Design Detection Reported on CBS’s 60 Minutes

_{Barry Arrington
November 30, 2008

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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This evening the CBS News show 60 Minutes reported on an impressive example of design detection in the on-line poker world.

Online gambling has grown in a few short years to a 16 billion dollar a year industry, and a big part of that growth has come from internet poker. Recently several professional gamblers at one of the larger internet poker sites, Ultimatebet.com, noticed that some of their opponents were playing extremely poorly, yet winning consistently. They suspected cheating.

One of the professionals obtained tracking data on one of the suspected cheaters, and after running the numbers determined that the suspect’s winning hand percentage was 13 standard deviations away from the mean percentage. This is equivalent to winning a 1,000,000 to 1 lottery six times in a row. The professionals took their findings to the licensing authority. Denyse, you’ll get a kick out of this. Most internet poker sites are licensed by a sovereign Indian nation near Montréal, Canada, the Mohawk Kahnawake tribe. The tribe hired a professional gaming expert to investigate, and sure enough there was cheating. One of Ultimatebet’s employees had gotten an administrative password, which gave him the ability to play poker at the site while looking at the other players hands! In all, the employee stole more than $20,000,000. Read the whole story here.

How does this relate to ID? The investigation was pure scientific design detection. Here is how the investigator employeed the scientific method to reach his conclusion.

Step 1: Decide on a question one would like to explore. In this case, the investigator suspected cheating, but it was just a gut feeling. The poker players among us know that in any given hand the worst player in the world can beat the best player in the world by pure dumb luck. I have personally seen a player win a hand in which the probability that he was going to win was only 1%. But blind luck like this succeeds only in the short run. In the long run, the better player will always come out ahead. Here, the investigator saw data that seemingly contradicted that maxim. A player (let’s call him Joe) who was playing very poorly, constantly taking foolish risks, was nevertheless winning not only in the short run, but also in the long run.

Step 2: Form a hypothesis. This was easy enough. The investigator hypothesized that the Joe was cheating.

Step 3: Test the hypothesis. The investigator gathered data about Joe’s history and performed a statistical analysis to test his hypothesis. He determined that Joe was winning at a rate that was 15 standard deviations above the mean. In the story the investigator is quoted saying, “Now, this sort of stuff just doesn’t happen in the real world.” In other words, the investigator cannot rule out random chance in an absolute sense, but as a practical matter, he is certain that Joe is cheating.

Step 4: Form a conclusion. The data indicate that Joe is cheating.

Acting on his scientific findings, the investigator reported Joe to the licensing authority, which performed its own investigation and found that Joe had in fact been cheating by using the administrative password to look at the other players’ hands while he was playing.

How is design detection in this instance different from the design detection employed by ID proponents? As far as I can tell, not at all.

Comments

The crux of the disagreement is that ID supporters, while generally conceding the feasibility of small evolutionary steps, aren’t convinced that these small steps can accumulate to produce a major feature like the flagellum.
Umm "evolution" isn't beiung debated. The debate is about the mechanisms- designed to evolve or evolved via an accumulation of genetic accidents. And if you want to refute an ID icon all you have to do is demonstrate that an accumulation of genetic acidents can give rise to the flagellum
Because a) science has worked tremendously well without invoking design.
And just exactly what has it done in the name of an accumulation of accidents? Let's see it hasn't given us any insight in fighting AIDS. And it hasn't given us a better explanation of the physical realm.
b) over their history, humans have mistakenly attributed all kinds of things to design;
Maybe ignorant people. But can yuou provide a reference that educated people did so?
c) indeed, humans have been shown to have a propensity for seeing design where there is none
Reference please. Humans have also been shown to see a pattern of universal common descent where there isn't any.
