At Some Point, the Obvious Becomes Transparently Obvious (or, Recognizing the Forrest, With all its Barbs, Through the Trees)

_{Gil Dodgen

June 5, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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At UD we have many brilliant ID apologists, and they continue to mount what I perceive as increasingly indefensible assaults on the creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection. In addition, they present overwhelming positive evidence that the only known source of functionally specified, highly integrated information-processing systems, with such sophisticated technology as error detection and repair, is intelligent design.

[Part 2 is here. ]

This should be obvious to any unbiased observer with a decent education in basic mathematics and expertise in any rigorous engineering discipline.

Here is my analysis: The Forrests of the world don’t want to admit that there is design in the universe and living systems — even when the evidence bludgeons them over the head from every corner of contemporary science, and when the trajectory of the evidence makes their thesis less and less believable every day.

Why would such a person hold on to a transparently obvious 19th-century pseudo-scientific fantasy, when all the evidence of modern science points in the opposite direction?

I can see the Forrest through the trees. Can you?

Comments

Chris: "Artificial selection absolutely requires Intelligent Design – that provided by man. Without it, we would never have seen all of those varieties of cabbages and dogs. It is a fact that Natural selection alone didn’t manage it despite having tens of millions of years to do so." But, that kind of artificial selection is just as dependent as natural selection on the variation provided by random mutations. So, I would argue (as does Dawkins and Darwin) the the capacity for random mutation providing the raw materials for selection to work on has been established.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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ellazimm said: "For me I just find that the modern evolutionary synthesis has much more explanatory power and makes fewer assumptions about the forces utilised. It’s more parsimonious. Occam’s Razor and all that." No, it's not. Occam's razor and the principle of parsimony states that you don't want to multiply explanatory entities beyond necessity. If one is going to that chance* mutations and natural* selection have explnatory power in any evolutionary sequence, it must at least be vetted that the evolutionary outcome is at least reasonably possible given a qualified stochastic analysis of the real potentials of the processes in question. But there is no such metric that has ever been offered that verifies chance* and natural* processes up to the task - indeed, Darwinists assert there is no such metric. Fewer assumptions? You have **assumed** your entire engine of evolution to be something you cannot even begin to verify - chance*, and natural*. Yet you (and Darwin) feel perfectly comfortable pointing at products of artificial selection and claiming it provides evidence of what natural selection can do! Will you also point at genetic engineering as an example of what chance* mutations can do?William J. Murray_{June 6, 2011
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WJM: "Please refer me to any paper or research which has vetted any of the collective mutations or series of selection events as chance* or as natural* (meaning, not guided by intelligence)." You know you can't prove a negative like that!! And, I would say, the default assumption is not guided by intelligence unless there is other evidence of intelligence present for the task.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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WJM: I realise you didn't ask, I'm just trying to give a sense of why I find the design inference unsatisfying. It just doesn't answer enough questions for me. I hear lots of ID proponents saying the same about Darwinism: you can't prove this or that happened. And I suppose that will lead some to say that the real difference between a Darwinist and a non-Darwinist is the basic commitment/assumption of only mechanical processes. I suppose that is arguable. It certainly seems to get argued about a lot. For me I just find that the modern evolutionary synthesis has much more explanatory power and makes fewer assumptions about the forces utilised. It's more parsimonious. Occam's Razor and all that. It being about 3:40pm here in England I suspect Lizzie is busy at work. :-)ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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ellazimm states: I know these examples are not considered adequate but to me they DO show the amazing power of random mutation and selection with no design on the molecular level. Please refer me to any paper or research which has vetted any of the collective mutations or series of selection events as chance* or as natural* (meaning, not guided by intelligence). If you are going to claim that macro-evolutionary feats (or any evolutionary feat) demonstrates the power of chance* mutation and natural* selection, then you are obliged to demonstrate (not narrate or assert, but demonstrate) how you have vetted those collections and sequences of mutation and selection as being unguided by intelligence.William J. Murray_{June 6, 2011
