Computer Simulations and Darwinism

_{Gil Dodgen

October 1, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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Okay dudes, no more talk about my abandonment of atheism. Here’s some science and engineering talk.

I know something about computer simulations. In fact, I know a lot about them, and their limitations.

Search algorithms (and especially AI-related search algorithms) are a specialty of mine, as is combinatorial mathematics.

The branching factor (the average number of moves per side) in chess yields approximately 10^120 possible outcomes, but the number of legally achievable positions is approximately 10^80 — the estimated number of elementary particles (protons and neutrons) in the entire known universe. Compare this to the branching factor of nucleotide sequences in the DNA molecule. Do the math.

Finite element analysis (FEA) of nonlinear, transient, dynamic systems, with the use of the most sophisticated, powerful computer program ever devised for such purposes (LS-DYNA, originally conceived at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the mid-1970s for the development of variable-yield nuclear weapons) is another of my computer-simulation specialties.

Dyna has been used heavily in the automotive industry for simulating car crashes, so that cars can be designed to produce the least damage to occupants.

In these simulations everything is precisely known and empirically quantified (the material properties of the components — modulus of elasticity, mass density, shear modulus, precisely calibrated failure modes, etc.).

In addition, the explicit FEA time step (the minimal integration time step determined by the software based on the speed on sound in the smallest finite element and its mass density, which is required to avoid numerical instability) is critical. In my simulations the time step is approximately a ten-millionth of second, during which partial differential equations, based on the laws of physics (F=ma in particular) are solved to compute the physical distortion of the system and the propagation of the forces throughout the system in question.

One learns very quickly with FEA simulations that even with all of this knowledge and sophistication one must empirically justify the results of the simulation incrementally by comparing the results with the reality it attempts to simulate.

One false assumption about a material property or any of the other aspects of a simulation can completely invalidate it. Worse yet, it can produce results that seem reasonable, but are completely wrong.

So, the next time someone tries to convince you that a computer simulation has validated the creative power of the Darwinian mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection in biology, you should tell them to go back to school and learn something about legitimate computer simulations, and how difficult it is to produce reliable results, even when the details are well known.