d) given that we have a mechanism (natural selection) that seems capable of explaining biological complexity,
Explain? Mayb e. Demonstrate? Absolutely not. Everything we know about natural selection demonstrates it CONSERVES. And also, when NS has been tested we see it only accounts for about 18% of the variation. But when population sizes excede 1000, NS disappears. See The Strength of Natural Selection in the Wild:
Natural selection disappears as a biological force and reappears as a statistical artifact. The change is not trivial. It is one thing to say that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution; it is quite another thing to say that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of various regression correlations between quantitative characteristics. It hardly appears obvious that if natural selection is simply a matter of correlations established between quantitative traits, that Darwin’s theory has any content beyond the phenomenological, and in the most obvious sense, is no theory at all. Be that as it may, the real burden of Kingsolver’s study lies in the quantitative conclusions it reaches. Two correlations are at issue. The first is linear, and corresponds to what in population genetics is called directional selection; and the second quadratic, and corresponds either to stabilizing or disruptive selection. These are the cornerstones of the modern hill and valley model of much of mathematical population genetics. Kingsolver reported a median absolute value of 0.16 for linear selection, and a median absolute value of 0.10 for quadratic selection. Thus an increase of one standard deviation in, say, beak finch length, could be expected to change fitness by only 16 percent in the case of linear selection, and 10 percent in the case of quadratic selection. These figures are commonly understood to represent a very weak correlation. Thus if a change in the length of a beak’s finch by one standard deviation explains 16 percent of the change in the population’s fitness, 84 percent of the change is not explained by selection at all.
He goes on to say:
These results, although at odds with those reported by Endler, are not in themselves astounding. It is when sample sizes pass beyond samples of 1000 that results become far more difficult to accommodate, for under these circumstances, Kingsolver reported, both linear and quadratic selection were virtually non-existent.
IOW instead of invoking natural selection you would be better served by invoking hocus pocus.Joseph_{December 4, 2008
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pubdef, You said "If something actually happens, then it’s possible, regardless of how infinitesimal the a priori probability was." What happened was the appearance of a new species. Darwin's book was called "Origin of Species." He hypothesized a mechanism for the origin of species. That is what is under debate, the mechanism, not that new species arose. We are debating just how new species arose, not that they arose. So to say that new species arose says nothing about how they arose. Darwin had a speculation which has never been verified or even supported with anything but trivial changes in organisms. Just look at how ribczynski goes on about microbe changes which are trivial in terms of evolutionary changes but can be lethal to millions. He mistakes small changes in genomes with massive reorganizations that must take place for macro evolution. It is a common mistake or maybe it is a common tactic. There is plenty of evidence of small changes taking place, sometimes with lethal results, but no evidence that these small changes amount to anything more than just small changes. I used the term forensic evidence to mean that there is a complete lack of any trail that a genome took moving from one place to another which had novel complex functions. Such a pathway should have generated thousands of intermediaries but the best that is pointed to are a couple fossils that might have been on this intermediary path. And they cannot point to any pathway in the current world. You say you do not know much about evolutionary biology but yet you challenge those who have read a lot about it. Go and read both sides in this debate. You do not need to be an evolutionary biologists to understand the issues though a basic course in biology will help. The one book I would read from the anti Darwin perspective is Denton's Evolution, A Theory in Crisis. There are plenty of others. When you read a pro Darwinian book, read closely as to just what they have found and what they actually claim. They make a lot of claims without empirical evidence but continue on as if they are all supported.jerry_{December 4, 2008
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In the comment above, strike the word 'evolutionary':
a) specify a particular evolutionary process by which the flagellum was designed;
ribczynski_{December 4, 2008
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Timaeus wrote:
No, I didn’t grow up near Muncie; I just picked it as a typical town. But I gather it’s a nice place to live.
