Darwinian Debating Device #17: “The Black Knight Taunt”

_{Barry Arrington

November 3, 2014

Intelligent Design}

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The essence of the “Black Knight Taunt” is to pretend overwhelming victory after suffering a crushing defeat. Here we have a classic example from a commenter named “keiths.”

In my No Bomb After 10 Years post I noted that after 10 years of debating origins I had never encountered a “science bomb” that would disabuse me of my ID position.

Amusingly, keiths insisted that he had posted just such a bomb over at The Skeptical Zone that proved that Darwinism is “trillions” of times better at explaining the data than ID. His argument failed at many levels. Yet, even more amusingly, he kept on insisting he had debunked ID after his so-called bomb had been defused by numerous commenters. See, e.g., here and here.

Here is the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

In my example, WJM lopped off the Black Knight’s arms and KF took out his legs. Yet days later he was still posting shrill comments announcing his triumph.

In the clip above Arthur gives the only response to “The Black Knight Taunt.” We pick up the scene after Arthur has cut off the knight’s arms and legs:

Black Knight: Right, I’ll do you for that!
King Arthur: You’ll what?
Black Knight: Come here!
King Arthur: What are you gonna do, bleed on me?
Black Knight: I’m invincible!
King Arthur: …You’re a loony.

Arthur rides away.

Black Knight: Oh, oh, I see! Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to you! I’ll bite your legs off!