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F/N: recall, Paley's watch example goes on to the issue of the watch with a self-replicating facility, and argues that the additionality of a unit that is capable of replicating the watch is a significant additional reason to infer to design. I find that in the literature that dismisses Paley, this is as a rule not addressed in any serious fashion, and mostly simply not discussed in the haste to say that self-replication is the key answer to Paley.kairosfocus_{June 6, 2011
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Now we have unintelligent forces generating intelligent, *unintentional* processes that can mimick intentional intelligent processes. Heck, why not just have unintelligent forces mimick intentionality, too? All without - so far - a shred of evidence that shows such processes, forces and materials up to the task of generating anything of the kind. Nothing but imagination and hope that chance can work a series of materialist miracles.William J. Murray_{June 6, 2011
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Hi ellazim: sounds like you've been reading "The Greatest Show on Earth"! I'm still reading it myself... surprisingly, it keeps getting bumped down by other books (though it is much more tolerable than 'The God Delusion')! Anyway, regarding cabbages and dogs. There is actually a fundamental difference between artificial selection and natural selection. Not that Dawkins realises it. Artificial selection absolutely requires Intelligent Design - that provided by man. Without it, we would never have seen all of those varieties of cabbages and dogs. It is a fact that Natural selection alone didn't manage it despite having tens of millions of years to do so. Yes, artificial selection is pretty remarkable. Natural selection alone, not so. Natural selection acting upon random mutations in a macro-evolutionary manner? Merely a fairytale! I personally see no role for "the Darwinist proposed process" in any of the four things I listed.Chris Doyle_{June 6, 2011
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KF: I agree that we frequently infer design without knowing much about the designer. But in order to prove the point when challenged then I, personally, would want to be very specific about what I was claiming was designed and I would want to be very sure that I had other evidence that a designer with that claimed capacity was around at that time. Again, this is just to answer the question: why can't Darwinists accept the design hypothesis. For me it's because I can't get answers to the questions that come up.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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ellazimm said: "I would ask the same of ID. Without knowing the power, forces or capability of a designer how can you be sure there was one capable of what is being claimed? Setting aside the fact that the claim is not yet clear." Pardon me for answering under a different name (my work computer won't all me to sign on via my "Meleagar" identity), but: I never asserted that ID was an adequate explanation. I only asked Dr. Liddle to support her assertion that non-intelligent evolutionary forces were "an adequate explanation". Note how Dr. Liddle still hasn't answered the question or met the challenge, but is now claiming that evolutionary forces might be considered intelligent, just not intentional; IOW, she's thinking maybe an "intelligent" decision-making computer can be purchased from generated from unintelligent processes. Note how the semantic distinction between "intelligence" and "intentionality" simply moves the question to another position; okay, Dr. Liddle, please show your rigorous evidence that demonstrates that unintelligent forces, chemicals, natural laws, etc. or whatever can generate intelligent processes. Or is making a distinction between "intelligence" and "intentionality" simply more dissembling in order to continue avoiding the fact that you have provided no scientific basis whatsoever for your assertion that chance* and natural* processes can [insert new begged-question semantic avoidance] generate the "intelligent" non-intentional processes necessary to acquire macro-evolutionary success?William J. Murray_{June 6, 2011
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Chris: Are you saying that every step of the development of life on Earth was guided and intentional? Did it develop roughly through the Darwinist proposed process but with the designer creating the beneficial mutations or were there major leaps of new body forms and structures? The creation of many of the species of Brassica plants (kale, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts) all arose from the same plant base. They were created via random mutation and selection; not natural selection I grant you but the variation that the selection acted on was the same. I think that's pretty remarkable and all within the last few thousand years. Same with the varieties of dogs. I know these examples are not considered adequate but to me they DO show the amazing power of random mutation and selection with no design on the molecular level.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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F/N: On Dembski defining intelligence: Being sufficiently interested to follow up, I find this from WD, in 2000:
