ID Foundations

For some time now, LYO has been a fairly frequent critic in UD’s comment threads. Overnight, he has challenged EA:

I challenge you to give me a fact, real or hypothetical, any fact at all about the world which would falsify ID.

There were prompt short answers that immediately followed the just linked:

UB: A demonstration that inanimate matter can physically establish the relationships required for information to be recorded and transferred.

Joe: Demonstrate that blind and undirected chemical processes can produce a living organism from non-living matter- ie demonstrate that a living organism is reducible to matter, energy, necessity and chance.

A little later, responding to the wider point being raised by LYO, EA said: Read More ›

Onlookers, Geno concludes for the moment with FAQ’s: ____________________ Geno: >> A Testable ID Hypothesis: Front-loading, part C In the last two articles on front-loading, I explained what the front-loading hypothesis is all about and some research questions we can ask from a front-loading perspective. This article will be an FAQ about the front-loading hypothesis. So, without further introduction, let’s begin (note: some of the content of this FAQ can be found in the previous two articles). What is front-loading? “Front-loading is the investment of a significant amount of information at the initial stage of evolution (the first life forms) whereby this information shapes and constrains subsequent evolution through its dissipation. This is not to say that every aspect of Read More ›

Sometimes, comments at UD can be quite revealing. Jan 25, AIG objected in the Shermer/Flannery Wallace debate thread in an inadvertently revealing way, which I have picked up: ___________ >>AIG: Re: questions of how, why, and “who” (the names of people involved [at Stonehenge etc]?) are secondary. We know that human beings were present at the time these were built, so everybody agrees that human beings were responsible . . . . “Agency” is a term from philosophy (mainly moral philosophy and philosophy of mind). It is also used in sociology, where it refers to people (human beings) in social systems. It is not a term used in biology, physics, or the cognitive sciences . . . This is utterly, Read More ›

Genomicus continues his presentation of the front-loading hypothesis: ___________ Geno: >>In my previous article on the subject of front-loading, I described the front-loading hypothesis and what it proposes. I outlined three testable predictions generated by the front-loading hypothesis. In this article, we’ll see how the front-loading hypothesis can lead us to numerous research questions, and this, in turn, will allow us to establish a better picture about the history of the origin and development of biological complexity. There are probably dozens of research questions that we can ask as a result of the front-loading hypothesis, so I’ll only cover some of them here. How could molecular machines and systems be front-loaded? An interesting question from a front-loading perspective is how Read More ›

For some months now, I have been having a behind the scenes correspondence with a regular viewer of UD, whom we shall call EP. He works with industrial robots, and has been fascinated by the way the ribosome works as a nano-scale automated machine cell. Accordingly, a process sequence diagram (‘map”) has been developed, based on accessible descriptions of the ribosome in action. The result is a fascinating look at the ribosome as industrial robot work-cell. (The tRNA’s are molecular scale position-arm devices with a universal CCA coupler — yup, the AA bond is universal, it is the loading enzyme that sets up which tRNA gets what AA — to load and click AAs to a protein chain.) So, enough Read More ›

A few months back, we looked at the story of Wallace’s views here and again here. Now, thanks to an online premiere, here’s the movie (HT: ENV): Relax, enjoy, and discuss. END _____________ F/N: to understand Wallace, have a read of his major book published in 1910 ff, The World of Life (cf. here, here, here and here at Amazon — republished, of course, by Forgotten Books).

(Series on Front-loading continues, here) As we continue the ID Foundations series, it will be necessary to reflect on a fairly wide range of topics, more than any one person can cover. So, when the opportunity came up to put Front-Loading on the table from a knowledgeable advocate of it, Genomicus, I asked him if he would be so kind as to submit  such a post. He graciously agreed, and so, please find the below for our initial reflections; with parts B and C (and maybe, more? please, please, sir . . . 😆 ) to follow shortly, DV: ____________________ >> Critics of intelligent design (ID) often argue that ID does not offer any testable biological hypotheses. Indeed, often times Read More ›

In the current discussion on [Mis-]Representing Natural Selection, UD commenter Bruce David has posed a significant challenge: . . . it is not obvious that even with intelligence in the picture a major modification of a complex system is possible one small step at a time if there is a requirement that the system continue to function after each such step. For example, consider a WWII fighter, say the P51 Mustang. Can you imagine any series of incremental changes that would transform it into a jet fighter, say the F80 and have the plane continue to function after each change? To transform a piston engine fighter in to a jet fighter requires multiple simultaneous changes for it to work–an entirely Read More ›

Courtesy North Dakota State U: (And for those wanting a narrated version of the famous XVIVO vid, cf here.) Remember, we are looking at these videos in light of Denton’s remark of 1985: To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter [[so each atom in it would be “the size of a tennis ball”] and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, Read More ›

