East of Durham: The Incredible Story of Human Evolution

_{Cornelius Hunter

December 2, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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Imagine if Galileo had built his telescope from parts that had been around for centuries, or if the Wright Brothers had built their airplane from parts that were just lying around. As silly as that sounds, this is precisely what evolutionists must conclude about how evolution works. Biology abounds with complexities which even evolutionists admit could not have evolved in a straightforward way. Instead, evolutionists must conclude that the various parts and components, that comprise biology’s complex structures, had already evolved for some other purpose. Then, as luck would have it, those parts just happened to fit together to form a fantastic, new, incredible design. And this mythical process, which evolutionists credulously refer to as preadaptation, must have occurred over and over and over throughout evolutionary history. Some guys have all the luck. Read more

Comments

Gordon: I fully accept your edict. Indeed, I think I have always tried to obey it. But please, consider that here we are in a blog, and we caanot always expect absolute terminological rigor from all. :) Well, at least on the two points you have mentioned, I would say that we have succeeded in "agreeing strongly without getting disagreeable". Which, after all, should not be difficult :) .gpuccio_{December 9, 2011
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Thank you everybody who has commented already in threads 14 and 20! Part of what I love about this site is that anybody with a genuine question can ask it and get respectful, well thought out answers. I want to open a new thread. 20 is basically a continuation of 14, however some of us are still commenting in 14 while 20 has digressed somewhat. I would just like to reiterate the specific topic I raised at the beginning so we can get a clear idea of what everybody thinks. If that's OK with you. After all this discussion, I am left with three opinions, that I am willing to change on persuasive arguments: 1) It is important to have a clear-cut, materialistically acceptable definition of a design agent. If you want to win people over from an opposing position it isn't good enough to just have a well defined effect if you don't have an equally well-defined cause. It doesn't have to be a narrow definition, it can be inclusive, it just has to have a well-defined limit that can be tested by reductio ad absurdum. The answer to the "Are beavers design agents?" question that goes "Either the beaver is, or whatever made the beaver is" is perhaps correct on a certain level, but that approach leaves you with human beings as the only hitherto observed design agents, which makes things much harder for the ID camp than they need to be. A more general definition that regards as irrelevant the distinction between the design originator and its proxy, and is therefore flexible enough and yet rigorous enough to include beavers etc, might be an easier starting point to defend and also help to clarify the debate, redirecting it towards more salient issues. 2) We do not yet have a clear-cut, materialistically acceptable definition of a design agent. We have such definitions for designed objects themselves in the form of dFSCI etc, which is a very clearly defined and appliable concept. However the debate sparked by my question "Are beavers design agents?" merely served to demonstrate that as yet we have no such clear definition of design agents, at least not one that doesn't fall back on "free will." 3) Free will is not a scientifically defendable premise. I happen to agree with it, but until you can find anything solid against the determinist hypothesis, a scientific defintion of a design agent that stipulates free will is a non-starter. Again, these are merely my current thoughts, I hope to be convinced otherwise.englishmaninistanbul_{December 8, 2011
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Thanks Eric. When I say "disrupt the operation of known physical and chemical laws" I am trying to say that an intelligent agent, with no direct external causal factor, intercedes in his environment. For example, a falling object should normally keep falling until it hits the ground, due to the operation of a known law: gravity. But if I catch that falling object, thus preventing it from hitting the ground, I have disrupted the operation of that law, and the cause can be traced back to a discrete, autonomous agent: me. I don't pretend to have digested the rest of your post yet and I have to go to work now, so I'll have to come back later.englishmaninistanbul_{December 8, 2011
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I see you insist on the same issue.