Timaeus, Muncie definitely has its charms, particularly in the summer. I was there in July to visit my mom and I enjoyed the endless fields of soybeans and head-high corn, the slow blink of the fireflies in the evening, and falling asleep to the sound of thunder -- things that are missing from my life in California. The people are very friendly. In the two weeks I was there, I had more pleasant conversations with total strangers than I usually have in six months here in California. On the other hand, I opened up the Muncie Star Press one morning to read that someone had burned a cross in a black family's yard. This came only a year after another cross burning in town. The headline read, "WHAT CENTURY IS THIS?" On balance, I'm still glad I moved away.
And let me add that here at UD we need constant criticism (provided that it’s polite and intellectually substantial) so that we do not grow lazy or complacent. ID has to be able to defend itself in the heat of intellectual competition.
Hear, hear. For my part, I like posting in a place where the other commenters are, shall we say, highly motivated to find flaws in my ideas and to let me know about it when they do.
Your flu example isn’t parallel. We know that disease is communicable by contact, even if we can’t specify the historical chain of contact in many cases.
Yes, but we also know that mutations arise, that they can generate new information, that they can cause phenotypic changes that can be selected (or pruned), and that they can be inherited. In the epidemiological case, we presume that the virus is passed from person to person until a signficant number of Scrantonians are infected, even though we can't trace the exact chain of contact. In the evolutionary case, we presume that a number of mutations have occurred and been selected for, leading stepwise through a number of intermediates to the flagellum we see today -- even if we can't specify the exact sequence. The crux of the disagreement is that ID supporters, while generally conceding the feasibility of small evolutionary steps, aren't convinced that these small steps can accumulate to produce a major feature like the flagellum. I have a question about this skepticism that I'd like to pose to you and other ID supporters, but I'll wait and do it in a separate comment later.
I don’t see how positing a designer is a huge complication. Beavers design dams. Bees design hives. Computer programmers design computer programs.
Yes, but we already know that beavers, bees and programmers exist. They aren't being appealed to just to explain the existence of dams, hives and programs.
If we had never seen a beaver or a bee or a computer programmer, would it be a “huge complication” to infer a designer of all these things?
Yes, if we had no other evidence of their existence and if we already knew of mechanisms that seemed capable of producing dams, hives or programs.
Would it be less of a “complication” to infer that dams and beehives and computer programs arose by chance combinations of trees or waxy substances or keystrokes?
That would be an enormous complication. Of course, the way NDE works is in no way analogous to forming "chance combinations of trees or waxy substances or keystrokes".
Why, then, should we go out of our way to avoid a design inference in the case of the flagellum, the avian lung, or the cardiovascular system?
Because a) science has worked tremendously well without invoking design; b) over their history, humans have mistakenly attributed all kinds of things to design; c) indeed, humans have been shown to have a propensity for seeing design where there is none; d) given that we have a mechanism (natural selection) that seems capable of explaining biological complexity, why invoke a superfluous designer? What is so intellectually horrifying about the possibility that there might be design in living nature?
Nothing. I grew up believing it and I didn't, and don't, find it horrifying at all. I just don't think the evidence warrants it.
And what is unscientific about it? It was believed by virtually all the great scientists from the time of Aristotle up to the time of Darwin.
True, and I suspect that I too would have believed it had I lived before Darwin. Hence Dawkins's statement about Darwin making it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled" atheist.
To say that “known rates of evolutionary change seem adequate to explain the flagellum” is to make a circular argument, since all such rates are calculated on the assumptions that (1) evolution occurred, and (2) that it occurred through Darwinian mechanisms.
Not really. In the studies I've seen, the assumption of common descent is sufficient. You don't dispute common descent, do you?