Comments

If a person designs a program to evolve a solution to a problem by a blind and undirected process, then it does it by a blind and undirected process. And that is what GAs do. Joseph, I asked you about your own GAs. I am intrigued that you use them to solve encryption problems, as encryption problems are the kind of problem not readily solvable by GAs - because there are no part-solutions. So if you are solving encryption problems by what you call a GA, then you are probably have in mind something very different from an actual evolutionary algorithm.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Yes, they self-replicated, and yes they evolved new functions, as self-replicators will if they replicate with heritable variance in reproductive success. They evolved functions that enhanced their ability to self-replicate (in other words they evolved by natural selection), thus exhibiting sequence changes that were reflected in phenotypic advantages. Yes, the original self-replicating molecules were designed, but the form they eventually took, in which they self-replicated far more efficiently than the original designed molecules, was not designed. It evolved.
“There was a day that it all happened,” said Dr. Joyce, namely Oct. 1, 2007, when as he puts it, the replicators “went critical,” and their population began growing exponentially. The game, as he likes to say, was on. And it has never stopped. Dr. Joyce and his colleagues next proceeded to engineer a sort of March Madness for molecules. They synthesized 12 versions of the replicators, which could mutate and evolve to improve their ability to reproduce. The experimenters threw these into the pot, along with the appropriate “food” segments, to compete. “They just go at it,” Dr. Joyce explained. By the end, the winning molecules were doubling their numbers every 15 minutes. Mistaken swaps had produced combinations, mutations, that had not been in the mix at the start. Most of the original versions almost completely disappeared. In short, the molecule evolved. “Evolution is not a theory for us chemists,” Dr. Joyce said. “It’s what molecules do when they have the property to replicate and transmit information from parents to progeny.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/science/28life.html?_r=1&pagewanted=allElizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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If a person designs a program to do something AND IT DOES IT, then there isn't anything blind and undirected about it. If you think there is then you need some serious help. As for the theory of evolution, well I would bet I have a better understanding of it than you. However it is a safe bet that you do not understand Intelligent Design. BTW no one knows what constrains evolution- and IF anything does it would be information.Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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Except they didn't evolve- no new functions- and they didn't even self-replicate. And no new complexity- nothing- you lose (yes a sequence change but no evolution, which requires something different besides just the sequence)Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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Thank you for your substantial response. I will try to get to it at the weekend :)Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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So if you follow the posts and comments of people such as that, along with the core readings suggested above, you and I should end up on the same page regarding what ID is.
You mention Michael Denton's "Nature's Destiny" which is a fine tuning argument. Denton's view is indistinguishable from mainstream biology. He states this explicitly. Shapiro, in his new book, does not depart from mainstream biology. He has an extreme position on evolvability, and he might personally think the game of evolution is rigged by fine tuning, but he invokes no hint of intervention. He explicitly denies that any such thing is necessary or indicated.Petrushka_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth: Thank you for your reply in 18.1. Regarding your first point, you have to distinguish between ID as a coherent theoretical position and a whole host of things which ID enthusiasts might say about ID. If you want to see ID as a coherent theoretical position, I would recommend that you focus mainly on the writings of Behe, on Dembski's No Free Lunch, on Dembski and Wells's Design of Life, on Denton's Nature's Destiny, and on some of the articles on the Discovery web site where a short, pithy definition of ID is articulated. Remember that on an open-for-comments website such as UD, you get comments from scores of people, some of who know the ID literature extremely well, and others who know it less well, and you get comments from scores of people whose interest is more in religious apologetics than in theories of design detection. So in some of the comments here you are bound to get a blurring between design theory proper and religious applications of design theory, just as on some other websites you will get a blurring between arguments for evolution and anti-religious polemics allegedly based on evolution. You have to take the time to sort out the core assertions of ID from the peripheral material. That said, there are many commenters here who understand the core assertions of ID very well, including Vincent Torley, Gil Dodgen, scordova, nullasalus, Cudworth, and StephenB, to name just a few. So if you follow the posts and comments of people such as that, along with the core readings suggested above, you and I should end up on the same page regarding what ID is. It is possible to assert ID without raising battle-cries against atheism and without launching into Christian apologetics. Those of us who have studied the history of philosophy and the history of science in some depth know that the modern debate between ID and Darwinian theory has ancient pre-Christian parallels. We have in the debates between the Epicureans, on one hand, and the Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics, on the other hand, many passages which (adjusting for the archaic scientific vocabulary) look as if they could have been pulled out of ID-Darwinist debates. The Epicureans argued that it was perfectly plausible that complex order, including the order of living things, could have come about through the unguided interaction and combination of blind, non-foresighted particles, and the others argued that this was nonsense, that order on the highest level cannot come from disorder, that a designing mind must have been involved, etc. And none of the participants in these debates had read Genesis or were concerned to attack or defend the Bible. So if you want to understand the theoretical core of ID, think of those pre-Christian debates. What ID does is to update the anti-Epicurean side, and what The Modern Synthesis does is to update the Epicurean side. The Bible and Christian theology ought to be kept out of it, as far as the basic theoretical debate goes. And in ID at its theoretically most pure, this is exactly what we find: the Bible and Christian theology are kept out of it. You don't find arguments from the Bible or theology in Behe's books, for example, or in No Free Lunch by Dembski. And when Darwin is criticized by Behe or Denton, he is not criticized for being an atheist (which he probably wasn't, anyway), or for being responsible for Hitler or eugenics or the moral depravity of modern America, etc.; he is criticized for proposing a flawed evolutionary mechanism. (Of course, by that mechanism they have in mind not simply Darwin's ideas, but Darwin's ideas as updated and polished by the Modern Synthesis.) So you have to keep your eye on the ball, and ignore the extraneous religious flak. If you want to disagree with Behe or Dembski about this or that biological claim, that's fine. But don't try to characterize ID as a doctrine of divine tinkering, when its core theoretical writings do not argue for or discuss divine tinkering. Second, regarding your statement that you are entitled to express any theological opinion that you want, I agree. So if you object to "God as tinkerer" -- though it is unclear to me why such a view would bother you, since, if I understand previous statements you have made elsewhere, you don't believe in God in the first place -- you can of course protest this notion. But it is pointless to bring up the inadequacies of God as tinkerer as a criticism of ID when ID as such does not affirm God as tinkerer. Denton has explicitly denied that God tinkers, and Behe, when the question has been put to him directly, has denied that tinkering is a necessary implication of ID. If an individual ID proponent, speaking for himself as a religious believer, affirms that God is a tinkerer, then you can of course sensibly raise your objection then. But such an objection is irrelevant if you are pretending to characterize ID as a pure theoretical position. The correct formulation is in fact that ID does not exclude the possibility of divine tinkering, but does not require it. A designer could achieve his end either by constantly modifying a pre-existing design, but could also set things up so that the design would unfold by an automatic process. So the designer could be something like a tinkerer, but could also be something like a computer programmer. Denton's designer is a sort of cosmic computer programmer, with the set of evolutionary outcomes being the output of the program. You wrote: "Yes, you do have “one possible interpretation of evolution from an ID perspective”. It’s the very one I suggested myself in my post you quoted. However, that interpretation does not emerge from, for example, Dembski’s argument, and does, interestingly, emerge from Darwin’s, who famously said: "'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.' "The ID case, as I understand it, is that Darwinian evolutionary processes cannot account for the evolution of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” from “so simple a beginning”. I think that case is fundamentally flawed." There is confusion here. The form of evolution that I was indicating was Dentonian. You here identify what I was talking about with Darwin's form of evolution. But the two are quite different, even though in both cases only natural causes are involved. The Dentonian form is driven by an inbuilt teleology, whereas the Darwinian form is resolutely anti-teleological, both in its original Darwinian form and in its later version in the Modern Synthesis. Keep in mind that ID in its pure form is not anti-evolutionary but only anti-Darwinian. The debate between ID and Darwinism is not over evolution but over teleology. (And yes, I know, there are many ID proponents who are not just anti-Darwin but also anti-evolution. But anti-evolutionism is merely compatible with ID, not essential to ID. Again, one must keep one's eye on the pure theoretical position.) So yes, ID proponents do deny the capacity of Darwinian processes to accomplish the results claimed for them; but this is not an inherently anti-evolutionary position, since non-ID evolutionary biologists like Margulis and Shapiro also deny the same thing. That's all I have to say about the mischaracterization of ID. I now turn to your response to my final point, about the nature of modern science. You wrote: "Science is all about finding regularities in the universe, not about accounting for every single individual phenomenon. We know why meteor craters form. We cannot trace the trajectory of a single meteor." Two points. First, your first sentence is true of experimental or "operational" science; it is not true for historical sciences such as cosmology, geology and evolutionary biology. The latter necessarily affirm the occurrence of particular contingent events, and cannot dispense with detailed accounts of how those events might have happened. Second, even in the case of experimental or operational sciences, while it is not necessary to trace particular causal paths in all cases, it certainly is necessary to do so in some cases. For example, when scientists concern themselves