You wish to trivialize my question, but regardless of your sarcasm, it remains a rather important unanswered question. There's a large part of the ID community that asserts that humans have mastered biological design because we have observed the physical implementation of the code, and because we have the means to transfer genes from one organism to another. That's equivalent to noticing that the Voynich manuscript is made up of "words" separated by spaces. It doesn't provide us with the means of translation. And in my hypothetical case, knowing how DNA words are delineated doesn't help us translate them into function. In the absence of such a Rosetta Stone I'm going to assert that ID cannot rest on the analogy with human design, because humans can't design complex biological molecules. No one ever has. The closest we can come is to set up industrial evolution machines that crank out billions of candidates and sieve them. Chemistry is faster than computation.Petrushka_{December 8, 2011
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We can understand the functional space of proteins well enough, and have enough computing power, that we can simulate the folding and activity of the sequence, and understand the single anomaly that prevents its functionality.
Ah, it would be nice to have an actual theory of design. What if it turns out that protein folding is mathematically complex, that is to say it diverges rapidly based on small differences in parameters. At any rate, would you agree that we do not currently have any theory of folding that would make computation practical. At the moment it would seem that the fastest way to solve the problem would be to use chemistry. C2 and c3 are ruled out because we haven't designed any realistically long sequences from scratch, and there aren't enough particles in the universe to store a database of functional sequences. My follow-up question is, given a functional sequence, how do you compute the number of functional bits. How can you be sure that some parts of it are mutable without changing function? Do you have a theory for determining whether the entire sequence is critical?Petrushka_{December 8, 2011
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Gaah, link fail. My mention of the Bennett et al article should've linked to http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chain-letters-and-evoluti.Gordon Davisson_{December 8, 2011
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gpuccio:
Gordon: Again I want yo thank you for your reply, and from the heart. I deeply appreciate your contribution, and it was a pleasure for me to read it.
Thank you as well; I greatly appreciate your civility (in the face of my recalcitrance) as well. I'm glad we can disagree so strongly without getting disagreeable. Your replies raise some issues that deserve serious discussion, but unfortunately I haven't had much time to write... so I'll reply on a couple of minor, easy topics instead:
[From my summary of the status of various parts of evolutionary theory:] - Common ancestry (all — or at least many — organisms are related to each other): very strong for the “many” version, much weaker for “all”.[...] I must say that I am a little disappointed that you conflate here ID with the negation of common descent, as many do. I would have expected maybe some more explixit distinction, given the high level and pertinence of your discussion.
Actually, I agree completely with you here, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I included it in my list because it's an important part of evolutionary theory, some ID supporters dispute it, and it (together with the facts that mutation and selection actualy occur) imples that mutation and selection have participated in shaping modern organisms (whether that participation was significant or not is another question). My favorite example to show the compatibility of ID and common ancestry is an article in Scientific American from 2003: "Chain Letters and Evolutionary Histories", by Charles H. Bennett, Ming Li, and Bin Ma. They use the example of variants of a chain letter (created & at least sometimes modified via ID) to show how phylogenetic reconstruction works, and the result is that yes, the chain letters show common ancestry, and the standard techniques for analyzing their history work fine. And on a completely different topic:
Let’s keep it simple, When we speak of information in ID, we are considering what Abel would call “semiotic information”. IOWs, we are interested to information that conveys a meaning.