8. The Distinction Between Natural and Non-Natural Designers But isn’t there an evidentially significant difference between natural and non-natural designers? It seems that this worry is really what’s behind the desire to front-load all the design in nature. We all have experience with designers that are embodied in physical stuff, notably other human beings. But what experience do we have of non-natural designers? With respect to intelligent design in biology, for instance, Elliott Sober wants to know what sorts of biological systems should be expected from a non-natural designer. What’s more, Sober claims that if the design theorist cannot answer this question (i.e., cannot predict the sorts of biological systems that might be expected on a design hypothesis), then intelligent design is untestable and therefore unfruitful for science. Yet to place this demand on design hypotheses is ill-conceived. We infer design regularly and reliably without knowing characteristics of the designer or being able to assess what the designer is likely to do. In his 1999 presidential address for the American Philosophical Association Sober himself admits as much in a footnote that deserves to be part of his main text (“Testability,” Proceedings and Addresses of the APA, 1999, p. 73, n. 20): “To infer watchmaker from watch, you needn’t know exactly what the watchmaker had in mind; indeed, you don’t even have to know that the watch is a device for measuring time. Archaeologists sometimes unearth tools of unknown function, but still reasonably draw the inference that these things are, in fact, tools.” Sober is wedded to a Humean inductive tradition in which all our knowledge of the world is an extrapolation from past experience. Thus for design to be explanatory, it must fit our preconceptions, and if it doesn’t, it must lack epistemic value. For Sober, to predict what a designer would do requires first looking to past experience and determining what designers in the past have actually done. A little thought, however, should convince us that any such requirement fundamentally misconstrues design. Sober’s inductive approach puts designers in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience. To be sure, designers, like natural laws, can behave predictably. Yet unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence of true novelty, eschews predictability. It follows that design cannot be subsumed under a Humean inductive framework. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor. But the problem goes deeper. Not only can’t Humean induction tame the unpredictability inherent in design; it can’t account for how we recognize design in the first place. Sober, for instance, regards the intelligent design hypothesis as fruitless and untestable for biology because it fails to confer sufficient probability on biologically interesting propositions. But take a different example, say from archeology, in which a design hypothesis about certain aborigines confers a large probability on certain artifacts, say arrowheads. Such a design hypothesis would on Sober’s account be testable and thus acceptable to science. But what sort of archeological background knowledge had to go into that design hypothesis for Sober’s inductive analysis to be successful? At the very least, we would have had to have past experience with arrowheads. But how did we recognize that the arrowheads in our past experience were designed? Did we see humans actually manufacture those arrowheads? If so, how did we recognize that these humans were acting deliberately as designing agents and not just randomly chipping away at random chunks of rock (carpentry and sculpting entail design; but whittling and chipping, though performed by intelligent agents, do not). As is evident from this line of reasoning, the induction needed to recognize design can never get started. My argument then is this: Design is always inferred, never a direct intuition. We don’t get into the mind of designers and thereby attribute design. Rather we look at effects in the physical world that exhibit the features of design and from those features infer to a designing intelligence. The philosopher Thomas Reid made this same argument over 200 years ago (Lectures on Natural Theology, 1780): “No man ever saw wisdom [read “design”], and if he does not [infer wisdom] from the marks of it, he can form no conclusions respecting anything of his fellow creatures.... But says Hume, unless you know it by experience, you know nothing of it. If this is the case, I never could know it at all. Hence it appears that whoever maintains that there is no force in the [general rule that from marks of intelligence and wisdom in effects a wise and intelligent cause may be inferred], denies the existence of any intelligent being but himself.” The virtue of my work is to formalize and make precise those features that reliably signal design, casting them in the idiom of modern information theory. Larry Arnhart remains unconvinced. In the most recent issue of First Things (November 2000) he claims that our knowledge of design arises not from any inference but from introspection of our own human intelligence; thus we have no empirical basis for inferring design whose source is non-natural. Though at first blush plausible, this argument collapses quickly when probed. Piaget, for instance, would have rejected it on developmental grounds: Babies do not make sense of intelligence by introspecting their own intelligence but by coming to terms with the effects of intelligence in their external environment. For example, they see the ball in front of them and then taken away, and learn that Daddy is moving the ball--thus reasoning directly from effect to intelligence. Introspection (always a questionable psychological category) plays at best a secondary role in how initially we make sense of intelligence. Even later in life, however, when we’ve attained full self-consciousness and when introspection can be performed with varying degrees