The only truly scientific way of explaining the origin of the flagellum in Darwinian terms would be to: (a) specify a particular evolutionary pathway for the evolving bacterium, demonstrating the survival advantages of the phenotypical modifications at each stage; (b) identify the changes in the bacterial genome that would be required to alter the phenotype at each stage; (c) calculate the probability of each change occurring, based on known causes of those specific mutations and their rates of occurrence [where the rates of occurrence are calculated independently, by field or lab observation, not back-reasoned to fit into the time allotted by the fossil record, on the assumption that Darwinian evolution is true];
If all of that is true, then shouldn't you also say that the only truly scientific way of explaining the origin of the flagellum in terms of ID would be to: (a) specify a particular evolutionary process by which the flagellum was designed; (b) specify alternate implementations of the flagellum and other motility devices, and explain why they were not chosen by the designer; (c) identify the constraints that the designer was operating under and the design parameters that he was attempting to optimize; and (d) calculate the probability that these goals and constraints would lead to genetic and phenotypic changes that just happened to appear compatible with a hypothesis of common descent and Darwinian selection? Also, your analysis mistakenly treats the flagellum as a singular goal that evolution is working toward. In reality, evolution has no foresight and doesn't "care" where it's heading, as long as each step along the way is adaptive (or neutral). The end result need not be a flagellum.
and (d) demonstrate that each previous mutation is probabilistically likely to be “held in place” (i.e., not wiped away by another random mutation) long enough to still be there when all the later mutations it must co-ordinate with (which might be millions of years apart) occur.
First of all, if the intermediate state is beneficial, then natural selection will tend to hold the mutation in place unless the new one is "better". Second, as I mentioned above, the flagellum is not a "goal" that the process is working toward. If a mutation is "wiped away", it just means that evolution will go in a different direction.ribczynski_{December 4, 2008
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-----pubdef: "All I’m saying is that rejecting a scientific theory solely on the basis of its improbability is a serious mistake." The problem is that Darwinism is so sloppily defined and so mathematically impoverished, it is difficult to ascertain how improbable it really is. ID scientists, those who understand mathematics and can supply the analysis that Darwinists would prefer not to consider, have made it clear that RV+NS cannot do what it is supposed to do in five billion years—or fifty billion years---or five hundred billion years. Having been apprised of these facts, Darwinists simply forget about the age of the earth, assume a time frame without limits, and continue on as sleek as ever. No theory like that deserves anyone’s intellectual assent.StephenB_{December 3, 2008
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#62:
However, possibility does carry some finite probability.
I'm sorry, I have no idea what you mean by this, unless it's that possibility requires some minimum level of probability, in which case, you're just wrong. If something actually happens, then it's possible, regardless of how infinitesimal the a priori probability was. Let me try to sharpen my focus here. I'm basically ignorant of the science of evolutionary biology, so I am not going to discuss its substance. It is certainly the case, though, that evolutionary biologists do not agree with your assertion regarding a "forensic trail" that "none exists." "To base a scientific theory on an extremely remote possibility out of faith is not science" -- who can argue with that? All I'm saying is that rejecting a scientific theory solely on the basis of its improbability is a serious mistake.pubdef_{December 3, 2008
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pubdef, I am sure Timaeus is quite capable of answering your objection. However, possibility does carry some finite probability. If this possibility is very small and it must be combined with several equally small possibilities then the probability just got much, much smaller. In cases that involve life the process has never been observed and if it indeed did happen, would have left a forensic trail supporting the possibility. None exists. To base a scientific theory on a an extremely remote possibility out of faith is not science. It is at best wishful speculation.jerry_{December 3, 2008
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# 43
It’s not enough to show that Darwinian mechanisms could eventually, given gazillions of years and gazillions of planets, have produced complex integrated systems. It also has to be shown that Darwinian mechanisms could have done so within the limited time slots available in the actual history of the earth. Without quantified probabilities, this cannot be shown.