I'll disagree here, because I see a number of different kinds (/definitions/whatever) of information used/discussed in ID contexts. Dembski, for example, looks at CSI and active information, neither of which match what Abel's talking about (at least as far as I understand it). I also see other kinds of information thrown in, usually without realizing that they are different kinds. For example, I see people claiming the importance of information in physics supports ID; but the information that shows up in physics is Shannon-information (and its quantum equivalents), which have nothing to do with conveying meaning. Confusing different meanings of "information" is rather a pet peeve of mine, so I offer an edict (for whatever it may be worth): speak of dFSCI, or semiotic information, CSI, or Shannon-entropy, etc as much as you want, but do not use the word "information" without qualifying what sense you're using it in. Ironically, the word "information" by itself has so many possible meanings that it is effectively meaningless.Gordon Davisson_{December 8, 2011
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Joe: I bow to your experience. But you don't really have to convince me. I said from the start that the complex and intelligent behaviour of animals is really a big mystery. Still, I think there is some value in the resonings I have proposed. But I am really happy to leave the issue quite open. :)gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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Petrushka: Ah, I forgot. So that would rule out Paley’s watch and nearly every object in the universe that is not a computer program or a genome. Well, let's say that it woul rule out those things from my personal evaluation, obviously for my limited ability. Others can certainly do that work better than me.gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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Petrushka: I see you insist on the same issue. But I will answer you just the same. How much dFSCI does the non-functional version have? This is easy. dFSCI cannot be evaluated if we do not recongize a function. That does not mean that the sequence, being a close approximation of a functional sequence, has not functional information. It has potential functional information. So there are two possibilities: a) we don't know that the sequence is almost a functional sequence. In that case we cannot recongize any function, and we cannot affirm any dFSCI (dFSCI has meaning only for a specific, defined function). That does not mean that the sequence has no functional informattion. It just means that we cannot recognize any function, so for our analysis it is a negative. One of the many false negatives. b) If, instead, in some way (see later) we are aware that the sequence is a close approximation of a functional sequence, we can still define a function. We can, for example, define: "any sequence that is no more than one aminoacid distant form a functional sequence with this function, and can therefore be a close precursor of this protein." That is a valid functional definition, and we can measure dFSCI for that definition. c) There are at least three ways that we can be aware of the true functional potential of the protein. c1) We can understand the functional space of proteins well enough, and have enough computing power, that we can simulate the folding and activity of the sequence, and understand the single anomaly that prevents its functionality. c2) We can know already the functional sequence, and compare the two sequences. c3) We are those who created the non functional sequence from the functional one. In all three cases, we can define an appropriate functional condition for tha apparently non functional sequence. But I want to state again that, if we cannot define a function and measure dFSCI for the "non functional" sequence, and then we can measure dFSCI for the functional one, in no way that means that the sequence has "gained" a lot of functional information by the change of one aminoacid, as I have already argued in my post #18.gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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That is very, very interesting. But does it mean that they possess their own intelligence, or are they acting on programming/instinct? Ultimately I can't claim to know the answer. But it still strikes me as incredibly advanced programming, simply because they do one thing very well but not much of anything else. What do they do if removed from an environment where they can build dams? Do they exhibit the ability to analyze other environments or plan solutions to other problems? I'm not trying to limit them by using the term "programming." Perhaps if we understood instinct better we might find that the analogy doesn't fit at all. If that's what it is, it's far more advanced than anything that runs on a processor. They are using actual brains. They apparently are able to exercise foresight with regard to very specific activities.ScottAndrews2_{December 8, 2011
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Like I said, some in the field consider it (consciousness) an emergent property, but not all and although searle may have identified himself with that philosophical position, others who are strong AI researchers do not. To quote Wikipedia on Strong AI:
There are other aspects of the human mind besides intelligence that are relevant to the concept of strong AI which play a major role in science fiction and the ethics of artificial intelligence: consciousness: To have subjective experience and thought. self-awareness: To be aware of oneself as a separate individual, especially to be aware of one's own thoughts. sentience: The ability to "feel" perceptions or emotions subjectively. sapience: The capacity for wisdom. These traits have a moral dimension, because a machine with this form of strong AI may have legal rights, analogous to the rights of animals. Also, Bill Joy, among others, argues a machine with these traits may be a threat to human life or dignity.[13] It remains to be shown whether any of these traits are necessary for strong AI. The role of consciousness is not clear, and currently there is no agreed test for its presence. If a machine is built with a device that simulates the neural correlates of consciousness, would it automatically have self-awareness? It is also possible that some of these properties, such as sentience, naturally emerge from a fully intelligent machine, or that it becomes natural to ascribe these properties to machines once they begin to act in a way that is clearly intelligent. For example, intelligent action may be sufficient for sentience, rather than the other way around.
