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Another example of reductive evolution? More bad news for Darwinism

Salvador Cordova
November 14, 2006
Intelligent Design
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In information science, it is empirically and theoretically shown that noise destroys specified complexity, but cannot create it. Natural selection acting on noise cannot create specified complexity. Thus, information science refutes Darwinian evolution. The following is a great article that illustrates the insufficiency of natural selection to create design.

Key to zebrafish heart regeneration uncovered

“Interestingly, some species have the ability to regenerate appendages, while even fairly closely related species do not,” Poss added. “This leads us to believe that during the course of evolution, regeneration is something that has been lost by some species, rather than an ability that has been gained by other species. The key is to find a way to ‘turn on’ this regenerative ability.”

If the ability to regenerate major organs is hardly visible for natural selection to preserve, how in the world will natural selection be able to even create the ability to regenerate major organs in the first place?

Natural Selection does not trade in the currency of design (ala Allen Orr). I have also argued here why contingency designs are almost invisible to natural selection. The ability to regenerate major organs is an example of a contingency design.

The discovery by these researchers again illustrates the ID’s Law of Conservation of CSI and ID’s formulation of the 4th law of thermodynamics.

(HT: Mike Gene, Telic Thoughts)

Comments
[...] But do we have some direct evidence for the difficulty of selection creating fault tolerance? From Reductive Evolution: [...]God's iPod - Uncommon Descent - Intelligent Design
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[...] But do we have some direct evidence for the difficulty of selection creating fault tolerance? From Reductive Evolution: [...]Fault Tolerance a greater foe to Darwinism than Irreducible Complexity | Uncommon Descent
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Jehu wrote: quote: If the life is created or designed by another life form it is not abiogenesis, it is biogenesis. unquote. I see, the Intelligent Designer is now confirmed to be a life form, not a supernatural 'being'. Unless you countgods and other supernatural entities as 'life forms'? My POW though, has always been that life as we know it, began with assembling matter (atoms/molecules) into a pattern/configuration that we recognize as, and define as 'life'. Whether that process was initiated/performed by nature itself or by supernatural forces is being hotly debated and is a different subject.Dizzy
November 29, 2006
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also the abstract at Genes and Development is here... http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/content/abstract/gad.1475106v1 Would be cool if anyone has access to see more info.Michaels7
November 20, 2006
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Salvador, here is the initial link again with comments... http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/si-sow111706.php Here's a few quotes... "In this simple experiment, we removed part of the chick embryo's wing, activated Wnt signaling, and got the whole limb back - a beautiful and perfect wing," said the lead author, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, Ph.D., a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory. "By changing the expression of a few genes, you can change the ability of a vertebrate to regenerate their limbs, rebuilding blood vessels, bone, muscles, and skin - everything that is needed." "beautiful and perfect wing" huh? in an unguided and purposeless worldview? One of my questions above was about communication. I was thinking of signals being lost after reading the initial article. This article shows they suspected after early experiments with salamanders the Wnt signal was turned off. It was conserved and present all the time! Now they're "just" switching it back on at the embyronic stage. "This new discovery "opens up an entirely new area of research," Belmonte says. "Even though certain animals have lost their ability to regenerate limbs during evolution, conserved genetic machinery may still be present, and can be put to work again," he said. Previously, scientists believed that once stem cells turned into muscles, bone or any other type of cells, that was their fate for life – and if those cells were injured, they didn't regenerate, but grew scar tissue." I guess it should make IDers and Creationist excited with the functional processes across a wide variety of species? Or am I overstating the findings of this research? Here is the second link in regards to fibroblast that are so important. http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2005.8.141?cookieSet=1&journalCode=rej So we have lost essentially two steps that we know of as humans from what I've read so far. 1) The initial com signal Wnt and 2) the nano scale architecture fibroblast that form scafolding for the other cell tissue types to rebuild on. Fascinating! What a wonderful look at reverse engineering life.Michaels7
November 20, 2006
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Benjy, There is a difference between the measure of information and information itself, Dembski is using a shorthand for the measure of information. Stop repeating the Perakhism I pointed out, you're just wasting my time. I invite the reader to read the definition of CSI on page 141. It does not correspond to Benjy's claim. Further, Benjy, you still didn't quote page 155 explicitly but gave your interpretation. I have that page. Give the exact quote rather than flooding this thread with your misrepresentation of what Dembski said, or don't bother posting to this threads again. Until you accuratly represent what has been said by ID proponnets, you're just wasting my time.scordova
November 20, 2006
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scordova, In reference to the current definition of CSI in "Specification," I wrote:
To be more precise, Dr. Dembski defines a quantity and refers to it as information.