of reliability, I would argue that even then intelligence is inferred. Indeed, introspection must always remain inadequate for assessing intelligence (by intelligence I mean the power and facility to choose between options--this coincides with the Latin etymology of “intelligence,” namely, “to choose between”). For instance, I cannot by introspection assess my intelligence at proving theorems in differential geometry, choosing the right sequence of steps, say, in the proof of the Nash embedding theorem. It’s been over a decade since I’ve proven any theorems in differential geometry. I need to get out paper and pencil and actually try to prove some theorems in that field. Depending on how I do--and not my memory of how well I did in the past--will determine whether and to what degree intelligence can be attributed to my theorem proving. I therefore continue to maintain that intelligence is always inferred, that we infer it through well-established methods, and that there is no principled way to distinguish natural and non-natural design so that the one is empirically accessible but the other is empirically inaccessible. This is the rub. And this is why intelligent design is such an intriguing intellectual possibility--it threatens to make the ultimate questions real. Convinced Darwinists like Arnhart therefore need to block the design inference whenever it threatens to implicate a non-natural designer. Once this line of defense is breached, Darwinism quickly becomes indefensible.
In clarifying his terms, WD says: (by intelligence I mean the power and facility to choose between options--this coincides with the Latin etymology of “intelligence,” namely, “to choose between”). We may safely adjust on remarks he has made elsewhere:
. . . (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. (No Free Lunch, p. xi.)
So, adjusting: (by intelligence I mean the power and facility to choose between options [towards a goal] --this coincides with the Latin etymology of “intelligence,” namely, “to choose between”). Therefore it is an error of misreading to imagine that Dembski's definition of intelligence in the context of design excludes purposefulness or intent. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{June 6, 2011
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"And it is this similarity that, I submit, that is reflected in their “CSI”, not the additional factor of “intention”." The sequence of chemical symbols in DNA is useless unless it is read in a linear fashion. Otherwise no information would come from it. But, there is nothing in the material make-up of the DNA molecule that sets this charateristic as a matter of physical neccesity. So the question becomes, can it be said that DNA was not intended to be read in a linear fashion? - - - - - - - - - By the way Dr Liddle, you were going to demonstrate how neo-darwinian processes brought information into existence in the first place. I am eargerly awaiting your explanation.Upright BiPed_{June 6, 2011
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Okay, here's a list of things for starters: 1. The Solar System 2. The Earth 3. Life on Earth 4. The Cell Depends what you mean by micro-evolution. I personally prefer the term 'sub-specific variety' (or variation within a pre-existing gene pool of a species) and I don't personally credit it with anything particularly remarkable: certainly nothing that sheds any light on the four things listed above.Chris Doyle_{June 6, 2011
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I know, I know, ID doesn't ask some of my questions and I'm not expecting answers really. But the question has been asked: how come 'Darwinists' cannot accept the design inference. Well, it's 'cause we can't help but ask all the follow on questions. When I think of Paley's watch example I can see how all the design questions can be answered. We can answer a lot of the how, why and when questions. I will find the design inference a lot more satisfying and plausible when some of those issues are addressed. But, as I've promised, I'm not going to push it too much.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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Chris: I think then you need to be specific and say exactly what was designed. What are you actually claiming? If you grant 'micro'-evolution then what was actually designed? I'm finding it very hard to pin down exactly what the design hypothesis is saying.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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Meleager: "You are stating that Darwinism is “an adequate explanation” without even providing a rigorous explanation of the power (and limits of that power) of chance* and natural* processes claimed to be “an adequate explanation”. How can you claim those processes are adequate, if you cannot even direct me to where they have been vetted as adequate via a rigorous falsification metric?" I would ask the same of ID. Without knowing the power, forces or capability of a designer how can you be sure there was one capable of what is being claimed? Setting aside the fact that the claim is not yet clear.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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Hello ellazimm, "If I thought something was designed then I would want to know things about the designer and there just is no evidence that there ever has been one." You mean, apart from all of the design in nature? Just because you don't know anything about the designer, it doesn't mean it wasn't designed. Far from it.Chris Doyle_{June 6, 2011