Take it from someone working in this field, the role of consciousness in strong AI is not clear and a 'strong AI' in the sense that it is used by researchers in this field does not necessarily require consciousness.GCUGreyArea_{December 8, 2011
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gpuccio, ScottAndrews, et al- RE beavers as designing agencies- A little background- I deal with those not-so-little flat-tailed engineers on a daily basis. They have a habit of damming up a culvert down the street, that if left unchecked could cause serious flooding. There are many sreams and creeks with beaver dams in my general area.. These animals inspect and repair their work. They know when there is an issue and they set about fixing it. They cut and fall trees with the accuracy of a top-notch logger. They know that the work is that way and they make sure the tree falls in that direction. I challenge any of you to actually get out and watch what these animals do. Granted it will take some time but it should clear up some of your misconceptions- these guys work out problems and with what they have to work with they are pretty impressive.Joe_{December 8, 2011
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gpuccio, I think you mentioned this earlier - the information content of the programming for building dams is perhaps even better to look at. As with an orbital web, I try to imagine, having a machine capable of processing sensory inputs, movement, and manipulation of objects, how much programming would it take for it to analyze a space and construct a web or a dam? The latter is interesting because it involves both the gathering of materials and cooperation between multiple beavers. Also interesting are the numerous benefits beaver dams provide to the ecosystem rather than just to themselves. This is a pattern that repeats throughout nature and appears to exhibit foresight. Bacteria decomposing plant material have no interest beyond the immediate act of consuming something. And yet they are the reason why leaves can fall from trees without piling up indefinitely. If changes to individual organisms are explained in terms of benefit to themselves, how does one explain the incomprehensibly interwoven relation between living things in an ecosystem? Individual entities attempting to survive the best they can could never possess the foresight to contribute to an ecology which would facilitate their reproduction for countless generations. Granted, there is no specific "perfect" ecological balance. But how is any initial balance achieved? If one creature consumes excessive resources until none are left it eliminates both itself and more efficient variations equally. How, then, could any living thing evolve to participate in an ecology rather than competing to exhaust all resources until everything died? (I wasn't starting with that thought - I just went off on a tangent.)ScottAndrews2_{December 8, 2011
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GCUGreyArea: I found the following on Wikipedia: Searle identified a philosophical position he calls "strong AI": The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds.[19] The definition hinges on the distinction between simulating a mind and actually having a mind. Searle writes that "according to Strong AI, the correct simulation really is a mind. According to Weak AI, the correct simulation is a model of the mind." That would seem in line with my use of the term.gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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Ok, as I also pointed out, you will find plenty of people working towards strong AI who do believe consciousness is an emergent property, but there are others who don't and the field of strong AI research encompasses both views - and causes many heated debates amongst my peers!GCUGreyArea_{December 8, 2011
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GCUGreyArea: As you have seen, I have chosen for the moment to qualify explicitly the term. I appreciate your suggestion, however. I think that I have found the term "strong AI theory" used as I used it, and contrasted to "weak AI theory" (maybe in Penrose), but I could be wrong. I will check that as soon as possible, and if really my use is incorrect, I will change it. Anyway, thank you for your input.gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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...the measurement of functional information in analogic objects, while certainly possible (as KF often correctly reminds us), is more difficult, at least for me.
So that would rule out Paley's watch and nearly every object in the universe that is not a computer program or a genome. I'm just thinking out loud here, but I spend more time than I should thinking about Douglas Axe's experiment. Suppose you have a gene comprised of, say 1000 base pairs. Suppose it is mutated by a change in one base pair, so that it is completely non-functional, even lethal. How much dFSCI does the non-functional version have? Suppose you are given the sequence for this gene in its non-functional version. Can you propose any way of determining how close it is to functionality, in the absence of any close relatives? Suppose you were given a million such strings, and all but one are completely random. Could you tell which one is just one mutation away from being functional?Petrushka_{December 8, 2011
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2. My personal claim is that strong AI theory (intended as the statement that consciousness can arise as an emergent property of some specific configuration of objective matter) is logically and empirically unsupported, and should be refuted, or at leat considered as what it is: a bizarre theory, neither interesting nor useful.