Comments

Has any one else noticed that neither Rich nor Alan even attempt to make coherent arguments? At least keith s tried.Joe_{November 3, 2014
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Rich: There's any number of UD threads where discussion on the merits can continue, but right now I have no time to deal with further let's dump trifecta fallacy rhetorical garbage on our neighbour's lawn trollishness slander tactics as several objectors have been doing over the past few days. Onlookers can see for themselves (a) KS' tactic failed on multiple levels, (b) to overturn the design inference on FSCO/I as reliable sign what is needed is reliable counter example not schoolyard taunt namecalling, (c) after years of repeated failure to provide such [including the evolving clocks on youtube put up by someone who didn't understand what it takes to mesh and align gears . . . ) all sorts of evasions, obfuscations and smear tactics backed up by ideological impositions and question-begging have become the Darwinist stock in trade, with countless examples. A sad, telling picture. Black Knight taunt is fully justified. KF PS: I link from the OP here, here and also here; a substantial discussion can easily enough be had on the merits of fact and logic if there is any genuine interest. Prediction: none such will happen. And BTW, AF, brazenly declaring that quantitative metrics don't exist [with working, indeed in peer reviewed literature for biology cases, and/or suggesting hyperskeptically that the common way to measure functionally specific files (just look at file lists on a PC) is suddenly deeply suspect when an ID thinker uses it, or that the math has not been done even after several corrections to the contrary, is itself revealing of this problem.kairosfocus_{November 3, 2014
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Alan, I and others posted a peer-reviewed paper that does those calculations wrt biology. Grow up. And keith s- your argument has been refuted. Your denial means nothing to us but it is entertaining.Joe_{November 3, 2014
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Box,
The number of deficiencies in Keith’s argument is not yet surpassed by the number of times that he declares it to be a bomb.
If it's riddled with flaws, then it should be easy to refute. Go to it, Box. Dazzle me with your refutation.keith s_{November 3, 2014
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drc466 wrote here
Meanwhile, empirical evidence of chance/law producing CSI/novelty/macro-evolution/whatever you want to call it still remains absent. To which the evolutionist’s only response is to deny there is a difference between complex/simple, specified/unspecified, up/down, add/subtract, new/old, live/dead, sandcastles/piles of sand.
Let's see those CSI calculations. Please show your work. All IDers, please. This is open to anyone!Alan Fox_{November 3, 2014
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drc466 @ 5, that was very succinctly put! Hope you don't mind if I post it on facebook Darwinian Debating Tactic #17: “The Black Knight Taunt” - November 3, 2014 Excerpt: "Keith s (via Theobald) uses a subjective, statistical analyses of incomplete and contrary “trees of life” to show that they meet the statistical definition of an objective nested heirarchy (ONH), with the assumption that an ONH = UCD (Universal Common Descent). Keith s fails to acknowledge the subjectiveness or weakness of the trees so analyzed, the weakness of using purely statistical analyses, and most fatally fails to prove the assumption that ONH = UCD, or that ID has equal probability of 1= ONH. He then loudly proclaims victory, screaming epithets at the retreating backs of those who’ve chopped his legs off." https://uncommondescent.com/ddd/darwinian-debating-tactic-18-the-black-knight-taunt/#comment-525045bornagain77_{November 3, 2014
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drc466, on the other thread:
keith s has decided that a subjective, statistical analysis of incomplete, contrary cladograms “proves” evolution. While ignoring the flaws of his argument, and all the statistical analyses of orders of orders of magnitude higher improbabilities that “disprove” evolution.
drc466, here:
How about this: Keith s (via Theobald) uses a subjective, statistical analyses of incomplete and contrary “trees of life” to show that they meet the statistical definition of an objective nested heirarchy, with the assumption that an ONH = UCD. Keith s fails to acknowledge the subjectiveness or weakness of the trees so analyzed, the weakness of using purely statistical analyses, and most fatally fails to prove the assumption that ONH = UCD, or that ID has equal probability of != ONH.
drc466, 1. The cladograms are not "incomplete and contrary". Theobald's Figure 1 is rightly captioned "The Consensus Phylogenetic Tree of All Life". 2. They are also not "subjective". Theobald makes the difference clear here. 3. I do not assume that "ONH = UCD". My argument works against creationists, common designists, and guided evolutionists alike. Try again.keith s_{November 3, 2014
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"the weakness of using purely statistical analyses" - Unlike FIASCO / CSI has actually passed testing / back-testing: "In order to establish their validity in reliably determining phylogenies, phylogenetic methods have been empirically tested in cases where the true phylogeny is known with certainty, since the true phylogeny was directly observed. Bacteriophage T7 was propagated and split sequentially in the presence of a mutagen, where each lineage was tracked. Out of 135,135 possible phylogenetic trees, the true tree was correctly determined by phylogenetic methods in a blind analysis. Five different phylogenetic methods were used independently, and each one chose the correct tree (Hillis et al.1992 ). In another study, 24 strains of mice were used in which the genealogical relationships were known. Cladistic analysis reproduced almost perfectly the known phylogeny of the 24 strains (Atchely and Fitch 1991). Bush et al. used phylogenetic analysis to retrospectively predict the correct evolutionary tree of human Influenza A virus 83% of the time for the flu seasons spanning 1983 to 1994. In 1998, researchers used 111 modern HIV-1 (AIDS virus) sequences in a phylogenetic analysis to predict the nucleotide sequence of the viral ancestor of which they were all descendants. The predicted ancestor