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F/N: I have added remarks on molecular phylogenies and the kangaroo here.kairosfocus_{June 6, 2011
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NZer: "As an engineer, it seems rather odd to me that you should almost uncritically support one (seemingly crazy) hypothesis while rejecting the much more obvious appearance-of-design hypothesis. Why is this not an a priori and irrational bias (Richard Lewontin)?" Speaking for myself I find the modern biological synthesis more parsimonious. I see no other evidence or indication of a designer and, it seems to me, hypothesising the existence of one asks more questions than it answers. I know that ID proponents are not pushing into that realm but I would. If I thought something was designed then I would want to know things about the designer and there just is no evidence that there ever has been one. Also, it's not clear what kind of design is being talked about. Even ID proponents do not necessarily agree on when or at what level the proposed designs were implemented. Is every 'random' mutation not really random? Does the designer let things go for a while and then decide to tweak some plants and animals, creating new body parts and plans and then let them go again to see how it plays out? Was the genome of all living things top-loaded from the very start and then life has been allowed to expand out from there? If humans were always the goal of a great design project then why does it look like it took a few billion years for us to show up? What's the agenda in the design implementation? As I said, the design inference brings up a lot of questions for me. And I don't see a way to answer those questions.ellazimm_{June 6, 2011
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OT: Quantum Action confirmed in DNA by direct empirical research; (aka; another Day, another extremely bad day for neo-Darwinists) DNA Can Discern Between Two Quantum States, Research Shows Excerpt: -- DNA -- can discern between quantum states known as spin. - The researchers fabricated self-assembling, single layers of DNA attached to a gold substrate. They then exposed the DNA to mixed groups of electrons with both directions of spin. Indeed, the team's results surpassed expectations: The biological molecules reacted strongly with the electrons carrying one of those spins, and hardly at all with the others. The longer the molecule, the more efficient it was at choosing electrons with the desired spin, while single strands and damaged bits of DNA did not exhibit this property. These findings imply that the ability to pick and choose electrons with a particular spin stems from the chiral nature of the DNA molecule, which somehow "sets the preference" for the spin of electrons moving through it. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110331104014.htmbornagain77_{June 6, 2011
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Meleager: I am not "dissembling", and, actually, don't. I am capable of being wrong, dense, and biased, but I do not knowingly tell untruths. I'm not interested in untruths. They seem very tedious things to me. No offence taken (well, only a teensy bit) but I do want to make that clear :) And I obviously need to make my point clearer than I did: I do not think that evolutionary processes are intentional. If our definition of "intelligent" incorporates "intention" then evolutionary processes are not intelligent. However, if our definition excludes intention (and, interestingly William Demsbki's own does, explicitly) then I would argue that by that definition, both human design processes and evolutionary processes are intelligent: both are processes that involve deeply nested "decision trees". And it is this similarity that, I submit, that is reflected in their "CSI", not the additional factor of "intention". And so, if we want to find the signature of "intentional" design, as opposed to mere "intelligent" (where intelligence does not necessarily require intention) then I think we must look for something other than CSI. To others who have addressed questions to me: Thanks! I'll try to get to them later. I do appreciate the opportunity to take part in these discussions.Elizabeth Liddle_{June 6, 2011
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Two sales in one day? I should contact Stephen Meyer and ask him for a cut! When it comes to SITC, I tend to go on like a broken record but, as someone who has been following this debate for 15 years, reading it left a very strong impression on me. We can endlessly debate about fossils, embryos, peppered moths, panda's thumbs, etc. But it turns out that it is the cell - the most astoundingly sophisticated and complicated thing in existence - that has the final word.Chris Doyle_{June 6, 2011
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Heh, I just bought SITC too, for KOBO, for about $5 USD. Excellent ! Amazon was about twice that price for the same eBook.NZer_{June 6, 2011