You responded:
No he does not.
1) Dembski defined CSI. 2) CSI is a quantity. 3) The I in CSI stands for "information." The fact that he refers to the quantity as information does no immediately imply that it is information in a conventional sense. You have not responded to my observation that it is not clear to me that taking the logarithm of the count of probabilistic resources gives something we might reasonably interpret as information. Am I missing an associated random event or descriptive complexity? When I look at CSI, what I see is a test statistic, specificity, with a critical value, the log count of probabilistic resources plus 0.5. When specificity exceeds the critical value, design is inferred. CSI looks like specificity (information) with normalization (additive bias) to make the critical value 0.5. I have not been criticizing CSI, but your claim that it, because Dr. Dembski calls it information, inherits basic properties of better studied forms of information.
Furthermore, I asked you to provide a reference, which you did not. You also alluded to a second hand quotation which you did not even provide. [...]
I read NFL two years ago, and I do not own it. I did not allude to a quotation. Googling, I found a discussion of CSI gain that gave a page number, but no quotation. In case you wonder why I do not need to cite a source in discussing why the CSI of y = f(x) is bounded above by the CSI of the pair (f, x), I had published a similar result for a different type of information some years before NFL was published. Do you deny that Dembski shows this in NFL? As for unresponsiveness, I previously indicated that I could find no evidence that Dr. Dembski has written about LCI or the 4th Law in three years, including in his expert reports for the Dover trial, and no one has commented on this. It seems to me that some followers are assigning more significance to them than he presently does.Benjy_Compson
November 17, 2006
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kvwells,
are you a cosmological-frontloading-ist? Do you believe all the biological CSI was “programmed” into the Universe at the beginning?
What I am driving at in this thread is that ID is in its infancy, and that the strong claims many people make are not warranted by ID research. I contend that we need to come up with as many reasonable hypotheses as we can, and then do the research to test them. My mind is open, including to the prospect that we will find it very difficult to come up with compelling evidence for design. If we find evidence for cosmological front-loading, so be it. But I am biased in favor of quite the opposite of that. I suspect that the information enters the natural universe constantly, and that design is subtle. Dr. Dembksi's suggestion in "Searching Large Spaces" that evolution could be guided by a cooperative environment interests me.Benjy_Compson
November 17, 2006
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DaveScot, you wrote:
I do consider it a law of nature that life comes from life and abiogenesis is a baseless myth held by atheists to help them deny any living force in the universe that transcends themselves.
I politely asked you to respond to what I thought was a reasonable inference in the context of ID:
Are you telling me that a telic, intelligent, unembodied source of information is alive in the same sense that a plant is alive?
You responded:
I’m telling you life comes from life and there are no known exceptions. Put different words in my mouth one more time and it’ll be the last comment you make here.
Then here are the words from my mouth. There are at least two senses in which life can come from life. Organic life can reproduce, by definition. Hypothetically, an intelligent life form can intervene in the material universe to produce an organic life form. Science relies heavily on induction from empirical observations, despite the fact that induction is logically unsound. All of the many life forms we have observed have been organic, and by induction all life is organic. We have observed many living things to arise by reproduction of existing living things, and never by any other means. By induction, all living things come into being by reproduction. There is obviously a little problem with the "reasoning" that all living things arise from reproduction of organic life, namely the Big Bang. The empirical evidence is strongly against an infinite regresss of reproduction. Organic life had to originate at some point in the history of the universe. It is tempting to say here that all life comes from life, and thus the original organic life must have resulted from the intervention of some intelligent life form. This is equivocation on "comes from." Induction supports "comes from" only in the sense of reproduction. There is no empirical evidence that any intelligent life form ever caused organic life to come into existence by means other than reproduction of itself. Personally, I believe that a living God created and the universe, but the sense in which God is living is very different from that in which bacteria are living. In any case, I do not see the sense in marking off the origin of organic life for different scientific treatment than biological evolution. If design is manifested in one, it may be in the other as well. A telic and intelligent designer should be able to direct chemical evolution just as well as biological evolution.Benjy_Compson
November 17, 2006
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Benjy, are you a cosmological-frontloading-ist? Do you believe all the biological CSI was "programmed" into the Universe at the beginning?kvwells
November 17, 2006
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Would everyone agree that, at the moment the first life was formed/began/whatever, biological CSI began to be interpreted? Of course the first biological life came from (or 'was made from', the Agency is not important here) non-living matter. The question may be about the point at which one could say, were he there in spirit, "there is now something alive in the universe." IOW was the information first expressed in the first biological life, in which cas it existed outside of and independent of biological life, or did CSI evolve into existence piecemeal or gradually. I agree that gradualism, when applied to biological CSI seems a strange concept indeed, and is the quandry OOL researchers are confronted with.kvwells
November 17, 2006
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To be more precise, Dr. Dembski defines a quantity and refers to it as information.