with predicting whether a certain rogue asteroid is going to hit the earth X years from now, and contemplate how a nuclear device might be sent up to intercept it, they must indeed be able to trace the trajectory of the of the rogue asteroid, and they can in principle do this using their knowledge of celestial mechanics. (For that matter, the same knowledge enables them to land craft safely on Mars within a few dozen feet of the projected target.) On your last point, I did not say that science excludes God. I said that the methodology of modern science excludes the consideration of supernatural interventions, so that, if supernatural interventions have in fact occurred, science could never know it. This is a built-in and inescapable blindness of the way science is done today. But in no way does this exclude God, because God might have chosen to work wholly through natural causes. Again, refer to the discussion of "tinkering" above. For God to guarantee a result under Darwinian evolution, he would have to tinker; but for God to guarantee a result under Dentonian evolution, he would not have to tinker. Modern science does not exclude a God who operates in the way that Denton suggests; it does exclude a tinkering God. And that exclusion cannot be justified by anything that modern science has "proved". It is rather a postulate that modern scientists work from because they find it heuristically useful. And I don't criticize that procedure, as long as modern scientists aren't under the illusion that they have "proved" that the natural causal nexus is unbreakable. They have not proved and cannot prove such a thing. Philosophers and historians of science (who have often thought more deeply and reflectively about the nature of science than working scientists) have long been aware of this. I carry no brief for miraculous interventions in the evolutionary process, but biologists cannot show that such things could not have happened. What they can do is provide plausible wholly naturalistic scenarios, full hypothetical evolutionary pathways for the origin of major organs or bodily systems. The more such pathways they can describe, the stronger the case that supernatural intervention would not be necessary, and therefore would be an uneconomical hypothesis. Unfortunately for Darwinism, the fact is that there does not exist in the scientific literature even a single full (or anywhere *near* full) hypothetical evolutionary pathway such as I have called for. Thus, we have no demonstration that Darwinian processes, so pretty on paper when they are allowed to remain at high levels of generality such as "drift", "mutation," and "selection," can actually do the job that they are required to do, which is not just to confer antibiotic resistance on a microbe, but to build a radically new body plan or system. ID people continue to remain skeptical that Darwinian processes can do that job. But skepticism about the biology of Mayr and Dobzhansky does not entail outright rejection of evolution itself. It means that it is unlikely that evolution could be driven wholly or even primarily by Darwinian processes. And on this point, ID people have been theoretically ahead of their Darwinian opponents, as the recent high-level criticisms of neo-Darwinism coming from the Altenberg group, from Shapiro and others shows. T.Timaeus_{October 13, 2011
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oops: that should read (third last paragraph) "the GA designer's problem is also solved".Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Yes, they do, Joseph. In a GA (at least in the ones I am familiar with) the mutations are completely blind, and no more likely (less likely in most cases) to result in a variant with better chances of reproductive success than no change, or worse. That's what we mean by "blind" in evolution and in that sense, GAs are blind. Nor are they "directed" except in the sense in which evolution is "directed" by the simple truism that variants that reproduce well in the current environment will leave more copies of themselves than variants that reproduce less well. The "current environment" in both GAs and in nature, consists of a set of hazards and resources. In a GA these are often chosen in such a way that when the population of virtual organisms evolves to reproduce well within that environment, the GA designer's program is also solved. But the solution is not directed in the very slightest, in either GAs or nature. What constrains evolution is the hazards and resources of the environment. If you don't understand this, Joseph, you either don't really understand GAs, or you don't really understand the theory of evolution.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Yes, they designed the molecules - the starting population. Which then evolved, by blind, undirected processes. I win :)Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth:
not only that but at least one experiment has shown that this happens in chemistry: http://www.newscientist.com/ar.....e-lab.html
BWAAAAAHAAAAHAAAA- you ARE cofused- they DESIGNED the molecules and nothing evolved- you lose.Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth:
And GAs demonstrate that blind undirected (except by the environment) processes can do the things I claim;
Except that GAs have nothing to do with blind, undirected processes.Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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I love probability calculations, Joseph, and I'm running one right now. And GAs demonstrate that blind undirected (except by the environment) processes can do the things I claim; not only that but at least one experiment has shown that this happens in chemistry: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16382-artificial-molecule-evolves-in-the-lab.html I'm not the one whining here, Joseph :) And nonsense is not established by majority opinion.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Note to evolutionists: If you do not like probability calculations then perhaps you should get to work and actually demonstrate that blind, undirected chemical processes can do the things you claim. In the absence of that it appears that all you have is child-like whining. And that is why the majority of people think your position is nonsense.Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth, Until YOU start supporting YOUR assertions do not ask me to support something that is a common fact. again we do not know how Stonehemge came to be.
