Fire Rainbow

_{William Dembski
August 8, 2006

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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This is a fire rainbow — one of the rarest naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena.

The picture was captured this week on the Idaho/Washington border. The event lasted about one hour.

Clouds have to be cirrus, at least four miles in the air, with just the right amount of ice crystals; and the sun has to hit the clouds at 58 degrees.

It’s the gratuitousness of such beaty that leads me to rebel against materialism.

Fire Rainbow

Comments

I loved that paper, WmAd! Especially the examples of the people with hardly any brains and plenty of intelligence. The only part I disagree with is where you say that the intellectual feats of people like Sidis(?) hint at the difference in kind between primates and humans. I find the moral/spiritual sphere to be a far more compelling realm in which a difference in KIND as opposed to degree is readily observable. This refers not just to the slippery quality of altruism, which can always be twisted into a selfish motivation by reductionist trickery, but other things like art, and most importantly, the perception of the creator and the life beyond this life.tinabrewer_{August 8, 2006
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improvius asked: Interesting, do you have links to any of those papers?
In addition to the Roughgarden citation above, how about Charle's Darwin's own evaluation of his speculation, he said sexual selextion is "an awful stretcher". :=) That said, I must admit, Allen Orr, continues to gain my respect by the way he absolutely pummelled Daniel Dennett as I looked into material to support Bill's opening thesis about rainbows. It has some relevance to the extravagances of nature Dennett's Strange Idea:
Evolutionary biologists thrive on creating adaptive stories where Design is least obvious. After all, where is the glory in explaining why some new species of mite is brown ("it hides in dirt")? The great challenge is to explain why some feature -- whose Design is far from apparent -- is actually adaptive and optimally Designed.... Given our difficulty discerning Design, and this penchant for concocting adaptive stories just where Design is least conspicuous, how could evolutionary biologists not have jitters about adaptationism? It would be an extraordinarily unreflective group indeed that did not ask questions like: How seriously should we take these endless adaptive explanations of features whose alleged Design may be illusory? Isn't there a difference between those cases where we recognize Design before we understand its cause and those cases where we try to make Design manifest by concocting a story? And isn't it worrisome that we can make up adaptive stories (and pen wildly speculative papers) faster than we can make up experimental tests?...When does adaptationism stop being a useful research strategy and start being a silly exercise in cleverness? .... Dennett is fond of speaking of selection as leading organisms through "Design Space": Selection "lifts" organisms along "ramps" of good Design. Although this imagery is often useful, it invites two subtle misconceptions about adaptation. The first is that natural selection cares about Design. In reality, selection "sees" only brute birth, death, and reproduction, and knows nothing of Design. Selection -- sheer, cold demographics -- is just as happy to lay waste to the kind of Design we associate with engineering as to build it. Consider the eyes of cave organisms who live in total darkness. If eyes are expensive to make, selection can wreck their exquisite engineering just as surely as it built it. An optic nerve with little or no eye is most assuredly not the sort of design one expects on an engineer's blueprint, but we find it in Gammarus minus. Whether or not this kind of evolution is common, it betrays the fundamental error in thinking of selection as trading in the currency of Design.
Orr Unwittingly admits, Man's well engineered capacity for perceiving the beauty and mathematical intracacies of the unvierse make little sense in terms of Natural Selection. To be fair, that was not his intent to say that, but sometimes the truth is so blatant one can't help but allow it to slip out of one's mouth.... Salvador PS thanks to Charlie and Ofro for their data pointsscordova_{August 8, 2006
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Brilliant discussion on sexual selection. However, I have always wondered what the Darwinian explanation is if for why humans find rainbows, sunsets, landscapes, stars, and the rest of natures so beautiful. Is it sexual selection? I think not.Jehu_{August 8, 2006
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Regarding sexual selection in a different context, see page 19 and following of http://www.designinference.com/documents/2004.06.Human_Origins.pdf.William Dembski_{August 8, 2006
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Oh what a primitive notion... that it all can be reduced to genes and the struggle for reproductive advantage. It smacks of Steamboat era ignorance, really. If only Darwin had known that information preceeded it all. If only he could have peered inside the cell which he thought was merely a blob of protoplasm.Scott_{August 8, 2006
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http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/2003/february19/aaassocialselection219.html Contact Stanford Report News Service /Press Releases Stanford Report, February 19, 2002 Gender scientists explore a revolution in evolution
