Evolution Professor: I Was Not Talking About Teleology

_{Cornelius Hunter

May 27, 2014

Intelligent Design}

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Evolution is interesting because while it is based on religious beliefs, evolutionists insist it is all about science. Consider, for example, PZ Myers as he writes in the Los Angeles Times that God would not have created this world, while nonetheless claiming that he’s just following the scientific evidence. Or consider Jerry Coyne who goes into great detail about how this world would not have been intended by a creator, and in the next moment claims that these are scientific results. This sort of thinking goes back to Darwin and before, and it is foundational to evolutionary thought. It runs all through the evolution literature, but it doesn’t work. You can’t claim the high ground of scientific empiricism while relying on metaphysics to make your case. Read more

Comments

SM: In addition, I cannot see the why of this design means it is bad, is suspect. Do you know all the constraints and trade-offs as well as the purpose and philosophy? A good case in point is the sloppy thinking that dismisses the eye's design because the objector would not do it that way. And all of this is a grand side track from the basic point: functionally specific, complex organisation and linked information are strong, empirically and analytically well grounded signs of design. KFkairosfocus_{May 28, 2014
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"IF good design bumps the probability of ID up, instances of bad design necessarily bump it down." No. This is very sloppy. You are confusing two distinct issues: 1. Is there a designer? and 2. Are they a good designer? ANY and ALL evidence of design "bumps up" the case for a designer. In fact this is a simple binary possibility with no indeterminate middle state except through ignorance. It takes only ONE single case of an artifact that must have been designed to establish the existence of a designer. Everything else in the universe could (hypothetically) have other explanations, but the existence of a single watch proves the existence of a watch-maker. Whether that watch is an elegant piece of Swiss genius or an ancient sun dial is irrelevant to this point. But while we are on the subject, the human eye is a work of incredible genius. There is nothing we are able to manufacture, with all our vaunted intelligence, that comes near to its dynamic range and performance. That you consider yourself, utterly unable to even begin to construct anything that could function as a working visual system, yet still able to judge whether such a thing as the human eye is "good" design or otherwise, speaks only of your remarkable hubris. It tells us nothing about the design of the eye itself. As for the Crick quote, wd400; if you think that extra bit bolsters his case you're also dreadfully confused. Recast in plain English he says "We dont know what happened, we dont know how or where it happened, and we cannot reconstruct any plausible sequence by which it might have happened, but we KNOW it happened, so there." And no, we do not know there was so much time as he presumes. That case is also shaky and subject to valid challenge on scientific grounds, not least of which is that throwing billions of years more time into a universe undergoing constant entropy increase, doesnt help your case for the spontaneous generation of enormous negative entropy embodying life forms, any more than detecting bad design implies a lack of designer. This is merely more confused and sloppy thinking, not an argument.ScuzzaMan_{May 28, 2014
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ayearningforpublius, I know. For what it's worth I was on an aircraft carrier (the largest non-nuclear aircraft carrier), in the Indian Ocean during the Iran hostage crisis. USS Constellation (CV-64) iirc we set the record for most days at sea.
Constellation's next deployment, from September 1978 to May 1979, was originally scheduled to end in March but was extended due to her sortie into the Indian Ocean in reaction to a political crisis in Yemen. Following a relatively short eight-month turnaround cycle, she was underway again in February 1980. After participating in RIMPAC exercises, Constellation steamed westward to the Arabian Sea, where Gonzo Station had been established following the November 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Connie had reached the eastern Indian Ocean when the unsuccessful 24 April 1980 raid to free American hostages took place, and she relieved Coral Sea (CV-43) on Gonzo Station on 1 May. This at-sea period would last a record-setting 110 days
It was 113 days :)Mung_{May 27, 2014
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I Was Not Talking About Teleology We know! You were talking about dysteleology. :DMung_{May 27, 2014
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IF good design bumps the probablity of ID up, instances of bad design necessarily bump it down.
Of course if that is the case, then surely the opposite is also true. If instances of bad design bump it down, then instances of good design must bump it up. And the thing about bad design is that there must be design in the first place for there to be a bad version of it. After all, no-one says a pile of dirt is a badly designed house. So it really doesn't matter how much 'bad' design you point to because there has to be design present in order for there to even be 'bad' design.
This describes many design processes, but not the one almost every IDists envisages as being behind life.
I assume you are talking about creation by the Christian God. You seem to be saying that if God had designed life he would have made it perfect (perfect for what?) and it would somehow have remained so to this day. But really, you shouldn't care what we think (or what you think we think). You should care what the evidence says. And the evidence says that living things were designed, often brilliantly, though sometimes they have flaws. If this leads you to believe that life was not designed by the Christian God, but rather by lovecraftian Elder Things, then so be it. At least you would be consistent with the evidence found in biology.StephenA_{May 27, 2014
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Piotr writes,
almost (just because the origin of life is difficult to reconstruct, so there’s a temporary niche left for the god of the gaps)
Pity that all the experiments they've tried haven't really shown much of anything. But keep hoping!
Barb. For some reason you’ve cut Crick off mid-paragraph. He also said But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth’s surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against. You may wish to tell whatever source you copied the quote from that they are mis-representing Crick’s views…
They didn't misrepresent anything. I quoted what I wanted to quote. I know Crick is an agnostic/atheist, but even he acknowledges the statistical improbability of life coming from non-life. He has hope, though, that someday science will come up with a theory. This is called an argument from ignorance. It really proves nothing.Barb_{May 27, 2014
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AYP: Spot on, though simply a requirement that such design and get to work a complex hard and soft ware entity would be enough to teach a lot. Gkairosfocus_{May 27, 2014