As I have pointed out previously, you should not be referring to Strong AI theory as the statement that consciousness can arise as an emergent property of some specific configuration of objective matter. Strong AI is a research goal that defines an area of scientific investigation, not all the researchers who believe it is achievable also believe that it is directly about consciousness, or that a system that would qualify as exhibiting 'strong AI' needs consciousness. Perhaps a more accurate term, if you want to use it, would be 'The emergent consciousness hypothesis'. Of course you can choose to qualify your use if the word 'Strong AI Theory' in the way you have, but you would be misrepresenting what the term Strong AI actually refers to. It does not refer to a theory of consciousness.GCUGreyArea_{December 8, 2011
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Joe: I have nothing against establishing that the dam is designed, be it by counterflow or any other argument. I cannot do that, because i have always concentrated on the evaluation of dFSCI in biological information. I am not dicussion here of "ultimate causes", bit of designers. Maybe the designer of some specific thing is an "ultimate cause" (I suppose he is, if he is God). Maybe not. If I design a post such as this, I don't usually consider myself an "ultimate cause": just the cause of the post. The problem is: the designer is the agent who inputs for the first time the necessary functional information. He is the agent who "configures switches", to use Abel's terminology. He is not the person, or object, that copies or executes the information. The designer is the original source of that information. A computer printing Hamlet is not the designer of Hamlet. And neither is the actor who plays the role (even if he can be considered the designer of the specific features of that intepretation). So, if the beaver's consciousness is not the source of the information to build the dam, as it seems likely, and it is only an "actor" palying a part, even if with personal features, then the beaver is not the designer of the dam, even if it is certainly its proximate cause. I hope I have expressed clearly my thought.gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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gpuccio, I would think we could establish that the dam exhibits counterflow and go from there. And in the end we may be able to only determine and study the proximate, rather than ultimate cause(s).Joe_{December 8, 2011
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I think a more interesting question would be, is there a purely objective way to determine whether such artifacts as beaver dams, honeycombs, nests, and such are designed. Without having any information at all about their history or any information at all about possible makers?
Gee whiz, golly- where have I heard that before?
Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?
Guess who said that (and also answered it)Joe_{December 8, 2011
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ScottAndrews2: If we can ascertain that the dam has CSI (I really don't know, see my answers to Eric and Petrushka), then we can infer that it is designed. The problem remains: is the designer the beaver, or the designer of beavers? To answer that, we need further information.gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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Petrushka: I don't know if CSI is exhibited by dams, honeycombs and so on, because, as I have said many times, the measurement of functional information in analogic objects, while certainly possible (as KF often correctly reminds us), is more difficult, at least for me. That's why I stick in the discussion to digital information. In these cases, as I have suggested, we could measure the digital information in the genome (if it is in the genome) that allows the realization of those objects. That would be simpler, and certainly specific. Unfortunately, we have at present no idea of how those "instinctive" functions are implemented in the genome (or wherever else). So, we have to be patient, and stick to our "simpler" protein genes model. If the animal is conscious or not is relevant, but what is really relevant is if the animal is the conscious agent that originates the functional information. If the functional information is in the genome, then the animal, conscious or not, is not the designer, but the dam, or whatever else, iscertainly designed.gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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Eugene: 1. You are right, the fact that we have no idea of what "instinct" really is makes the discussion difficult (see also my answer to Eric). But it is true that such instincts, whatever they are, seem to be transmitted in the individual species, and implement always the same type of functional output (with some variability that can be attributed to the environment, but also to some individual intervention of the animal). Beavers build dams, bees build hives, butterflies migrate, and so on. It seems that beavers cannot learn other tipes of machine building. In the same way, the behaviour seems to be mainly inherited, even if certainly some stimulation from environment and active learning is implied. Whether intelligence necessarily means consciousness depends on how we define the word. For me, it is better to define intelligence as the cognitive meaningful representations of a conscious being. Obviously, those representations can be "outputted" to material systems, like a computer, a book, and so on. Then we can say that there is "intelligence" in the computer or the book, but that only means that inteliigent representations hav outputted a form to a non conscious material system. So yes, in my terminology only conscious beings can be intelligent. Collective intelligence is a deeply interesting point, but I would say that at present it is a complete mystery, even more than individual instinct, especially if you consider that huge collective intelligence seems to operate, for instance, in bacteria. I would really leave that part alone for the moment, because I don't think we have any data to even propose an answer. Anyway, I am pretty sure that in all those manifestations, the role of the initial input of information from the original designer of life is overwhelming. 