No he does not. There may be some short hand notations that may lead you to think that, but that is not the case. That is a Mark Perakhism. Furthermore, I asked you to provide a reference, which you did not. You also alluded to a second hand quotation which you did not even provide. If you're just going to clog this thread with unsupported assertions, misrepresentations, and further fabricate things IDers never said, and when requested to provide evidence they said something just ignore the request, why bother having a discussion with us. I asked earlier that you provide a reference with quotation for this claim:
even Dr. Dembski concedes the possibility of CSI increasing within bounds by natural processes.
Further you said,
Regarding increase of CSI, Dr. Dembski indicates (on page 154, according to a secondary source) that application of a function to an argument can increase CSI.
You didn't even cite the second hand source. Why don't you cite the original source? Or are you going to pull a Jack Krebs/Pandas Thumb stunt and start commenting on books you've not read?scordova
November 17, 2006
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Dizzy,
If abiogenesis means life from non-life, isn’t that what it’s got to be, regardless of what the cause(s) might be? With respect to ‘godless materialism’, I think it an unjust and ill conceived concept.
No. Abiogenesis means life from non-life. If the life is created or designed by another life form it is not abiogenesis, it is biogenesis.Jehu
November 17, 2006
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Benjy, if anyone here uses the term “spontaneous generation" I highly doubt they're referring to the idea that "complex, living organisms are generated by decaying organic substances, e.g. that mice spontaneously appear in stored grain or maggots spontaneously appear in meat."Patrick
November 17, 2006
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Benjy Are you telling me that a telic, intelligent, unembodied source of information is alive in the same sense that a plant is alive? I'm telling you life comes from life and there are no known exceptions. Put different words in my mouth one more time and it'll be the last comment you make here.DaveScot
November 17, 2006
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Jehu wrote: belief in abiogenesis is irrational and is an obvious demonstration that certain beliefs of scientists are, as you stated, “the false consequences of godless materialism.” If abiogenesis means life from non-life, isn't that what it's got to be, regardless of what the cause(s) might be? With respect to 'godless materialism', I think it an unjust and ill conceived concept.Dizzy
November 17, 2006
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DaveScot, I know how "abiogenesis" is used in contemporary origins of life research by virtue of my reading. But if I did not know, I would not start by looking up "spontaneous generation." I would go directly to the article on abiogenesis. Check out the first paragraph.
I do consider it a law of nature that life comes from life and abiogenesis is a baseless myth held by atheists to help them deny any living force in the universe that transcends themselves.
Are you telling me that a telic, intelligent, unembodied source of information is alive in the same sense that a plant is alive?Benjy_Compson
November 17, 2006
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Mr. Cordova,
CSI is defined as a form information, therefore it is governed and constrained by basic laws of information.
To be more precise, Dr. Dembski defines a quantity and refers to it as information. This does not mean that CSI shares properties with other other quantities referred to as information. Recall that CSI, as presently defined, is the sum of three terms. One of the terms is a surprisal, and another is descriptive complexity. These are reasonably called measures of information, though of different sorts. Together they make up specificity. The third term is the logarithm of the count of probabilistic resources. The count is bounded above by 10 ^ 120. It is not clear to me why this should be considered information. Taking the logarithm of a quantity does not make it into information. In any case, CSI is not remotely like any other measure of information I have seen. Dr. Dembski has not proven the properties of CSI, and they do not follow from any "basic laws of information." We should be emphasizing that there is challenging and interesting work to be done, not that we already know the answers. I genuinely do not understand why you keep returning to the notion of noise turning into CSI. Who suggests such a thing? It's been a long, long day. I have to check out here.Benjy_Compson
November 16, 2006
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Most of the present models of abiogenesis involve some form of chemical evolution. As such, they are no more spontaneous than biological evolution. While you will find “spontaneous” in many dictionary definitions of abiogenesis, this does not reflect contemporary scientific usage.