I think that you're making the common error of conflating probability (the likelihood that something did or will happen) and possibility (whether it could have happened). Probability can be very, very small; but as long as it is not literally zero, it is not the same as "impossible." If an explanation is not impossible, and there is any evidence at all that it is valid, its small probability is no reason to reject it out of hand.pubdef_{December 3, 2008
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"we have never found any examples where such constructs have arisen naturally" Ribczynski claims this is a conclusion. No it is an observation, not a conclusion. 1. There are organisms with functional complex specificity. This is an observation. Do you object to this characterization? 2. No examples exist which show how these organism obtained this functional complex specificity naturally. Another observation. Do you object to this characterization? So how is this assuming a conclusion? We assume that something is responsible for the origin of functional complex specificity. Intelligence could explain it, natural processes so far have come up short. So what is a probable inference. That intelligence is a possible source for the functional complex specificity. That is a conclusion. You are flaying, trying to impugn the wording and reasoning of the comments directed at you as opposed to presenting arguments based on facts and logic. This is a familiar process as nearly all arguments against ID on evolution go down the same path. It will be interesting to see how you proceed. Good luck!jerry_{December 3, 2008
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-----Rib: "If Paul wants to use Dembski’s notion of specified complexity successfully, he needs to understand how it is defined. The fact that he used it in a tautological way suggests that he did not understand its true meaning." I am glad that you understand that SC is an empirically anchored exercise in abductive logic. This is all to the good and will save much confusion later on. You should be commended for not falling into the typical Darwinist error of believing that a design inference is a tautology or that it is based on a philosophical/theological presupposition.StephenB_{December 3, 2008
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Also, the perceived tautology of my statement was due to a lack of YOUR willingness to understand specified complexity, and not realizing that there are terms that could be synonymous. Normally thorough comprehension of a concept allows the use of synonymous nomenclature given one has the vocabulary to apply it. My intent was not to confuse, but I just assumed that readers would understand the term "complex specificity" to be synonymous with specified complexity, you can verify this by looking up their definitions.PaulN_{December 3, 2008
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Rib, Now you're just twisting my words to make it seem like I'm contradicting myself. I previously said: "'Nature' alone does not produce complex specificity to such a degree in any other instance from what we’ve empirically observed." This was to avoid the weak exceptions of nature-produced specified complexity such as reports of the face of Jesus being toasted onto a slice of bread or a cloud in the sky that resembles a kangaroo. People have claimed to observe these instances of specified complexity as a result of natural chance happenings, which is why I phrased that sentence in such a way. Yes, nature can account for these happenings, but it cannot account however, for the complex functionality of a boeing 737 or the source code for Microsoft Windows, both of which we know are only products of intelligence. Could my choice of words been better? Of course, but my main point still stands.PaulN_{December 3, 2008
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Ribczynski: No, I didn’t grow up near Muncie; I just picked it as a typical town. But I gather it’s a nice place to live. Allow me to praise you for your courage in posting criticisms of ID in a venue where you are outnumbered. I have just been in the same situation over on the ASA list, where I was answering about 30 people at once. And let me add that here at UD we need constant criticism (provided that it’s polite and intellectually substantial) so that we do not grow lazy or complacent. ID has to be able to defend itself in the heat of intellectual competition. Your flu example isn’t parallel. We know that disease is communicable by contact, even if we can’t specify the historical chain of contact in many cases. But whether Darwinian processes can produce a flagellum is not known. I don’t see how positing a designer is a huge complication. Beavers design dams. Bees design hives. Computer programmers design computer programs. If we had never seen a beaver or a bee or a computer programmer, would it be a “huge complication” to infer a designer of all these things? Would it be less of a “complication” to infer that dams and beehives