2. My personal claim is that strong AI theory (intended as the statement that consciousness can arise as an emergent property of some specific configuration of objective matter) is logically and empirically unsupported, and should be refuted, or at leat considered as what it is: a bizarre theory, neither interesting nor useful. When I discuss science, I am never interested in proving that something is "impossible" to refute it. It is often impossible to prove that something is impossible. That does not make that something real. In science, we refute theories becasue they don't explain what they should explain, or because they are logically inconsistent, or because they are really unsupported by facts. Luckily, more or less, all of those conditions are satisfied both for neo darwinism and for strong AI theory (intended in the sense that I have specified).gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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Technically I agree. What if we were observers who saw beavers building dams but knew nothing else? The dams are the subject of the examination, not the beavers.ScottAndrews2_{December 8, 2011
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Eric: I would answer yes to all your questions. The important point is that we have no idea of how animal instinct is implemented. That would allow a more specific discussion, also about the complexity of the output. IOWs, we could measure not so much the functional complexity of the dam (that is probably more difficult to evaluate), but the functional complexity of the genetic (oe else) information necessary to have the beaver build a dam, and that would be easier, especially if that information is in digital form (which is likely).gpuccio_{December 8, 2011
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Again, thank you all. After some thought, I would like to take another step towards crystallizing exactly what I'm getting at. (Even I'm working this out as I'm going along.) Someone with a purely materialistic worldview will tell you that free will is an illusion, that when we eventually come to an understanding of the inner workings of the brain, we will discover that all our thoughts and actions are produced by mere chemical and electrial reactions interacting like so many wheels and cogs. Even someone who believes in God, if he also believes in fate, might actually find that such a hypothesis fits in quite well with his worldview. Since nobody actually knows precisely how the brain works, and therefore can produce no empirical evidence to prove or disprove such a viewpoint, we are left with philosophy and religion. Perhaps consciousness is something that can be regarded as an undisputed fact, because we all experience it. However I fear that "free will" falls short of that ideal. And if free will is disputable, you have no scientifically watertight way of arguing that there is any fundamental difference between a human, a beaver and my theoretical computer program. As far as I can see. I suppose you could say that my previous, ham-fisted attempt at defining an "intelligent agent" was an attempt to bypass this problem.englishmaninistanbul_{December 8, 2011
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GP, 1. It would be extremely interesting to clarify what consistutes "instinct" in terms of information. I hazard a guess that designing intelligence can be attributed to animals, although 'simple' animals have more collective intelligence than individual (such as termites, bees, vs. wolves, apes). But as we go up the complexity ladder, once collective intelligence is observed, it is consistently present. E.g. humans apart from high individual intelligence also have collective intelligence, which is also powerful (e.g. brainstorms). I don't think that intelligence necessarily means consciousness but I may be wrong. 2. Indeed not. The blind watchmaker videoclip on youtube caused me trouble until I realised that the algorithm there used the available albeit piecemeal information about the broken watch which 'by magic' assembled itself in a number of generations (and even improved upon itself, if I remember rightly). So the information was essentially already there. While it can be impressive, it does not refute the claim that strong AI is impossible.Eugene S_{December 8, 2011
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Are beavers design agents?
I think a more interesting question would be, is there a purely objective way to determine whether such artifacts as beaver dams, honeycombs, nests, and such are designed. Without having any information at all about their history or any information at all about possible makers? The ability to distinguish design, lacking all information about history, seems to be an essential feature of all ID paradigms. If animal products are considered to be designed, then it is irrelevant whether the animal is conscious or not. the products are obviously purposeful, and sometimes quite complex. Many of them cannot easily be replicated by humans.Petrushka_{December 8, 2011
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