Yes, we do.
According to the archaeologists who have studied it, we do not know how it was built.
We know what it is made of, and therefore where and how the stones were formed.
Umm stones can be formed in many ways. One is that MAN made them.
We know they were not local, so we can infer they were transported by some mechanism.
Thanks for supporting my claim-> transported by some mechanism? loL!
We know that people lived at the time it was most likely built, which we can infer from other artefacts and cross-reference to artefacts found on other sites, and we know a lot about their culture, and the other kinds of things they built.
The people could have just found it.
Please supply equivalent information for the ID you postulate as the designer of biological organisms.
You didn't provide anything about how Stonehenge was built. And all we do know came from INVESTIGATING Stonehenge, just as I said.
Please also note that in the case of Stonehenge, we know it does not reproduce, and in the case of biological organisms, they do.
Question-begging. Ya see there still isn't any evidence that blind, undirected chemical processes can produce reproduction.
I may be “full of something” Joseph, but it may be something you might like to try for yourself.
No thank you. What you have is detrimental to the health and well-being of the planet.Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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But you still haven't told me what you mean by "probability" in the context in which you are using it. How are you computing your "extremely small probabilities"? Not by frequentist methods, clearly, so, how? Let me take your post line by line, and see if I can pinpoint what I am seeing as the problem with your line of argument:
I mean, given probabilistic resources,
I'm assuming you mean something like the number of events estimated to have occurred in the universe since the Big Bang. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.
the statistical observation
What is a "statistical observation"? Again, I'm not trying to be difficult here, I'm really trying to understand what you are saying. In usual statistical parlance we talk about "observations" and then we produce summary statistics that describe them. For example, we might calculate the mean value, or plot them on a frequency histogram and calculate the probability distribution, so I'm assuming you mean something like the latter. But (nitpick) the observations are not "statistical". Statistical stuff is what we infer from the observations. At least in "inferential statistics" which I take it we are talking about here.
that certain events with extremely small probabilities
And this is what I want to know - what "certain events" are we talking about, and how have you calculated their probabilities?
(i.e. those below the universal plausibility bounds)
OK, the probability is small, given the number of "trials" or "opportunities". But how is this calculated?
of occurring actually never occur in practice.
But again, that's circular, or, at best, backwards. Things that never occur in practice (are never observed) clearly have "extremely small probabilities of occurring", by definition (at least by a frequentist definition). But, as you say:
life has occurred indeed
and so it does not have an extremely small probability by frequentist calculations. So what is it that does have an "extremely small probability"? Let me help you out here :) I think what you are trying to say is that: Under the null hypothesis of "no design" the probability of observing life is "extremely small" and, in fact, so small that it is unlikely to have occurred in the lifetime of the universe. And so, we must infer an alternative explanation from the undoubted fact that life exists, namely "design"? If this is indeed what you are trying to say, my question to you becomes: How are you calculating the "extremely small" probability that life could have occurred in the absence of design? Because your entire argument hangs on that calculation :)Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Most do.
Please support this assertion.
again we do not know how Stonehemge came to be.
Yes, we do. We know what it is made of, and therefore where and how the stones were formed. We know they were not local, so we can infer they were transported by some mechanism. We know that people lived at the time it was most likely built, which we can infer from other artefacts and cross-reference to artefacts found on other sites, and we know a lot about their culture, and the other kinds of things they built. We know that people are capable of building things out of stone. Please supply equivalent information for the ID you postulate as the designer of biological organisms. Please also note that in the case of Stonehenge, we know it does not reproduce, and in the case of biological organisms, they do. I may be "full of something" Joseph, but it may be something you might like to try for yourself. Harrumph.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth:
So some Darwinists infer that God does not exist.
Most do.
A great number of Darwinists make no such inference, and many are theists.
Yet there is no difference between their "god" and no god at all. Strange.
If you want ID to be taken seriously as objective science, then stop implying that Darwinism is equivalent to atheism,
DARWINISTS SAY IT IS. And BTW I can infer from what I read. People who say./ write do the implying.
And, having dropped the assumption that your ID is God, try to find evidence as to what kind of being he/she/it actually is, and how he/she/it executed the alleged designs.