and computer programs arose by chance combinations of trees or waxy substances or keystrokes? I think not. I think that such an inference (of chance plus lucky combinations) would be made only if we were determined to prove (due to some a priori prejudice) that these things were not designed. Why, then, should we go out of our way to avoid a design inference in the case of the flagellum, the avian lung, or the cardiovascular system? What is so intellectually horrifying about the possibility that there might be design in living nature? And what is unscientific about it? It was believed by virtually all the great scientists from the time of Aristotle up to the time of Darwin. To say that “known rates of evolutionary change seem adequate to explain the flagellum” is to make a circular argument, since all such rates are calculated on the assumptions that (1) evolution occurred, and (2) that it occurred through Darwinian mechanisms. Many ID people will grant assumption (1), but all ID people challenge assumption (2). The only truly scientific way of explaining the origin of the flagellum in Darwinian terms would be to: (a) specify a particular evolutionary pathway for the evolving bacterium, demonstrating the survival advantages of the phenotypical modifications at each stage; (b) identify the changes in the bacterial genome that would be required to alter the phenotype at each stage; (c) calculate the probability of each change occurring, based on known causes of those specific mutations and their rates of occurrence [where the rates of occurrence are calculated independently, by field or lab observation, not back-reasoned to fit into the time allotted by the fossil record, on the assumption that Darwinian evolution is true]; and (d) demonstrate that each previous mutation is probabilistically likely to be “held in place” (i.e., not wiped away by another random mutation) long enough to still be there when all the later mutations it must co-ordinate with (which might be millions of years apart) occur. On your last point, I would invoke notions of design in physics or astronomy if and when they became the best explanation for a phenomenon. But in many cases, the phenomena in question don’t seem to point to any particular design, the properties of matter and the laws of nature being sufficient alone. For example, given a certain mass of hydrogen, the physicists tell us, a star must form; gravity and the properties of hydrogen guarantee that, without anyone having to decide on any special arrangement of complex interacting parts. But there is as yet no comparable argument to establish that, given the properties of the elements, and enough time, life can form from non-life, or that, given the properties of simple one-celled creatures, and enough time, multi-celled creatures, higher animals, and man can eventually evolve. It looks as if, in addition to chemical properties and time, a certain amount of information must have been somehow imparted to matter. How that information was imposed is unknown, but that doesn’t alter the fact that we have no better explanation for specified complexity. The inference to the best explanation appears to yield the verdict of “design by agents and means unknown”. Of course, the best explanation can always change, as more information becomes available. Design could become the second-best explanation, if Darwinists could come up with detailed accounts such as the one suggested for the flagellum above. But so far, all the Darwinists have come up with are promissory notes stating that Darwinian mechanisms will one day be able to provide such detailed accounts. That’s why I’m not much impressed with Darwinism as a scientific hypothesis. T.Timaeus_{December 3, 2008
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Paul, Regarding "specified complexity" vs. "complex specificity": if you want to confuse people and/or look sloppy, be my guest.
I don’t remember specified complexity ever being confined to physical causes.
That's because it isn't. You've got it backwards.
And seeing as your definition of natural reality is confined to physical causes, of course it wouldn’t produce specified complexity, because intelligence is the only agent we have observed that does.
That's a strange statement from someone who just wrote:
"Nature” alone does not produce complex specificity to such a degree in any other instance from what we’ve empirically observed.
Maybe you should slow down, think it over, and try again.ribczynski_{December 3, 2008
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jerry wrote:
We are now witnessing it with quibbling over whether it is specified complexity or complex specificity or claiming that statements are tautological without any attempt to understand and say what might be attempted to communicate.
It's not a quibble. If Paul wants to use Dembski's notion of specified complexity successfully, he needs to understand how it is defined. The fact that he used it in a tautological way suggests that he did not understand its true meaning.