sequence closely matched, with high statistical probability, an actual ancestral HIV sequence found in an HIV-1 seropositive African plasma sample collected and archived in the Belgian Congo in 1959 (Zhu et al.1998 ). In the past decade, phylogenetic analyses have played a significant role in successful convictions in several criminal court cases (Albert et al. 1994; Arnold et al. 1995; Birch et al. 2000; Blanchard et al. 1998; Goujon et al. 2000; Holmes et al. 1993; Machuca et al. 2001; Ou et al. 1992; Veenstra et al. 1995; Vogel 1997; Yirrell et al. 1997), and phylogenetic reconstructions have now been admitted as expert legal testimony in the United States (97-KK- 2220 State of Louisiana v. Richard J. Schmidt [PDF]). The legal test in the U. S. for admissibility of expert testimony is the Daubert guidelines (U. S. Supreme Court Case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 587-89, 113 S. Ct. 2786, 2794, 125 L. Ed. 2d 469, 1993). The Daubert guidelines state that a trial court should consider five factors in determining "whether the testimony's underlying reasoning or methodology is scientifically valid": (1) whether the theory or technique in question can be and has been tested; (2) whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication; (3) its known or potential error rate; (4) the existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation; and (5) whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within the relevant scientific community (quoted nearly verbatim). Phylogenetic analysis has officially met these legal requirements." Hmmmmmm.Rich_{November 3, 2014
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The number of deficiencies in Keith's argument is not yet surpassed by the number of times that he declares it to be a bomb.Box_{November 3, 2014
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Rich, Ummm...you do realize that nothing you said contradicts my summation, right? Meanwhile, keith s didn't even try.drc466_{November 3, 2014
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Hmmmm.. Black Knights? Black Knights? Ahh yes... http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/09/slaying-meyers.htmlRich_{November 3, 2014
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Also reposting this: While we wait for Barry’s refutation, here are the closing paragraphs of my OP:
This is a big problem for IDers. They concede that unguided evolution can bring about microevolutionary changes, but they claim that it cannot be responsible for macroevolutionary changes. Yet they give no plausible reasons why microevolutionary changes, accumulating over a long period of time, should fail to produce macroevolutionary changes. All they can assert is that somehow there is a barrier that prevents microevolution from accumulating and turning into macroevolution. Having invented a barrier, they must invent a Designer to surmount it. And having invented a Designer, they must arbitrarily constrain his behavior (as explained above) to match the data. Three wild, unsupported assumptions: 1) that a barrier exists; 2) that a Designer exists; and 3) that the Designer always acts in ways that mimic evolution. (We often hear that evolution is a designer mimic, so it’s amusing to ponder a Designer who is an evolution mimic.) Unguided evolution requires no such wild assumptions in order to explain the data. Since it doesn’t require these arbitrary assumptions, it is superior to ID as an explanation. Here’s an analogy that may help. Imagine you live during the time of Newton. You hear that he’s got this crazy idea that gravity, the force that makes things fall on earth, is also responsible for the orbits of the moon around the earth and of the earth and the other planets around the sun. You scoff, because you’re convinced that there is an invisible, undetected barrier around the earth, outside of which gravity cannot operate. Because of this barrier, you are convinced of the need for angels to explain why the moon and the planets follow the paths they do. If they weren’t pushed by angels, they would go in straight lines. And because the moon and planets follow the paths they do, which are the same paths predicted by Newton on the basis of gravity, you assume that the angels always choose those paths, even though there are trillions of other paths available to them. Instead of extrapolating from earthly gravity to cosmic gravity, you assume there is a mysterious barrier. Because of the barrier, you invent angels. And once you invent angels, you have to restrict their behavior so that planetary paths match what would have been produced by gravity. Your angels end up being gravity mimics. Laughable, isn’t it? Yet the ‘logic’ of ID is exactly the same. Instead of extrapolating from microevolution to macroevolution, IDers assume that there is a mysterious barrier that prevents unguided macroevolution from happening. Then they invent a Designer to leap across the barrier. Then they restrict the Designer’s behavior to match the evidence, which just happens to be what we would expect to see if unguided macroevolution were operating. The Designer ends up being an unguided evolution mimic. The problem is stark. ID is trillions of times worse than unguided evolution at explaining the evidence, and the only way to achieve parity is to tack wild and unsupported assumptions onto it. If you are still an IDer after reading, understanding, and digesting all of this, then it is safe to say that you are an IDer despite the evidence, not because of it. Your position is a matter of faith and is therefore a religious stance, not a scientific one.
keith s_{November 3, 2014
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Reposting this from the original ‘bomb’ thread: With 1600 comments in this thread, now is a good time to pause and take stock. Barry started things off with this:
To tell the truth, when I first started debating origins, I assumed not only that there was a very good chance that I was on the wrong side of the debate, but also that one or more of those highly educated, credentialed, intelligent professionals would come along and drop a science bomb on me that would destroy my naïve belief in ID… And I think it is safe to assume also that at least one of those 40,000 individuals is the highly educated, credentialed, intelligent professional who, if they could, would drop a science bomb on me that would destroy my naïve belief in ID. Ten years later, 40,000 commenters later. No bomb. I’m beginning to think that maybe there isn’t a bomb. Maybe my confidence in ID is not naïve after all.
