionists - you're damned if you do and damned if you don't!

IDers see it as a weakness when scientific theories (well, the ones that deal with evolution, anyway) are questioned, which is a very interesting viewpoint considering that it is a big part of what science actually is all about. It has nothing to do with heresy as Paul states, but is merely part of the scientific process. But he is right about one thing - ID is acting up. Design interference is what I call that.

Reconsider your scientific ideas

2006-11-15T23:53:00.000-08:00

GilDodgen at uncommondescent blogged on Nov 15th, 2006 about how the Stardust mission had collected data making scientists rewrite "the text on how the solar system formed". He then asks:

If, in a hard science like this, previous assumptions can be reexamined and even overturned, how about the assumptions of a soft, philosophical “science” like Darwinism?

GilDodgen is obviously trying to get "Darwinists"to reconsider naturalistic evolution and start embracing intelligent design. But his argument is extremely silly. The only way he can make it work is if the "Stardust scientists" concluded (or at least examined the possibility) that the solar system formed due to the influence of an intelligent designer. That's hardly the case.

Peer review sucks?

2006-11-15T14:08:00.000-08:00

Denyse O'Leary, the ever championing ID journalist, has been criticizing peer review in a series of articles. I would like to give some comments regarding one of these.

Writes she:
Peer review problems went "public" mainly as a result of recent high-profile scandals like Science's peer-reviewed Korean stem cell research paper that turned out be fraudulent.
...
Some argue that the peer review system was designed to detect incompetence but not fraud. Flawed, yes, but fraud, no.
...

Yep. It's true. Published research can be both fradulent and flawed. There is a certain level of honesty and competency expected and it is not always met. The question, then is, what do we do about it? You can't really just moan about something unless you have a better alternative. Denyse offers two:

1) Interestingly, the ID journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (PCID) has opted to return to the early twentieth century approach, where a senior scholar recommends a junior scholar for publication. Time will tell if this old method can be revived successfully.

I totally fail to see why this would solve any problems. Instead of having several peer reviewers, you now have one. Why would this person be any less likely to be fooled by frauds and incompetents?

2) Internet-based technologies may enable a more open and dynamic system. In a way, it can be compared to the blogosphere. The blogosphere, for all its faults, has been a breath of fresh air in media. It has restored the original concept of news as what people want to hear about rather than what gatekeepers think they should want to hear about.

I actually think that this is an idea that might have some merit, but not in the incarnation that Denyse imagines. Her version would essentially turn published research into Wikipedia where anyone can write whatever they want about anything. Yes, the "winning" concept would be the one where people get what they want to hear about. So, are we then really supposed to let the whims of public opinion decide what is valid research. I'm sure that IDers, homeopaths and astrologers would love it. Denyse, there has to be some "gate keeping" done.

So, two alternatives are offerered and none of them seem to offer any improvements. Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

I just want to comment about one thing more that Denyse writes in her article:

Soothing comparisons have frequently been made to Winston Churchill's characterization of democracy as the worst system - except for all the others. But the convenient analogy to democracy fails. In the first place, the secrecy in which peer review operates make it a poor analogue to democracy. Second, democracy aims primarily to give every citizen a vote. The fact that some citizens vote for cranks or criminals does not mean that democracy has failed.

I suspect that Denyse has misunderstood why this so-called comparison has been made. Peer review is not analogous to democracy as she implies that scientists see it. The point of the "comparison" is just to point out that out of a variety of bad choices, peer review is the best (although this is debatable). All she has done here is to build and attack a strawman.

ID predicts...

2006-11-12T19:22:00.000-08:00

While browsing the web, I can across the IDEA Center website. It claims:

FAQ: Does intelligent design make predictions? Is it testable?

The Short Answer: Yes. Intelligent design theory predicts:
(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.
(2) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.
(3) Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.
(4) The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless "junk DNA".
Each of these predictions may be tested--and have been confirmed through testing!

First of all, intelligent design did NOT predict any of these. All the observations made above were done before ID was ever proposed. Also, ID predicts the above four points as much as it predicts the four below:
(A) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will NOT be found.
(B) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear SLOWLY and with precursors.
(C) Genes and functional parts will NOT be re-used in different unrelated organisms.
(D) The genetic code WILL contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless "junk DNA".