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Hello again, Lizzie, “OK. I have just ordered the book.” Excellent! I’m sure I’m not alone here in very much looking forward to hearing what your reaction is to it once you’ve read it. One point that is hammered home by SITC regarding DNA is this: all tested hypotheses based on chance and/or necessity have failed. That said, a failed experiment still contributes to our scientific knowledge. The truth value of good experiments is that they are repeatable: and it has been repeatedly shown that chance and/or necessity cannot explain the concentrated information we find in the cell. The continued, albeit demoralised, search for such an explanation therefore, can only be due to the non-scientific commitments that are being brought to the table. Given that what we are trying to explain is either a product of Accident or Design – there is no third way – then on what grounds do you not rule out alternatives? I’ve yet to hear of any explanation that offers an alternative to Accident or Design. Do you have one? Your comment about how people from each side of the debate “read the evidence and arguments differently” returns directly to the point that GilDodgen made at the outset. We are not suggesting that evolutionists have “failed to understand the argument”. Rather, that observational and experimental evidence is clearly not a decisive or even an important factor for them. They are bringing these non-scientific commitments to the table which are not deterred by contrary scientific facts. One of those commitments is to “scientific consensus” for example. I put it to you, Lizzie, that your own evolutionist convictions make a significant appeal to that: “How can all those scientists have got it so wrong!?” Cheers, Chris PS. Thank-you very much for your detailed answer to the MMR question.Chris Doyle_{June 6, 2011
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Once again, the reason Darwinists cannot materially support their contention that evolutionary forces are in fact chance* and natural* is because the metric necessary for making that determination would be the same metric that would qualify ID as the better explanation should the examination go badly for Darwinists. They assert no such metric exists. Therefore, their claim that such forces are chance* and natural* is without basis by their own words. Their view that evolutionary forces are Darwinistic (unintelligent) is not based on any rigorous methodology; it is sheer assumption. Dr. Liddle is assuming that evolution is an unintelligent process in the first place, then compares it to intelligent design and says that evolutionary processes look a lot like intelligent design, so we have to be careful in comparing the two. She hasn't demonstrated in the first place that evolutionary (darwinian) processes can even reasonably be characterized as chance* and natural*, let alone be counted as "an adequate explanation"; it's nothing but a bare, a priori, ideological assumption.Meleagar_{June 6, 2011
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Thanks for the reply Lizzie. I guess you are going to get worn out by all the questions getting directed at you :-) You wrote: ' “...the genetic code couldn’t have emerged from purely physical/chemical processes” isn’t that it did but that it could. I am not claiming that it did, but that it could have.' Ok, fair call -- you say it "could" have rather than "did". But what does the Darwinist establishment say? I suspect they would go further and say that the genetic code *must have* arisen by physical/chemical processes. You then make an interesting point about how ID could be falsified by a plausible theory. I guess you are meaning that, for example, the spring in Behe's mouse trap could have been a part from another system, thus it did not have to evolve significantly to fulfill its new purpose. But why not put the boot on the other foot and critique the Darwinist mechanism of NS acting upon RMs. Surely given the complex molecular machinery, and the layers upon layers of complexity that science has only begun to touch upon, it is more reasonable to critique the (status quo) chance hypothesis. As an engineer, it seems rather odd to me that you should almost uncritically support one (seemingly crazy) hypothesis while rejecting the much more obvious appearance-of-design hypothesis. Why is this not an a priori and irrational bias (Richard Lewontin)?NZer_{June 6, 2011
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Dr Liddle, I believe now you are dissembling. You keep avoiding the salient points with diversions such as "I don't regard "evolutionary" and "unintelligent" as synonymous." They are not synonyms, but in this context you either believe evolution contained some intelligent direction, or you believe it did not, which makes in this context "unintelligent" synonymous with "evolution". You said: "I think evolutionary processes resemble intentional intelligent processes very closely. " Unless you are claiming that evolutionary processes are intelligent, you are indeed saying "I think unintelligent processes [at least those driving evolution - Meleagar] resemble intelligent processes very closely." What I'd be more interested in is for you to direct me to where it has been rigorously demonstrated that darwinian (unintelligent, non-artificial) forces are capable of producing what they are claimed to have produced (not just-so narratives that rely on unqualified chance. I'm sure you don't make claims of "adequate [scientific] explanation" based on nothing more than narratives depending on unqualified appeals to chance, I await your sources and quotes from published works that have vetted evolutionary forces as chance* and natural* in the first place.Meleagar_{June 6, 2011
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oops apologies for double postElizabeth Liddle_{June 6, 2011
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@Chris
Hi Lizzie, In most cases, I’d be happy to summarise any book that I’ve read. But SITC is such an important, game-changing, bar-raising book in this debate and critics of ID cannot really be taken seriously until they both read and fully engage with the central arguments advanced by Meyer in it.