You are confused. In the absence of direct observation or design input the ONLY possible way to make any scientific determination about the specific design mechanism used is by studying the design in question. Heck we still don’t know how Stonehenge was built but we can say it is an artifact.
No. We also use information about how the “design in question” came into existence.
We can only do that by studying ten design- again we do not know how Stonehemge came to be.
However, if the thing was born from a parent, then we have to hand an alternative mechanism to an Intelligent Designer, namely Darwinian processes.
Yet darwinian processes have NEVER been observed to create new, functional multi-part systems. IOW you are full of something that isn't science.
If Stonehenge was observed to spawn baby henges one morning, the inference that it was designed by humans would have to be dropped.
Yup you are full of something...Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth, ok, thanks. I am using it in the following sense. I believe I have said that already elsewhere. I mean, given probabilistic resources, the statistical observation that certain events with extremely small probabilities (i.e. those below the universal plausibility bounds) of occurring actually never occur in practice. That life has occured indeed means that according to this statistical observation, it must not have had an extremely small probability. What was it that caused it to emerge? The only empirically warranted cause is design.Eugene S_{October 13, 2011
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So some Darwinists infer that God does not exist. A great number of Darwinists make no such inference, and many are theists. Just because some Darwinists are atheists and draw support for their atheism from Darwinism doesn't mean that Darwinism is equivalent to atheism, or even leads to it. If you want ID to be taken seriously as objective science, then stop implying that Darwinism is equivalent to atheism, otherwise the corollary is that ID is equivalent to theism. And, having dropped the assumption that your ID is God, try to find evidence as to what kind of being he/she/it actually is, and how he/she/it executed the alleged designs.
You are confused. In the absence of direct observation or design input the ONLY possible way to make any scientific determination about the specific design mechanism used is by studying the design in question. Heck we still don’t know how Stonehenge was built but we can say it is an artifact.
No. We also use information about how the "design in question" came into existence. Was it born from a parent? would be a first question. If not, then, could biological organism have built it?" would be a second. Then "do we know of any biological organisms with the competence to do such a thing?" would be a third. However, if the thing was born from a parent, then we have to hand an alternative mechanism to an Intelligent Designer, namely Darwinian processes. If Stonehenge was observed to spawn baby henges one morning, the inference that it was designed by humans would have to be dropped.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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What was IC about Thorton’s example? Elizabeth:
It was reached via neutral and even slightly deleterious pathways.
Non-sequitur. I ask AGAIN: What was IC about Thorton’s example? How many components, ie proteins, does it contain?Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth:
Yes, I know ID people keep saying this ad nauseam. And yet this site is absolutely full of posts and comments that conflate “Darwinism” with “atheism” and “materialism”. So I don’t find the protestations very convincing.
Except it is the materialists/ Darwinists that say their position = atheism. Geez just read Dawkins, Dennett and Provine.
More to the point: what is wrong with ID IMO, and this has nothing to do with theological inferences, merely with scientific methodology, if you want to infer design, you also have to consider the mechanisms of both design and execution.
You are confused. In the absence of direct observation or design input the ONLY possible way to make any scientific determination about the specific design mechanism used is by studying the design in question. Heck we still don't know how Stonehenge was built but we can say it is an artifact.
We have an alternative candidate to an Intelligent Designer, which is self-replication with heritable variation in reproductive success.
Question-begging as you have no idea that can mimic a designer.
This also results in complex structures that serve to enhance both the survival of the individual and the survival of the population.
Unfortunately that has NEVER been observed- no complex structures have ever been observed to come from reproduction with heritable variants.
So to differentiate between the two candidate processes, it is necessary to provide evidence for the postulated Intelligent Designer, or at least, for mechanisms by which he/she/it executed the designs.
We already know the power of targeted searches. OTOH we don't have any evidence for the claims of your position. All we have are your bald declarations. Strange. Ya see the design inference is based on our knowledge of cause and effect relationships whereas your position is based on the battle-cry "anything but design!"
It is not sufficient merely to say: oh, but it looks designed, because evolved things look designed too.
As I just said. ID is not anti-evolution, so thanks for the equivocation. There still isn't any evidence that blind, undirected chemical processes can design anything.
As I am continually told that Darwinism is equivalent to atheism,
Me too, by DARWINISTS!!!!!! Read for yourself:
In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and indeed all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism.1
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The frequently made assertion that modern biology and the assumptions of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are fully compatible is false.2
…
Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented. Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.3