These four points (A-D) are the opposite of 1-4, yet they are still in accordance with ID. You could, in fact, make any observation and it would be in accordance with ID. Is this bad you might say(?). It sure is. Can you imagine if someone claimed that (s)he could predict next weeks winning lotto numbers and as evidence (s)he presents all combinations of numbers possible. For sure, one of those combinations will win, but you would hardly claim that the "predictor" actually predicted it, would you?

Surprised Darwinists

2006-11-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

PaV at UncommonDescent blogged on 6th Nov, 2006

Darwinists are Always Surprised

by PaV on November 6th, 2006 · 32 Comments

Here’s a study on E. Coli. They force the bacteria to “mutate” to process glycerol. After six days, sure enough, a kinase shows up to handle the glycerol. But what is a “surprise” is that RNA polymerase shows up besides. It seems that two simultaneous mutations took place. But, of course, this is ONLY a surprise if you think RM+NS brought it about.

The authors say:

Mutations also appeared in a second, unrelated gene for an enzyme called RNA polymerase. “That was a surprise to almost everybody because RNA polymerase is involved in one of the core processes of any cell,” said Palsson. “You wouldn’t expect that gene to change because a wide variety of cellular process would be affected; it’s like replacing the wiring system in a building when a light bulb burns out. But we repeated the experiment more than 50 times and mutations in the RNA polymerase gene appeared again and again.”
I also enjoy the hesitation you almost hear as the reporter has to backtrack somewhat from RM+NS (listen for the word “presumably”):

All the mutants arose in the experiments presumably as the result of naturally occurring errors in copying DNA into daughter cells during cell division.

We here at UD have a better idea about what’s going on.

The reason that it came as a surprise was not because of the occurence of two mutations, but rather (as PaV points out) because one of them was in the RNA polymerase gene, which you would think would be irrelevant for the new function acquired. Obviously it wasn't, so SURPRISE!!

PaV claim that the people at UncommonDescent have a better idea. That probably involves something along the lines of the mutations not being random but that the organism actually sensed that it needed these mutations (as he argued in this thread). I have two things to say about that:
1. Given that, in this experiment, one in roughly 100 billion of all organisms actually get the selected for mutation(s), the notion that the organisms actually sensed that they needed it seems, if not far-fetched then at least like they were REALLY crap at sensing.
2. Even is the organism sensed that it needed to mutate RNA polymerase, it would still come as a surprise since it is not something that was expected.

PaV continues:
By the way, some time back, in a heated debate over bacterial mutation and point mutations, I calculated that the amount of bacteria needed to provide TWO simultaneous point mutations simply through random chance would be so large that the known universe couldn’t contain it. I’m sure my calculation was off somewhere, but I think you get the picture: two genes being affected simultaneously is something that cannot happen by chance alone.

You can read that thread (posted 5th Sept, 2006 under the heading How random is random mutation?) for yourself. PaV ended up backing out since his calculations more than just "off somewhere". So given that he brings this up again SURPRISES me, but maybe he hasn't learned from his mistakes.

Darwin is the father of fascism?

2006-11-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

O'Leary at Post-Darwinist is fond of slandering evolution. In this blog of hers from 6th Nov 2006 she quotes A. N. Wilson who in Telegraph's World of Books wrote:

"Darwin, the product of British imperialism, was surely the father, among
other things, of European fascism."

There are many definitions of fascism, but they mostly include the presence of a dictator, no allowance of opposition, strict social control and that the "primary guiding principle that the state or nation is the highest priority, rather than personal or individual freedoms". This hardly sounds like Darwin (or evolutionary science by extension). The dictator sounds more like a vile intelligent designer to me...

Dolphins sprout legs?

2006-11-06T13:25:00.000-08:00

Uncommondescent blogged about the find of a dolphin that had an extra set of fins.

From above article:
Japanese researchers said Sunday that a bottlenose dolphin captured last month has an extra set of fins that could be the remains of hind legs, a discovery that may provide further evidence that ocean-dwelling mammals once lived on land.