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Sorry ... meant to say 'aircraft carrier' But with that one correction, let me rephrase the later part in a way that may be more easily understood: I believe those making such arguments from “bad” design suffer from a dearth of: experience, training, education, skills and even knowledge of design. And the higher the level of education the worse this becomes and the more apparent it becomes. The flow is somewhat as follows: * Welcome atheism at a young age. * Stay in school and absorb more ‘materialistic’ education. * Enter the life sciences, preferably a PhD Evolutionary Biology program. * Develop great writing skills and publish to the unwashed masses. * Gain tenure so as to be unaccountable. * And more … What these kinds of minds need is a massive immersion in some real design. * An operations & maintenance job (for several years) in a large chemical plant or oil refinery. * Enlistment in the Navy and operate and maintain a large nuclear aircraft carrier over several two or three extended cruises, ideally with a few crisis situations thrown in. * A two to four year job maintaining a large & complex distributed software system with many varied interfaces. Then they may be qualified to talk about design or the lack thereof. Until then they are better suited to writing fantasy science fiction.-ayearningforpublius_{May 27, 2014
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Enlistment in the Navy and operate and maintain a large nuclear aircraft over several two or three extended cruises
Dang, there were no nuclear aircraft when I was in the Navy. *pouts*Mung_{May 27, 2014
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Barb. For some reason you've cut Crick off mid-paragraph. He also said
But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.
You may wish to tell whatever source you copied the quote from that they are mis-representing Crick's views...wd400_{May 27, 2014
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Barb: almost (just because the origin of life is difficult to reconstruct, so there's a temporary niche left for the god of the gaps)Piotr_{May 27, 2014
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Piotr writes,
Because evolution is not omnipotent, unlike God the designer. It doesn’t work miracles.
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” – Francis Crick, 1981.
The “rewiring” of the eye would mean disconnecting the optical nerve and connecting it again round the back, on the other side of the retina. You can’t do that by gradual improvement while preserving the functionality of the organ.
was it designed or not?Barb_{May 27, 2014
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ayearningforpublius, Do you think the apparently-good design of the biological world is evidence for ID? IF good design bumps the probablity of ID up, instances of bad design necessarily bump it down. Also By far the majority of my career was spent standing on the giants that preceded me in upgrade and maintenance – rarely did I have the privilege of fresh and from the ground up design This describes many design processes, but not the one almost every IDists envisages as being behind life.wd400_{May 27, 2014
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What amazes me is that these same evolutionists who have posited that the vertebral eye has evolved some 50 times and the brain twice,
Let the curtain of mercy descend on the phrase "vertebral eye" and the question of what has evolved how many times. Blessed are the ignorant, for I am afraid they may inherit the earth.
fail to explain why this wondrous, mighty force is unable to redirect this nerve.
Because evolution is not omnipotent, unlike ~~God~~ the designer. It doesn't work miracles. The "rewiring" of the eye would mean disconnecting the optical nerve and connecting it again round the back, on the other side of the retina. You can't do that by gradual improvement while preserving the functionality of the organ.Piotr_{May 27, 2014
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I find this "creationism debunked" argument interesting. My adult working career was consumed almost exclusively in some sort of software development - from working software controlling automated warehouses ... stacker cranes, conveyer belts and inventory control - to smart torpedo development - and for most of my career ... tracking, recording and displaying up to 100 highly maneuvering jet fighter planes in mock combat so that our combat air-crews get the best possible training. By far the majority of my career was spent standing on the giants that preceded me in upgrade and maintenance - rarely did I have the privilege of fresh and from the ground up design. However, over those many years I came across a variety of designs - some very good and some very bad. But what I recall looking back on is that each and every one was designed and was a deign - even the bad ones. And strangely enough they worked in the system context in which they operated. So to judge whether or not something is designed based on its elegance or lack thereof, is just simply silly and profoundly wrong - bad designs do exist but they are still designs. I believe those making such arguments from "bad" design suffer from a dearth of: experience, training, education,skills and even knowledge of design. And the higher the level of education the worse this becomes and the more apparent it becomes. The flow is somewhat as follows: * Welcome atheism at a young age. * Stay in school and absorb more 'materialistic' education. * Enter the life sciences, preferably a PhD Evolutionary Biology program. * Develop great writing skills and publish to the unwashed masses. * Gain tenure so as to be unaccountable. * And more ... What these kinds of minds need is a massive immersion in some real design. * An operations & maintenance job (for several years) in a large chemical plant or oil refinery. * Enlistment in the Navy and operate and maintain a large nuclear aircraft over several two or three extended cruises, ideally with a few crisis situations thrown in. * A two to four year job maintaining a large & complex distributed software system with many varied interfaces. Then they may be qualified to talk about design or the lack thereof. Until then they are better suited to writing fantasy science fiction.-ayearningforpublius_{May 27, 2014
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“I was not trying to rule out design or talk about teleology at all.” Of course, it may not have been his intent, but as Cornelius effectively shows, that is in fact what he did "try" to do. CH:
It is ironic that those who are most beholden to their metaphysics are those who are most oblivious to their metaphysics.
Indeed.Mung_{May 27, 2014
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What amazes me is that these same evolutionists who have posited that the vertebral eye has evolved some 50 times and the brain twice, fail to explain why this wondrous, mighty force is unable to redirect this nerve. We aren't asking for much, after all. Could it be that such a design is not so sub-optimal after all; if it were, certainly evolution would've done its magic. It seems to me that they have hoisted themselves on their own petard.OldArmy94_{May 27, 2014
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