Oops. Within hours of posting that, Barry was already faced with a bomb he could not defuse. A bomb showing that ID is trillions of times worse at explaining the evidence compared to unguided evolution. UDers have been trying, and failing, to rebut my argument ever since. Barry took a weak stab at it:
Your article consists of sneers and theological arguments about how a designer “woodna dun it that way.”
That’s wrong, of course. My argument makes no assumptions about how the designer “wooda dun it”. That’s precisely the problem for IDers — they have to explain why, out of the trillions of possibilities, a designer would do things in a way that makes it look exactly as if unguided evolution were responsible. It’s bizarre. After refuting Barry, I challenged him:
I’ve placed the bomb in front of you, Barry. Can you defuse it? Will you run for safety and let someone else deal with it? Or will you allow it to explode, and then stagger out of the smoke, dazed and singed like Wile E. Coyote, while insisting that there was no explosion at all? The spotlight’s on you, Barry.
That was on October 24th. I haven’t heard from him since. Meanwhile, others have tried, with similar results. Those attempts can be seen in this thread and also here. KF’s response was to post yet another of his “FYI-FTR” threads, with comments turned off, of course, to prevent open discussion. At around the same time, he appears to have turned off comments on the thread that WJM started to discuss my argument. The argument clearly has IDers spooked, and no wonder. Once you’ve seen that ID is losing the game by a score of trillions to one, there is no rational reason to continue believing in ID. IDers desperately need a refutation. Can anyone defuse the bomb?keith s_{November 3, 2014
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Let me repeat my challenge from the other thread:
Barry, If my bomb is such a dud, you should be able to defuse it easily, in your own words. How about it?
After you've made your attempt, I'll respond. Then we can look to see who is bleeding and who isn't.keith s_{November 3, 2014
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and then, later: "Bootstrapping is the most popular statistical method for assessing the reliability of the branches in a phylogenetic tree (Felsenstein 1985). Bootstrapping is a statistical technique for empirically estimating the variability of a parameter (Efron 1979; Efron and Gong 1983). In a bootstrap analysis, a fictional dataset is created by randomly sampling data from the real dataset until a new dataset is created of the same size. This process is done repeatedly (hundreds or thousands of times), and the parameter of interest is estimated from each fictional dataset. The variability of these bootstrapped estimations is itself an estimate of the variability of the parameter of interest. In phylogenetics, a new phylogeny is inferred from each bootstrapped dataset (Felsenstein 1985). These bootstrapped phylogenies will likely have different topologies. From these different bootstrapped trees, the variability in the inferred tree can be estimated. The parts of the bootstrapped trees that are in common are ascribed a high confidence, while the parts that vary extensively are assigned a low confidence. Trees constructed from random data do not result in high confidence trees or branches when bootstrapped. Thus, bootstrapping provides one way to test whether a phylogenetic tree is genuine."Rich_{November 3, 2014
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from 29+ evidences: "This method, now called cladistics, does not assume genealogical relatedness a priori, since it can be used to classify anything in principle, even things like books, cars, or chairs that are obviously not genealogically related in a biological sense (Kitching et al. 1998, Ch. 1, p. 26; ). Using firm evolutionary arguments, however, Hennig justified this method as the most appropriate classification technique for estimating evolutionary relationships generated by lineal descent. In fact, Hennig's cladistic method is nothing more than a formalization of the methods systematic biologists had been using intuitively ever since Linnaeus penned Systema Naturae. Biologists today construct their phylogenetic trees based on Hennig's method, and because of cladistics these phylogenetic trees are reproducible and independently testable (Brooks 1991, Ch. 2; Kitching et al. 1998)."Rich_{November 3, 2014
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Rich, How about this: Keith s (via Theobald) uses a subjective, statistical analyses of incomplete and contrary "trees of life" to show that they meet the statistical definition of an objective nested heirarchy, with the assumption that an ONH = UCD. Keith s fails to acknowledge the subjectiveness or weakness of the trees so analyzed, the weakness of using purely statistical analyses, and most fatally fails to prove the assumption that ONH = UCD, or that ID has equal probability of != ONH. He then loudly proclaims victory, screaming epithets at the retreating backs of those who've chopped his legs off. Good enough?drc466_{November 3, 2014
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William: Could you provide just a sentence or two as to the main points?Rich_{November 3, 2014
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Well, to be fair, narrative always takes precedence over facts when it comes to Darwinists. We can see here how denying the obvious comes in very handy when it comes to keeping the narrative intact. As far as I'm concerned, the Black Knight in the video represents Darwinism. Each wound is a major prediction by Darwinism that has proven to be false. And yet, the Black Knight keeps the narrative of his own triumph alive - at least in his own mind.William J Murray_{November 3, 2014
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It was going *so* well for the ID side they closed comments in both threads in a fit of mercy...Rich_{November 3, 2014
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Barry, congratulations on keeping the comments open. You know I really am warming to you. :) Have you read and fully understood the arguments? If so could you provide just a sentence or two as to the main points?Rich_{November 3, 2014
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