Some Uncommondescent commenters seem to be stuck on the idea that since these fins look like fins and not legs, the researchers should not claim that this provides "further evidence that ocean-dwelling mammals once lived on land". Let's examine this reasoning. Science has come to the conclusion that the ancestors of dolphins (and whales in general) were once land-dwelling tetrapods (i.e. they had four limbs). For these ancestors to evolve into dolphins, they must obviously have lost their legs somewhere along the way. This is not likely to have happened in one generation!!! More likely, the process would have been fairly gradual, starting with a four footed animal changing into a four-finned animal that subsequently lost it's rear fins - leaving us with the dolphins we see today. So, if today, a dolphin was found that sported extra rear limbs, we would hardly expect these to look like legs any more than we would expect it's front limbs to do. What we would expect, if descent with modification is true, is that these limbs would look like fins. The extra limbs found on this dolphin is thus consistent with the view that dolphins evolved from land-dwelling mammals.

JasonTheGreek asked at Uncommondescent: "Based on the fins, is there any way to show these were likely actual legs? Could these legs have held the weight of the body? ". The answer is no to both questions. When the pathway leading to the expression of these fins was last active, it was making fins, not legs. (Of, course, whether or not the extra pair of fins provide evidence that the ancestors of dolphins once lived on land depends on if they are due to an evolutionary remnant being switched back on - something that is by no means certain).

So, this find is consistent with dolphins have land-dwelling ancestors. However, like any singular piece of evidence, it is not a nail-in-the-coffin either for or against the theory. It is just a piece of evidence added to an already large pile of evidence that supports evolutionary theory.

Designers are impossible?

2006-11-01T16:58:00.000-08:00

This article was inspired an article on IdTheFuture by Paul Nelson that was rebutting some comments Richard Dawkins had made. This article is, in essence, a rebuttal of that rebuttal.

Dawkins wrote:
Given that chance is ruled out for sufficient levels of improbability, we know of only two processes that can generate specified improbability. They are intelligent design and natural selection, and only the latter is capable of serving as an ultimate explanation. It generates specified improbability from a starting point of great simplicity. Intelligent design can't do that, because the designer must itself be an entity at an extremely high level of specified improbability. Whereas the specification of the Boeing 747 is that it must be able to fly, the specification of "intelligent designer" is that it must be able to design. And intelligent design cannot be the ultimate explanation for anything, for it begs the question of its own origin.

Paul Nelson wrote:
Michael Ruse muttered to me darkly several years ago that Dawkins seems not to understand that this argument makes evolution by natural selection true by necessity -- hardly a happy position for any putatively empirical theory to be in.

Paul uses the analogy of a basketball game where it is only possible for the home team to win. The outcome of the game has been settled a prioi and the visiting team will loose even if they score the most points. But Paul is wrong; Dawkins argument does not make evolution true by necessity. Dawkins states above that "we KNOW of only two processes..." (emphasis added) and he then chooses one of the two KNOWN ones. What Dawkins (and most scientifically literate people) understand is that there could be more UNKNOWN processes. Future research might shed some light on these, but until that time, there is NO reason to consider any of them. If Paul's basketball analogy was to be correct, it should read something like: The home team has scored the most points and is therefore leading the game. However, other teams might join the game and it is possible that the home team will loose then (which doesn't make for a good analogy, really).

This hardly leaves evolutionary theory in an unhappy position.

Paul Nelson wrote:
When a philosopher hears that a theory about questions of empirical fact cannot be false, or that its competitors cannot be true, his tracking radar turns on. He also quotes NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel:

But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The
point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them.

Paul is possibly confused about what actually is true and what we can know scientifically to be "true". The two are not necessarily the same. There might, indeed, be a God as presented by Nagel, but since we have no empirical knowledge about it (and more to point probably never can), why should we even consider it? Some philosophers and religious people obviously do, but their resoning is not based on evidence and is from a scientific perspective, therefore, meaningless. So, Paul, it is not that some competitors can't be true, it's just that from a scientific viewpoint, some of them don't stack up.

Paul Nelson quotes Thomas Nagel again:
All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics.

Apart from the fact that I'm not sure what naturalistic physicalism is (I've equivalated it with methodological naturalism), I have only one thing to say. If there is no way (as Nagel seems to imply) to know "the ultimate cause", why not just say "I don't know", instead of just making things up?

Aliens demand answers

2006-10-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

Cameron at overwhelming evidence blogged on 3rd Oct, 2006

Design Inference

You are alone in your house when suddenly you are surrounded by creatures who announce that they are from another planet. You aren't sure that you are awake--this could be a dream, but it feels very real.