OK. I have just ordered the book.
The remit of science is far too narrow to have any relevance in the Land of Hypotheticals. Beautiful hypotheses are regularly slain by ugly facts. We know we have certainly exhausted all known improbables (in terms of chance and/or necessity). Your appeal to unknown improbables has no basis in observational or experimental evidence and is therefore unscientific. Remember, there is no third way here.
No, indeed, and that is the difference between the Land of Make Believe and the Land of Hypothesis Testing, and is where science gets its rigor. A hypothesis is only as good as the data it fits, however glorious the hypothesis. But that shouldn't stop us deriving hypotheses from theories and testing them, and there are already a number of testable (and tested) hypotheses about the origins of the genetic code.
Your belief in the existence of “historical pre-cellular entities” is also unscientific in the absence of any observational or experimental evidence to support it. That you hold such a belief can only be because you are bringing non-scientific preconceptions and commitments to the table in the first place. It’d be interesting to know exactly what they are and why you hold them.
Well, I dispute your premise, for two reasons. The first is that I do not rule out alternatives just because none has been presented. That's why I mentioned the One Black Swan. Secondly, in this case, testable alternatives have been presented and have been subjected to testing. All scientific conclusions must be provisional, but it would be wrong to claim there is no alternative to ID as the origin of the genetic code, or that it cannot have had a physical/chemical origin. So there is no need to identify my "non-scientific commitments" because they are irrelevant :)
If the evidence for “Darwinian processes” was actually “compelling”, then there would be no debate. Those who claim that the evidence is compelling bear an uncanny resemblance to those who have made an a priori commitment to the explanatory power of “Darwinian processes”. There is nothing ‘reasoned’ about that particular conviction. Cheers, Chris
Well, that argument cuts both ways. Saying that an argument can't be compelling because otherwise there wouldn't be a debate would wipe out many past scientific arguments that are now accepted as standard! I'm not saying all are compelled by the arguments (clearly you, for example, are not) but there is no reason, I suggest, for either IDists to assume that those who disagree with them have simply failed to understand the argument, nor vice versa. Clearly we read the evidence and arguments differently. I'm interested in trying to find out exactly where those differences lie.
PS. Completely unrelated question that I’d like to ask you as someone who may have a professional interest: what do you make of the MMR vaccine controversy that was stirred up by Andrew Wakefield here in the UK? Specifically, is there any possibility that there is a link between an MMR vaccine and Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Yes (this is my answer as a statistical person, not a clinical person btw, which I'm not) there is, technically, a possibility. We are back to the One Black Swan problem in another guise! It is far more difficult to rule something out (there are no black swans; MMR does not cause autism) than rule it in. However, what we can say is that rigorous studies with large statistical power have failed to demonstrate a link. The best we can do with that kind of study is to say: if there is a link, the effect size is too small to be detected by a study with very large statistical power. We can also say that the effect size claimed by Andrew Wakefield has been falsified. That's a very careful statistical answer I know! But sometimes the best we can do is quantify the risk we are wrong, rather than quantify the probability that we are right. There appears to be only a very very small probability that the claim that MMR can cause autism is correct. Moreover, even if correct, the additional risk can be no more than tiny.Elizabeth Liddle_{June 6, 2011
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