Because we have never found any examples where such constructs have arisen naturally, we make the inference that a probable cause is that they arose by intelligent activity. That is the essence of the whole argument.[emphasis mine]
If so, that is unfortunate, because your argument assumes its conclusion (see the bolded phrase above).ribczynski_{December 3, 2008
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Rib, 1. Ok, so when you can tell me how specified complexity and complex specificity have different meanings, or how they differ in design detection, I'll give you a cookie for that argument. 2. I don't remember specified complexity ever being confined to physical causes. You should recheck your definition. And seeing as your definition of natural reality is confined to physical causes, of course it wouldn't produce specified complexity, because intelligence is the only agent we have observed that does.PaulN_{December 3, 2008
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The interesting thing in the evolution debate is always the psychological aspects. We are reaching the point where ribczynski is starting to disassemble. When the debate is over Occam's razor or multi verses and the debate is often subjective, critics of ID can fling and flay with the best of them because of the subjective nature of the discussion. But when it gets down to evolution or OOL the debate gets more specific and this is where ALL Darwinists lose it. There is never any attempt to try to understand the discussion. All there is are attempts to snip at imprecise statements or to point out some logical inconsistencies. We are now witnessing it with quibbling over whether it is specified complexity or complex specificity or claiming that statements are tautological without any attempt to understand and say what might be attempted to communicate. The term specified complexity is one that has caused lots of anguish here as to just what does it mean which is why the term functional specified complexity or functional specified information has been introduced to describe the biological structures that exist. I would suggest you try to understand the relationship between certain things found in nature and those found as a result of intelligent activity and examine whether the examples in nature have ever arisen as a result of natural causes or not. Because we have never found any examples where such constructs have arisen naturally, we make the inference that a probable cause is that they arose by intelligent activity. That is the essence of the whole argument. No evidence ever of nature having the capability but tons of evidence that intelligence has the capability. So we infer intelligence as a possible cause and the more we learn, the most likely.jerry_{December 3, 2008
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PaulN wrote:
"Nature” alone does not produce complex specificity to such a degree in any other instance from what we’ve empirically observed.
Paul, 1. Dembski's term is "specified complexity", not "complex specificity". 2. Your statement is tautological. Specified complexity is defined as not being due to natural, physical causes. So I would agree: Nature doesn't produce what it doesn't produce.ribczynski_{December 3, 2008
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The argument for design is that not only must the item be complex, but it must also be specific. For example, sand-ripple patterns on a beach display complexity, but they do not specify anything. The heads on Mt. Rushmore display complexity AND they specify 4 famous figures from American history. Cellular machines are complex AND they specify common function to a myriad of familiar man-made machines such as an outboard motor. (Bacterial flagellum). "Nature" alone does not produce complex specificity to such a degree in any other instance from what we've empirically observed.PaulN_{December 3, 2008
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However, the microscopic biological nano-machinery in organic cells do.PaulN_{December 3, 2008
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Because not everything new and mysterious infers design, rib.PaulN_{December 3, 2008
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Timaeus, I actually grew up near Muncie, Indiana. Did you, by any chance? You're right, we can't assign a number for the probability of the evolution of the flagellum. We also can't always tell you how probable it is that Mary introduced the new flu strain to Scranton after picking it up while visiting her mother Bernice in Kokomo. Does that mean that epidemiology is not a science? Science by default assumes simpler explanations until more complicated ones are shown to be necessary. Positing a designer is a huge complication, and known rates of evolutionary change seem adequate to explain the flagellum, so why invoke a designer? We don't invoke designers to explain new, mysterious findings in physics, chemistry or astronomy. Why should we do so in biology?ribczynski_{December 3, 2008
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Ribczynski wrote: "... we simply can’t quantify the probability of the no-design hypotheses in interesting, real-life cases like the flagellum." This translates into: "... we simply can't quantify the probability of neo-Darwinian evolution in interesting, real-life cases like the flagellum." Thus, the neo-Darwinian evolution of a flagellum might well be less probable than being struck by lightning 13 times in your life, all on Friday 13th, at 1300 hours, on the same street corner in Muncie, Indiana. Yet, we should accept the neo-Darwinian mechanism as the true cause of the flagellum, because ... ?Timaeus_{December 3, 2008