Next you are aboard a spaceship, flying through the solar system. The aliens tell you that they have checked in on earth life periodically since it first started. They tell you that one day they abducted a lifeform from earth and changed it. They then returned it to earth.

Your alien captors give you a chance to guess what it was they changed. If you guess wrong, you will be killed. If you guess correctly, you will be returned to earth.

They give you two options. They say that one was designed by them, the other resulted from the Darwinian mechanism:

a) they changed a bacteria by adding a flagellum

b) they changed a beak on a finch on a Gallapagos island, which Darwin later attributed to natural selection.

Which do you choose? Which do you think was more likely to have been designed, and which is more likely to have resulted from the Darwinian mechanism?

If one thing is more likely to have been designed than another thing, that is a design inference.

The point of this post, as Cameron later describes is "that even the anti-ID crowd will have to admit that some things are more likely to be designed than others. But that is a concession that it is possible to infer design. How would they answer the question, "why is thing A more likely to be designed than thing B?" I'm not sure why he wants to make this point. Of course design can be inferred. Archaeologists do it all the time. The real thrust in his post is not really what he is arguing as much as the "wedge" he is trying to insert into peoples minds. While not saying outright that the choice between the flagellum and the beak is a real one, that is nonetheless the impression one easily comes out with. The alien scenario is, of course, just a hypothetical example he has provided and it is extremely easy to turn it into a pro-evolution one. Just change the options given above into

a) they created the mammalian blood-clotting system
b) they created centaurs (they even show you a living example on their ship)

Which do you choose?

Atheism - the road to destruction?

2006-10-29T18:13:00.000-08:00

William Dembski over at uncommondescent.com blogged on Oct 29th, 2006

In evolutionary terms, is religion so bad?
by William Dembski on October 27th, 2006 · 29 Comments

In this piece, Dembski asks: "On strict evolutionary grounds, isn’t religion an adaptation that offers humans survival and reproductive advantages?" I think that might be true. I can see how, for example, the bonds created when people share the same religion could offer advantages (I can, like Dawkins, also see the opposite where religion might be a destructive force [although i wouldn't express myself as strongly as Dawkins does]). But then Dembski goes on with a lengthy quote from a Chuck Colson who claims that Russias on-going crisis (including an AIDS epidemic, alcohol and drug abuse, high abortion rates, suicide, environmental degradation and loss of hope in the future) is mainly due to ... atheism. "Seventy-four years of official atheism robbed the Russian people of this source of hope. This, more than a ruined economy and environmental degradation, is what has put Russia on the road to extinction.", Colson claims. Is this true?

The Great Depression of the 1930's saw a sharp rise in both homicide and suicide, environmental degradation (the so called dust bowl years) and a loss of hope (largely regained from Roosevelt's New Deal). All this happened without a concurrent drop in faith. The onus of proof for mainly blaming atheism as the biggest source of “bad things” in Russia would thus seem to fall on Colbert (or Dembski, as he seemingly supports Colbert's conclusions). Unfortunately (and predictably?), none is provided, which only leaves us to consider the some unfounded ramblings - and why should any serious consideration be given to that?

Sheer-dumb-luck

2006-10-29T18:10:00.000-08:00

Joseph over at uncommondescent.com commented on Oct 28, 2006

Intelligent design requires evidence: Ah, but what can be considered evidence?
by O'Leary on October 28th, 2006 - revisited!

In comment #16 in this thread, Joseph remarked:

And I truly think that once people realize the materialistic alternative to ID is sheer-dumb-luck, they will see that the data is best explained by ID. Sheer-dumb-luck is a science stopper whereas ID offers many investigative possibilities.

Joseph, just like O'Leary seems to be fond of strawmen. Given that the materialistic alternative to ID is NOT sheer-dumb-luck Joseph has told an obvious falsehood. But does ID offer many investigative possibilities? Oh, Yes!! In fact, an infinite amount of them. And there is no way to say, after an investigation, which is the best explanation, given that ID's central tenet is that living things are best explained by an intelligent designer whose nature is not specified. Any investigation will support at least some form of designer in some sort of way.

Never question Darwinism?

2006-10-29T18:02:00.000-08:00

O'Leary over at uncommondescent.com blogged on Oct 28th, 2006

Intelligent design requires evidence: Ah, but what can be considered evidence?
by O'Leary on October 28th, 2006 · 32 Comments

(Bullet points have been added to make referring to individual points below easier - Hawks)

...
...
1. If materialism is assumed to be true and Darwinism is the creation story of materialism, then Darwinism is the best available explanation for the history of life.