Obviously I'd presume that any modern models will assume--rightly or wrongly--emergent properties of chemical law but you're the first I've seen to assert that the definition of abiogenesis should be extended to include intelligence. If that ever becomes the de facto standard then I'd be happy since that'd mean the paradigm shift is over.Patrick
November 16, 2006
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DaveScot, In my opinion the Law of Biogenesis was established by Louis Pasteur two years after Charles Darwin published his famous theory of eugenics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BiogenesisJehu
November 16, 2006
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Benjy In any science other than evolutionary the observation of life coming from life would be a law. When something is observed without exception and predicts without fail so many times as seeing life coming from other life it would be a law and abiogenesis would be an atheist myth. Not having any predispositions to chant the party line in biology I do consider it a law of nature that life comes from life and abiogenesis is a baseless myth held by atheists to help them deny any living force in the universe that transcends themselves.DaveScot
November 16, 2006
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Benjy While you will find “spontaneous” in many dictionary definitions of abiogenesis, this does not reflect contemporary scientific usage Wrong. See where the following link takes you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation Spontaneous generation is an old and disproven hypothesis explaining abiogenesis. Is there some particular reason you didn't know that other than a shallow depth of knowledge in this subject?DaveScot
November 16, 2006
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Benjy Compson, You said,
Abiogenesis is the emergence of living matter from non-living matter.
I think we all agree on that.
intelligence can make an improbable process of abiogenesis probable. I don’t know what your actual beliefs are, but your resistance to this subtle notion of design bespeaks closet creationism.
So in your opinion abiogenesis includes some intelligent agent taking already existing matter and fashioning that matter into life? I do not consider abiogenesis to include an intelligence using pre-existing matter to form life from nonlife. In that case, life is not coming from nonlife, it is coming from the life that designed it.
There are multiple hypotheses of abiogenesis. None of them rises to the level of theory. Why pick a particular hypothesis and try to pin it on me?
That was not my point in rasing the issue of abiogenesis. I mention it because belief in abiogenesis is irrational and is an obvious demonstration that certain beliefs of scientists are, as you stated, "the false consequences of godless materialism."Jehu
November 16, 2006
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Patrick, First let me say that I have browsed many old UD threads, and that I cannot keep people straight. When I write about a shortcoming of UD folks in general, that is not a veiled criticism of you in particular. Most of the present models of abiogenesis involve some form of chemical evolution. As such, they are no more spontaneous than biological evolution. While you will find "spontaneous" in many dictionary definitions of abiogenesis, this does not reflect contemporary scientific usage. The upshot is that the methodological naturalists own abiogenesis no more than they do evolution. I think it is a better idea to explore design in abiogenesis than to buck the stream and declare that it never happened. Regarding increase of CSI, Dr. Dembski indicates (on page 154, according to a secondary source) that application of a function to an argument can increase CSI. The gain of CSI of the function's value relative to the argument is bounded by the CSI of the function itself. The CSI of any function represented in nature is bounded. Note that when the function (natural law, under Dembski's interpretation) is applied in nature, it retains its CSI, and the result has more CSI than the input. Thus, even if the argument and the function are considered a closed system, CSI is conserved not absolutely, but up to an additive constant. I am blowing through the outline of this, and I am falling back on some mathematical jargon. Tell me if I need to meat this out. Sorry to be in a rush.Benjy_Compson
November 16, 2006
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Benjy asked: You referred to complex specified information, and to my knowledge there is still no reference to the concept in the literature of information theory (or communications engineering). So how could this be “basic stuff”? Can you give me references from the last few years?
No Free Lunch defines the concept for ID literature and relates it to usage by Dawkins for the concept of Darwinian evolution supposedly creating appearance of design. That is a reference. CSI is defined as a form information, therefore it is governed and constrained by basic laws of information. Whether the term CSI is used in professional literature is irrelevant, CSI is still information. The concept of fighting noise in the representation, preseveration, and evolution of information is fundamental enough to information science, that if you purport to be familiar with the concept, and yet continue this line of argumentation, it would appear you are merely arguing for arguments sake. Noise does not make specified complexity. That is a straight forward dedcution from the definition of specified complexity and information science. If you refuse to consider my hypothesis because Dembski's NFL or ID literature is not in mainstream peer-review, then go elsewhere and satisfy yourself it's false. I have no inclination to waste time persuading those who put the stamp of peer-review ahead of reason. The fact that Darwinian evolution dominates peer-reviewed literature is evidence to me the peer-review system needs fixing, not ID literature. And for what it's worth, NFL was cited in a recent peer-reviewed articl on OOL, and it would not surprise me to see reference to it in future discussions on evolutionary algorithms. Here are some references on noise and communication systems. You can easily google the ideas or get books on the topic. Noise in communication systems; probability and random signals If you are so confident noise can create specified complexity, then you are invited to post links to your mathematical proof of that here with references.