As the creationists claim, belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.4
click here for a hint:
‘Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.’ 5
Thank you for your honesty Will Provine. 1- Academe January 1987 pp.51-52 † 2-Evolutionary Progress (1988) p. 65 † 3- “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life” 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address 1 2 † 4- No Free Will (1999) p.123 5- Provine, W.B., Origins Research 16(1), p.9, 1994.
But my point is that if you probe ID, you find tinkering is the inevitable inference. I have p[robed it and you are wrong. Ya see I also understand what a targeted search is- apparently you have absolutely no clue how targeted searches work.
Joseph_{October 13, 2011
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Eugene, I wasn't trying to be difficult. I asked if you could define probability as you are using it in that sentence. The wiki article does not tell me that. But let me try to explain why I am asking: If an event does not occur in practice, then it has never been observed. Therefore, if we plot a frequency histogram of observed comparable events, it won't appear on the histogram, i.e. it has a frequency of zero. So when we compute the probability of its occurring in the future based on past frequencies (a "frequentist" approach to probability estimates) it will have probability of zero, or, if, as we should, we regard our observations as a sample rather than as a population, we can say that the probability is vanishingly small. It is thus backwards to say: "events with extremely small probability do not occur in practice". It is rather that: "events which have not occurred in practice are considered to have extremely small future probability". Now, life occurred in practice, so we cannot say that it has "extremely small probability". So you cannot be using "probability" in its frequentist sense. So, in what sense are you using the term in the context of your sentence?Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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"Could you define probability" Please see here.Eugene S_{October 13, 2011
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"Events with exteremely small probabilities do not occur in practice" Could you define "probability" as you are using it in that sentence?Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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Elizabeth, you wrote: “In fact, if the ID argument was that only a God could have invented a universe that could bring forth Chopin, I’d be almost fine with it. What I’m not fine with is the idea that the only possible God is one who had to tinker with his/her creation from time to time in order to ensure that Chopin turned up. The theory that the universe actually works without outside interference seems infinitely more marvellous to me than one that requires a maintenance engineer It is also, IMO, one that is supported by overwhelming evidence.” 1. “The ID argument” isn’t about God at all. It’s about inferring design. You may object, saying that many ID proponents identify the designer with the God of their religion. But that identification is not part of ID per se, as ID people have been saying ad nauseam for 15 years now. I’m not going to bother to find you quotations for this. If you are a responsible critic of ID, i.e., if you read what ID proponents say for themselves as opposed to rumors spread about them by their opponents, you will have seen many statements like the one I have just made.
Yes, I know ID people keep saying this ad nauseam. And yet this site is absolutely full of posts and comments that conflate "Darwinism" with "atheism" and "materialism". So I don't find the protestations very convincing. But whether ID is only about design detection or not, I am perfectly entitled to say what I think about any theological inference, and my own view is that if you are going to make a theological inference from evidence for design, it doesn't seem to me that a tinkerer ID is a very good candidate for god-hood. More to the point: what is wrong with ID IMO, and this has nothing to do with theological inferences, merely with scientific methodology, if you want to infer design, you also have to consider the mechanisms of both design and execution. We have an alternative candidate to an Intelligent Designer, which is self-replication with heritable variation in reproductive success. This also results in complex structures that serve to enhance both the survival of the individual and the survival of the population. So to differentiate between the two candidate processes, it is necessary to provide evidence for the postulated Intelligent Designer, or at least, for mechanisms by which he/she/it executed the designs. It is not sufficient merely to say: oh, but it looks designed, because evolved things look designed too. Indeed they are, but not by a foresighted process, and, as the evidence suggests that living things did not emerge from a foresighted process, then the Darwinian explanation, especially given the lack of any evidence for an actual Intelligent Designer, or for any mechanism by which the Designers designs could be implemented, like the likelier solution. Certainly the more parsimonious one.
2. To speak about “the only possible God” is to speak theologically. ID is not theology; it is branch of the information sciences, applied to biology (and sometimes also to cosmology). I have not heard leading ID proponents make statements about “the only possible God” in their theoretical writings about design detection. And even in the case of *some* ID proponents, who write about God in popular apologetic works, I haven’t heard them speaking of “the only possible God” — they merely defend their own conception of God. I don’t know where you are pulling up this phrase, but it either never or only rarely appears in literature written by ID proponents.
I didn't "pull it up". As I am continually told that Darwinism is equivalent to atheism, and that Christian Darwinists are sorely misled, it seems that there is a lot of opposition on this site to the idea that God could operate by means of setting up a universe in which intelligent life could evolve, and an insistence that s/he must tinker with the process to make sure it did. I'm not sure why. There seems to me nothing essentially atheist about Darwinism, any more than there is something essentially theistic about ID. If you agree, I have no quarrel with you, only with ID science. But in that case, let's hear less from IDist of the Divine Foot, and how science is wrong to exclude it!
3. It is not an inherent part of ID that the designer has to “tinker” with anything. Some ID proponents may personally believe that the Designer did in fact “tinker” with nature, but tinkering is not part of ID per se. You here fall into the same confusion that most ID critics fall into. You think that ID is about affirming supernatural interventions as against purely natural causes. It isn’t. It’s about affirming design as against chance. And a design can be implemented through purely natural causes, through a chain of events in which there is no divine intervention.
But my point is that if you probe ID, you find tinkering is the inevitable inference. And while I would agree with you that that inference is faulty (if you do agree), that is IMO because the design inference itself is faulty. It sets up ID as the only alternative to "Chance" which is fallacious as it has a huge "Excluded Middle", not least because "Chance" is not, in fact, an "explanation" at all.
Have you ever played the game “Mousetrap”? Everything that happens once the “boot” kicks the sign is purely natural; there is no intervention by the player. Yet the whole sequence is designed by the game manufacturer. Substitute “first life” or even “Big Bang” for the action of the boot, and you have one possible interpretation of evolution from an ID perspective. In fact, that is exactly the interpretation of evolution you will find in Michael Denton’s second book. No miracles. No interventions. And Michael Denton is definitely a design theorist, at least “id” if not “ID”.