2. So Darwinism is treated as true.

3. I am NOT saying that that follows logically.

4. Materialism could be true but its orthodox creation story could be untrue at the same time. Some other materialist story could better account for the evidence, for example.

5. However, most people do not think that way. (I am describing a course of mental events here, not a logical argument.)

6. Because Darwinism is treated as true, questioning it is irrational or malign.

7. If you are a scientist, it is no defence to say that you have uncovered evidence against Darwinism. That makes you a heretic.

8. Don’t try claiming that you do science better without Darwinism. If you don’t believe it, you shouldn’t be doing science at all, right?

9. The purpose of science is to uncover the evidence for materialism, and you may as well deny Genesis in a God-fearing chapel as deny Darwinism at the Smithsonian.

...

...

One has to wonder what went on in O'Leary mind as she wrote her comments above. She builds and attacks this strawman where Darwinism is the only possible acceptable materialistic theory for the diversity of life we have today. O'Leary, it is neither irrational nor malign to question ANY scientific theory. It's simply good science. The only people who think otherwise are people uneducated in science + the some creationists (O'Leary being one of them). The only good thing she says is in #3 and #5 where she claims that the supposed materialistic arguments are not logical - they're not. Neither is O'Leary argument and the only illogical mental events she exposes are those of her own. Heck, she even makes a strawman out of ID by claiming later in her post: "It will be useless for making any general point against the materialist paradigm. ID-friendly evidence will merely be shelved as a problem to be solved or reinterpreted along materialist lines, no matter how flimsy.". O'Leary, ID makes it very clear that it does not say anything about the nature of the designer, so by claiming that since science only deals with materialism, ID-friendly evidence will automatically be rejected is simply bogus.

2006-10-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

Nobel laureate rejects Darwinism

scordova over at uncommondescent.com blogged on Oct 24th, 2006

[anecdote 2004] Nobel Laureate given standing ovation after slamming Darwinism during a graduation ceremony

by scordova on October 24th, 2006 · 23 Comments

In preparing a letter to the editor of UVa magazine, I was researching the case of 1996 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Richard Smalley. I was astonished to discover that he delivered an anti-Darwinian speech during a graduation ceremony and apparently received a standing ovation. I also thought it an appropriate time to remember this extraordinary scientist.

Here is the account of Smalley’s speech:
Tuskegee University 2004

Smalley mentioned the ideas of evolution versus creationism, Darwin versus the Bible’s “Genesis.” The burden of proof, he said, is on those who don’t believe that “‘Genesis’ was right, and there was a creation, and that Creator is still involved.

Smalley also commented here:

Evolution has just been dealt its death blow. After reading Origins of Life with my background in chemistry and physics, it is clear that [biological] evolution could not have occurred.”

–Richard Smalley, Ph.D., Nobel Laureate-Chemistry, 1996
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Just like Smalley, scordova himself has rejected Darwinism and the intent of this message most likely goes along the lines of: "If a prominent scientist (a Nobel laureate with a background in chemistry and physics) has rejected Darwinism, why shouldn't other scientists and non-scientists do the same?" This is a very popular sort of argument and it is, of course, fallacious. It is nothing but an appeal to authority. To see this, just look at the "The burden of proof, he said, is on those who don’t believe that “‘Genesis’ was right, and there was a creation, and that Creator is still involved. " quote from above. Now, I can interpret this statement in two ways: 1) Smalley claims that science has to prove biblical creation wrong (which is impossible given that his God is supposedly omnipotent). 2) Science has to prove evolution (which is true, in a sense) and that if that fails, biblical creation is the default alternative (which is wrong). Whichever way you look at it, Smalley's reason for preferring biblical creation over evolution is not a scientific one (it might, of course, be true that Smalley had other reasons for choosing biblical creation, but none was presented by scordova). And if Smalley's reasons for choosing biblical creation are not scientific, then it matters not one iota what his scientific credentials were.

Sidenote: scordova also implies that Smalley got his standing ovation because his speech was anti-Darwinian, something I can see no evidence of. Smalley certainly seems to have mentioned God more than once, but he also seems to have been talking about a lot of other things.