Furthermore, as I pointed out to Patrick in the previous post, even Dr. Dembski concedes the possibility of CSI increasing within bounds by natural processes.
provide a reference, please with exact quotation. My interpretation of page 161 does not agree with yours, so feel free to quote exactly page 161 in context.
By analogy, why can an evolutionary process not transfer CSI from the environment to living things?
It can, but is their any empirical evidence to support that the environment has CSI and can transfer it via a low-noise channel????? Actually, there is abundant empirical evidence to the contrary that the environment is damaging to CSI, that even if it did contain CSI it is not the mechanism that infuses biological reality.
In other words, why not think of the environment as intelligently designed?
I believe it is intelligently designed, but so are random number generators, and analog-based noise makers. The characteristics of these intelligently designed random number generators don't make the kind of specified complexity we find in nature. In communciation engineering, we build random noise makers to test the strength of a communicaiton system's ability to deal with noise. Even though the noise in these experiements was intelligently designed, it does not imply the noise will be the mechanism of creation or communication of information for a given communication channel. Empirical evidence is against the environment or natural selection creating specified complexity, even if the environment is intelligent designed, much as in the case of intelligently designed random noise generators. See Dembski's essay: Randomness by Design I pointed out reasons why natural selection will be hard pressed statistically to correlate reproductive advantage to certain designs. The fact that organ regeneration can be lost is evidence that natural selection has a hard time selecting toward a contingency designs, much less creating a contingency design in the first place.scordova
November 16, 2006
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By Dembski’s definition, intelligence can make an improbable process of abiogenesis probable.
Learn to use the correct terminology. a‧bi‧o‧gen‧e‧sis noun the theory that living organisms can arise spontaneously from inanimate matter; spontaneous generation. As in, no intelligence involved.
There are multiple hypotheses of abiogenesis. None of them rises to the level of theory. Why pick a particular hypothesis and try to pin it on me?
Sorry...I should have been clear that my offhand comment was in reference to the discussion contained within the link. At the same time the focus should be on researching the "first steps" if you will and not jumping ahead. Once you have a scenario where the first step is accomplished further steps can be derived from this foundation (which will likely limit options).
As Dr. Dembski wisely points out, Bayesian inference (comparison of hypotheses to see which assigns higher probability to observed phenomena) is a quagmire for ID. Few of the discussants here have the statistical acumen to understand this, but non-comparative Fisherian inference is the only way for ID to go.
Thanks for the insult but Bill discusses this subject in sections 2.9 and 2.10 of No Free Lunch. You may also want to read this: http://www.designinference.com/documents/2002.08.Erik_Response.htm
I have also made it very clear that I think that sociopolitical activists without advanced education in math or science are trashing ID. To criticize simplistic notions held by people incompetent to understand the recent ID literature is not to criticize ID itself.
I'm an engineer, as are many of those on UD. Like a good little student I believed everything my professor taught me, including Darwinism. It was due to my interest in nanotechnology that I ran into ID. I was pointing that you were point-blank wrong. It was as if you just read the word "Conservation" in LCI and jumped to conclusions without reading the literature. If you have indeed read NFL then I have no idea why you stated reductive evolution was a problem for LCI. I comprehend that you believe we are mistaken in our understanding of ID and that you're attempting to correct us. That is a good goal but it appears you yourself are at fault here.
Read a little more of No Free Lunch, Patrick, and you will find that Dr. Dembski backs off from his first statement of the law, and indicates that CSI can increase, but only within a limit.
Thanks for the additional implied insult. Also, nice try at attempting to shift the conversation away from your obvious goof. Notice that I used quotation marks. I was directly quoting Bill. Also, your first remarks were on the modification of specificity...not on CSI as a whole. I'm also unsure what your point is; are you saying that it's a problem for ID that CSI can be modified (note that I'm not saying "increasing") after the initial instance of intelligent input?
You referred to complex specified information, and to my knowledge there is still no reference to the concept in the literature of information theory (or communications engineering). So how could this be “basic stuff”? Can you give me references from the last few years?