Sometimes, seeing is believing. Here is a nice, short summary of the kinesin microtubule highway “walking truck” protein in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLxlBB9ZBj4 This vid gives a bit of context: Especially notice the role played by Brownian motion, and that played by ATP. So, post turkey and pudding vid no 3: ATP Synthase in action: Walking trucks in the cell, fuelled by batteries made in a molecular factory that uses a nanotech motor  . . . And, a highway network that has to go where it is needed, with need for directions — that delivery truck has to know where to go, when! And the best explanation for all of this functionally specific, complex organisation and required information is . . . Read More ›

Over the past few days, I have been reflecting a bit on carrying design theory-relevant thought onwards to issues tied to education and economic transformation. In so doing, I found myself looking at a micro-level, personal black swan event, as I watched student robots picking and placing little plastic widgets much like . . . like . . . a chicken, or a duck. Or, a swan. Wait a minute: a swan’s long neck, beak and head form . . . a robot arm manipulator (with built-in sensor turret) on a turtle robot body capable of walking, swimming and flying: (Pardon the Canada Goose stand-in for a swan.) So, maybe, birds do have “arms” after all.  They didn’t just sacrifice Read More ›

In the Pulsars and Pauses thread, Petrushka raised a rather revealing assertion, to which MH, EA and I answered [U/d and GP just weighed in]: P: >> I find it interesting that when it seems convenient to ID, the code is digital (and subject to being assembled by incremental accumulation). But at other times the analogy switches to objects like motors that are not digitally coded and do not reproduce with variation. >> I have of course highlighted some key steps in the underlying pattern of thought: (i) design thinkers think one way or another at convenience [–> TRANS: we “cannot” happen to have either honestly arrived at views, or warrant for our views . . . ] (ii) our arguments Read More ›

The Wikipedia hit-piece on Intelligent Design (NWE’s introductory article is much fairer and better informed) leads with an illustration of a watch; an invidious allusion to William Paley’s famous parable of stumbling over a stone in a field vs. finding a watch in the same field, that appears in Ch I of his 1802 [- 6 ] Natural Theology:

>>IN crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? . . . >>

He continues:

For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e. g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.

This is of course, an invitation to the argument by inference to best explanation of empirical observations.

However, it is usually dismissed today as an example of the weakness of attempts to argue by analogy (itself an error, credible analogy is a key facet of real world inductive argument, the cornerstone of science), and the issue put on the table in rebuttal is usually that unlike watches, living things can self-replicate at cellular level, and reproduce with variation, thus evolve. Problem solved, nothing to see here, let us move on.

Not so fast, this dismissal argument is a strawman fallacy.

 (Series)

Emile Borel (1871 – 1956) was a distinguished French Mathematician who — a son of a Minister — came from France’s Protestant minority, and he was a founder of measure theory in mathematics. He was also a significant contributor to modern probability theory,  and so Knobloch observed of his approach, that:

>>Borel published more than fifty papers between 1905 and 1950 on the calculus of probability. They were mainly motivated or influenced by Poincaré, Bertrand, Reichenbach, and Keynes. However, he took for the most part an opposed view because of his realistic attitude toward mathematics. He stressed the important and practical value of probability theory. He emphasized the applications to the different sociological, biological, physical, and mathematical sciences. He preferred to elucidate these applications instead of looking for an axiomatization of probability theory. Its essential peculiarities were for him unpredictability, indeterminism, and discontinuity. Nevertheless, he was interested in a clarification of the probability concept. [Emile Borel as a probabilist, in The probabilist revolution Vol 1 (Cambridge Mass., 1987), 215-233. Cited, Mac Tutor History of Mathematics Archive, Borel Biography.]>>

Among other things, he is credited as the worker who introduced a serious mathematical analysis of the so-called Infinite Monkeys theorem (just a moment).

So, it is unsurprising that Abel, in his recent universal plausibility metric paper, observed  that:

Emile Borel’s limit of cosmic probabilistic resources [c. 1913?] was only 10⁵⁰ [[23] (pg. 28-30)]. Borel based this probability bound in part on the product of the number of observable stars (10⁹) times the number of possible human observations that could be made on those stars (10²⁰).

This of course, is now a bit expanded, since the breakthroughs in astronomy occasioned by the Mt Wilson 100-inch telescope under Hubble in the 1920’s. However,  it does underscore how centrally important the issue of available resources is, to render a given — logically and physically strictly possible but utterly improbable — potential chance- based event reasonably observable.

(Series)

Alfred Russel Wallace is the all but forgotten co-founder of modern evolutionary thought. His major book reveals a bit of why, right from the title and sub-title: The World of Life: a manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose.

In short, Wallace was a design thinker, and in fact he was also a supernaturalist. (A Spiritualist, actually.)

It should be no surprise to see, therefore, that he took on the methodological naturalism that was even then beginning to be informally institutionalised in science.  (In our time, it has now been formally written into redefinitions of science promoted by bodies like the US’s National Academy of Science and their National Science Teachers Association, in the teeth of serious historical, logical and epistemological issues and concerns.)

It is worth pausing for a few moments in this series of posts, to reflect on how Wallace responded to Hume et al, in his An Answer to the Arguments of Hume, Lecky, and Others, Against Miracles.

Clipping from p. 112 on, we may see: Read More ›