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I see. So your point is that Barry's example is not a case of "pure" design detection, where the only given is the object or outcome itself and the only question is whether there was design at all, as when we ask whether the flagellum was designed. True enough, though your second example (where we test to see whether there's a player at all, versus just a random call generator) seems pretty close to a "pure" case, and it succeeds using the same method of rejecting the no-design hypotheses. I still think the fatal weakness is a practical one: we simply can't quantify the probability of the no-design hypotheses in interesting, real-life cases like the flagellum.ribczynski_{December 3, 2008
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ribczynski So I do think that these are legitimate cases of design detection. This is no credit to the ID movement, however, as analyses of this kind were being done long before the advent of so-called “ID theory.” I agree. Both examples demonstrate evidence for a hypothesis that happens to include an element of design. I have no problem with that. But as I understand it the ID thesis is that it is somehow possible to deduce design in general without reference to a specific hypothesis by eliminating all cases which are necessity or chance. This clearly cannot be the case in Barry's example as the hypothesis that was eliminated also contained an element of design.Mark Frank_{December 2, 2008
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Mr. Ribczynski: I looked at your response to Atom, but it doesn't get directly at my real concern, so forget about the dilemma for a moment, and let me restate. I'm inferring that you think that neo-Darwinism is a bona fide scientific theory. But you've admitted, or rather insisted, that the probabilities that chance events could produce various complex structures (the eye, the flagellum, etc.) have not been reliably calculated by the Darwinists. Yet without such numbers, the Darwinists have no way of knowing whether or not the fossil record allows enough time for the alleged processes to have taken place via the proposed mechanisms. This means that they are asking the world to take the efficacy of Darwinian mechanisms on faith. Why should the world do so? It's not enough to show that Darwinian mechanisms could eventually, given gazillions of years and gazillions of planets, have produced complex integrated systems. It also has to be shown that Darwinian mechanisms could have done so within the limited time slots available in the actual history of the earth. Without quantified probabilities, this cannot be shown. On your account, then, Darwinism cannot be either verified or falsified, and hardly qualifies as a scientific hypothesis in any strict sense; it is at best a speculative narrative loosely conforming to the sequence of fossils, nothing more. This being the case, a decisive proof of the invalidity of Dembski's Design Filter would be rather a Pyrrhic victory for the Darwinists. T.Timaeus_{December 2, 2008
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Sorry, Timaeus. We "Darwinists" are outnumbered here, and so I'm not always able to respond quickly, if at all, to every comment directed my way. Since you asked, I'll address yours now. You wrote:
Mr. Ribczynski is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Which alternative will he choose: to say that the design inference in biology is as scientific as the inference of unguided causes made by neo-Darwinism, or to say that neo-Darwinism, unable to adequately quantify itself, is no more scientific than design theory?
You have presented Mr. Ribczynski with a false dilemma. See my response to Atom here.ribczynski_{December 2, 2008
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Ribczynski: You didn't reply to my argument at #10 above, despite the fact that you've replied to others since then. Did you miss it, or shall I take it that silence implies assent? T.Timaeus_{December 2, 2008
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What branch of science would be appropriate for studying the nature and identity of the designer? Universal Science :-)tribune7_{December 2, 2008
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pubdef: Even if your attention is elsewhere: ID is appropriately limited because, out of a careful evaluation of the available data, it has spontaneously chosen to address, for the moment, only the problem of design detection, because only for that available data are sufficient. most people in ID, including me, are convinced that there are not at present sufficient data and knowledge to address the problem of the identity and modality of operation of the designer in a scientifically sound way. To your question: "Who is working on identifying the designer, or, indeed, learning anything at all about how design actually works?" I would answer: everybody. All physicists, biologists, information theorists, and others who are accumulating data (and intelligent reflections) about reality. Be sure that, as soon as data are sufficient to build a valid scientific theory about those issues, we will be there. We are, indeed, very interested in them. At present, we are indeed trying to build tentative models about them (if you are a reader of UD, you should be aware of that), but unfortunately none of those models is clearly superior to the others in explaining existing data, and therefore they remain highly hypothetical, although not so hypothetical as darwinian theory itself.gpuccio_{December 2, 2008
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