Instead of answering Sal you're changing the focus to the usage of the exact phrase CSI in such literature; aka verbal dodge. Whether or not people use certain terminology does not mean research does not have implications for other research...and this goes the same for fields outside of biology and ID. I'm trying not to be too insulting, but seriously we have high schoolers who come on here and make more coherent arguments. Now don't fly off into a hissy fit. Consider this to be constructive criticism. I think you should reevaluate your own understanding of ID before you continue any discussions on UD.Patrick
November 16, 2006
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Mr. Cordova,
This is basic stuff Benjy. Since when has a communication engineer welcomed noise when trying to pump the specified complexity of a modem signal through a communication channel??? Nothing in the literture of communications engineering will suggest noise can construct a highly complex specified signal. The only place such ideas exists is in Darwinian biology, not in real science.
You referred to complex specified information, and to my knowledge there is still no reference to the concept in the literature of information theory (or communications engineering). So how could this be "basic stuff"? Can you give me references from the last few years? Furthermore, as I pointed out to Patrick in the previous post, even Dr. Dembski concedes the possibility of CSI increasing within bounds by natural processes. I have no idea what it means to say that "noise can construct a highly complex specified signal." How can noise construct anything? If we were to think of evolution in terms of signal processing and noise, we might pursue the analogy of passing a signal generated by a random process through an infinite impulse response filter (i.e., one with feedback). It is hardly clear what restrictions there might be on the filter output. Such matters require careful analysis, not offhand claims. But let me throw this idea out: If there is complex specified information in the filter itself, what keeps the filter from transferring CSI to the filter output under random inputs? By analogy, why can an evolutionary process not transfer CSI from the environment to living things? Since when does it take intelligence to move or copy information from one place to another? In other words, why not think of the environment as intelligently designed?Benjy_Compson
November 16, 2006
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Patrick,
Before you start criticizing ID on here you really ought to go read the literature.
You might start by reading the thread. I have made it very clear that my concern is the progress of ID as science. I have also made it very clear that I think that sociopolitical activists without advanced education in math or science are trashing ID. To criticize simplistic notions held by people incompetent to understand the recent ID literature is not to criticize ID itself.
The LCI restated in simple terms: “Natural causes are incapable of generating CSI.” The first corollary says that “the CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or DECREASES.”
Read a little more of No Free Lunch, Patrick, and you will find that Dr. Dembski backs off from his first statement of the law, and indicates that CSI can increase, but only within a limit. Or, as I said above,
Perhaps there is a limit to how much the specificity of a system can be increased by natural processes, but certainly one can drive it close to zero without any gain in specificity outside the system (e.g., one may nuke a bridge).
I assumed that readers would realize that I was alluding to NFL. Bad assumption, I guess.Benjy_Compson
November 16, 2006
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Patrick,
As far as I know this is the latest on abiogenesis : https://uncommondescent.com/archives/1621 To me discussing a hypothetical RNA world is like discussing a nascar race when you can’t even get the starting flag to wave.
There are multiple hypotheses of abiogenesis. None of them rises to the level of theory. Why pick a particular hypothesis and try to pin it on me? I merely note that the hypotheses exist, and that I suspect that no hypothesis or theory will be adequate without an accounting for influx of information from without the natural universe. Of course, my suspicion is obviously a mere hypothesis, just like the others. None of us has more than a guess at this point, and those who claim to have more are bald-faced... propagandists. The case for intelligent design of the first living thing(s) remains to be made. It is not sufficient to claim that ID makes more sense than unguided abiogenesis. As Dr. Dembski wisely points out, Bayesian inference (comparison of hypotheses to see which assigns higher probability to observed phenomena) is a quagmire for ID. Few of the discussants here have the statistical acumen to understand this, but non-comparative Fisherian inference is the only way for ID to go. There's essentially nothing for anyone to reject by Fisherian means at this point. Simple gut responses are all anyone has to offer, and while such responses are important in guiding scientific discovery, they mean nothing in and of themselves.Benjy_Compson
November 16, 2006
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Jehu and Patrick, If evolution can be directed by intelligence without a discrete design event, as Dr. Dembski and I agree, then why not abiogenesis? Abiogenesis is the emergence of living matter from non-living matter. If you have read the literature on ID, then you know as I do Dr. Dembski's definition of intelligence as those causal factors that transform one probability distribution into another. By Dembski's definition, intelligence can make an improbable process of abiogenesis probable. I don't know what your actual beliefs are, but your resistance to this subtle notion of design bespeaks closet creationism.Benjy_Compson
November 16, 2006
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