Yes, you do have "one possible interpretation of evolution from an ID perspective". It's the very one I suggested myself in my post you quoted. However, that interpretation does not emerge from, for example, Dembski's argument, and does, interestingly, emerge from Darwin's, who famously said: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." The ID case, as I understand it, is that Darwinian evolutionary processes cannot account for the evolution of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" from "so simple a beginning". I think that case is fundamentally flawed.
4. Whether or not something seems more marvellous to someone has nothing to do with its truth. The world of revealed religion seems more marvellous to most people than does the world postulated by atheism, but I don’t think you would agree that this is an argument for revealed religion against atheism.
Indeed.
5. Your notion of “overwhelming evidence” is curious. We don’t even understand 1% of what happens in the universe, and you are confident that “the universe works without outside interference”? We don’t have even one complete hypothetical evolutionary pathway for the origin of any major organ or system, and you are confident that evolution works without outside interference? I guess people trained in philosophy are much more skeptical than those trained in biomedical fields, because I don’t have your confidence.
Science is all about finding regularities in the universe, not about accounting for every single individual phenomenon. We know why meteor craters form. We cannot trace the trajectory of a single meteor. We know Darwinian processes work to produce novel solutions to difficult problems, and we have observed adaptation (i.e. evolution by means of natural selection) in both lab and field. We know a great deal about the mechanisms of inheritance, reproduction, development of the phenotype from the genotype, the mechanisms of mutations and the mechanisms of repair processes. We have both palaeontological and genetic evidence for descent with modification and for a vast branching tree-of-life, in which the further back you grow, the more merging of later species we find, so that we can identify ancestral population of multiple later, divergent populations. We also have growing evidence for the pathways by which the earliest self-replicators may have emerged from non-self-replicating molecules. I find that overwhelming evidence to support the "regularity" that Darwin proposed.
For all I know, all events may indeed happen without any “outside interference”; but I certainly do not think the evidence for such a claim is “overwhelming.” In fact, I don’t think such a claim arises primarily out of “evidence” in the first place. The claim is primarily an operational postulate of modern scientific research, not something that has been proved by modern scientific research. There isn’t a single event, no matter how strange or miraculous-seeming, that a modern scientist wouldn’t try to find a natural cause for. If Jesus rose from the dead today, the laboratory staff would be all over him, grabbing blood and tissue samples and putting his brain through a scan and so on, trying to isolate the natural cause of his resurrection. Thus, any possible counterevidence to naturalistic assumptions is simply turned into a new question for naturalistic science to answer. Modern science is methodologically blind to supernatural events, even if they do occur. So to speak of “overwhelming evidence” is to misconstrue the nature of modern scientific practice. Modern science could never find evidence that would count against its own inescapable assumptions. T.
heh. So ID is not about God, but the problem of science is that it excludes God? Do you really not see why the claim that ID has nothing to do with God rings hollow?Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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14.2.2.4.4 LastYearOn Re your question regarding past improbable events. Please see Emile Borel, "Probabilities and Life". Events with exteremely small probabilities do not occur in practice. Sound scientific research should take that observation into account.Eugene S_{October 13, 2011
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You seem very reluctant to provide the actual citation! Not to worry, I found the wiki page by putting your quotation into google, and that got me to the original paper: http://myxo.css.msu.edu/lenski/pdf/2004,%20Plant%20Breeding%20Reviews,%20Lenski.pdf Read page 251. There is nothing to suggest that the "perhaps 10 or 20 beneficial mutations" that occurred in each population had a flat distribution. The distribution is not, in fact given in the paper, and flat-topped distributions are extremely unusual. There is absolutely no reason to think that the distribution wasn't Gaussian. But even if it was flat, why would that mean a "wall"? A wall against what? I think you are confused. What they did find is that over all 12 populations, the average fitness increased relative to the ancestral population, indicating, as the theory of evolution proposes, adaptation to the lab environment (see figures 8.1 and 8.2). And, again entirely consistent with the ToE, the rate of increase in fitness tended to decline. This may be what you are regarding as a "wall". But it's only a "wall" in the sense of a ceiling for that environment. In other words, the population optimises itself for that environment. However, recall that the Lenski experiment is on bacteria which are cloning organisms, not sexually reproducing organisms. While bacteria are extremely useful for studying population genetics, because they replicate so rapidly, there is no way (or no systematic way) for a beneficial mutation in one lineage to mix'n'match with a beneficial mutation in another lineage, nor to shed any deleterious "hitch-hikers" that it has acquired on the way. This is not the case in sexually reproducing populations, in which successful alleles can propagate independently through the population. So I suggest that before you too far with your "hunch" you read the original Lenski paper thoroughly! It does not say what you think it says, and even if it did, it would not mean what you seem to think it would mean!Elizabeth Liddle_{October 13, 2011
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That’s wonderful. Now use that to explain where buildings come from.
Well take a look at your side's favorite links. The evolutionary changes required to distinguish one vertebrate from another require none of the difficult inventions that Behe and Axe talk about -- the invention of new proteins. You have your understanding of actual complexity backwards.Petrushka_{October 12, 2011
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Petrushka,
Nearly every every living thing in the world is a microbe or virus. By number, by weight, by variety. Why the obsession with evolving into something else?
I don't know, maybe because I am something else. And I tried obsessing with the stuff that didn't evolve into something else, but it's rather boring. By the way, are those the same bacteria that adapted to new food sources by means of loss of function mutations? This has been covered a thousand times. You might get some immediate benefit, but it doesn't explain large-scale evolution. It's like taking a wrecking ball to a building and smashing an accidental hole in the side. Everyone agree that they could use the extra entrance/exit, and now the employee of the month can drive his car to his desk. It's beneficial. Except for the weakened structure and higher AC bills. That's wonderful. Now use that to explain where buildings come from.ScottAndrews_{October 12, 2011
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