A great deal of empirical evidence exists that refutes Darwinian sexual selection. It's difficult to tell just how many exceptions there are to the rule because observations may have been skewed by Darwinian biases, says Roughgarden. "The exceptions are so numerous they cry out for explanation," says Roughgarden, who has outlined a stunning array of behaviors that don't fit the mold in her upcoming book, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (University of California Press, 2003). "The whole context for Darwin's theory of sexual selection is dissolving," says Roughgarden. "So, Darwin is incorrect in the particulars, but more importantly, [his theory of sexual selection] is inadequate even as an approach."
Charlie_{August 8, 2006
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I searched for Darwin's letter to Asa Gray, and what I found sounds a bit different from your interpretation. See www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin/intros/vol8.html: "The major stumbling block for most anatomists and physiologists was the difficulty of conceiving of the selection of chance variations being able to produce such a marvellously perfected structure as the eye. As Darwin admitted to Lyell, Gray, and others, imagining how selection could account for highly adapted organs had sometimes given even him a `cold shudder'. Yet it was more trifling structures, ones for which it was difficult to see clear selective advantages, that caused him greater discomfort. As he readily admitted to Gray: `The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!' (letter to Asa Gray, 3 April [1860])." It made him "sick" because he was trying to understand the evolutionary advantage of these beautiful structures.ofro_{August 8, 2006
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"I know it may seem that way, and that is unfortunate. I hear sexual selection is in trouble as a scientific theoryÃ¢â‚¬Â¦" Interesting, do you have links to any of those papers?improvius_{August 8, 2006
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Improvius wrote: "If you read a little farther down on that PBS page, it seems to answer those questions by explaining sexual selection." I know it may seem that way, and that is unfortunate. I hear sexual selection is in trouble as a scientific theory..... Salvador PS As I searched on the issue to respond to you, I found this, although somewhat off-topic, too good to pass up:
Evolution is henceforth the magic word by which we shall solve all the riddles that surround us. -- Ernst Haeckel1 HT Allen Orr on Daniel Dennett here
scordova_{August 8, 2006
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From the very next paragraph of the article Salvador quotes above: "In the end, Darwin came up with an entirely new theory to explain the extraordinary lengths many animals will go to in order to woo a potential mate. He called it sexual selection. Simply put, sexual selection is the evolutionary process that favors adaptations that increase an animal's chances of mating. Darwin identified two kinds. In the first, males compete fiercely with each other for access to females. This kind favors the evolution of secondary sexual characters, such as large size and armaments like horns, that enhance a male's ability to fight. In the second, males compete to win over a female. This variety favors the evolution of vivid color patterns, intricate courtship displays, and specialized structures such as plumes and frills, which heighten a male's attractiveness to the opposite sex." Odd that Salvador would point out the problem without mentioning Darwin's solution to the problem.zapatero_{August 8, 2006
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Don't you know, Sal!? The Peacock tail is the result of the nebulous "sexual selection". ;)Scott_{August 8, 2006
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If you read a little farther down on that PBS page, it seems to answer those questions by explaining sexual selection.improvius_{August 8, 2006
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The tail of the peacock also signifies beauty. Such things of beauty have little survival value. Darwin supposedly said such things in nature made him sick (I wonder why!) Darwin said that about the Peacock because he had no theory to justify such an expensive and mechanically hindering feature. This problem led him to his theory of sexual selection dynamics and how it might lead to more subtle paths of contigent development.jonabbey_{August 8, 2006
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From the (gasp) PBS Series on evolution:
The feathers that pestered Darwin Creature Courtship, By Peter Tyson "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" --Charles Darwin, in a letter to botanist Asa Gray, April 3, 1860 For most people, the glorious train of the peacock is a joy to behold. But for Darwin in the years immediately following the 1859 publication of Origin of Species, in which he laid out his theory of evolution by natural selection, the peacock's resplendent train amounted to an eyesore. For the father of evolution, baroque ornamentations like that train and other seeming extravagances -- such as the gaudy tailfin colors of the male guppy, the saber rattling of the rutting bull elk, and the elaborate bowers of the bowerbird -- seemed to fly in the face of natural selection. How could such ostentation, so costly to the creature in question in terms of expended time and energy, benefit the animal and its offspring in the survival of the fittest?
scordova_{August 8, 2006
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I think Bill made a good point to ponder. The scientific evidence can cause one to regard materialism as nonsense; where-as an observation of the improbable & unwarrantedness of such beauty can lead one to rebel against materialism. It's one way to describe perspectives that perhaps I could have benefited from when I made this thread on the ARN forum: http://www.arn.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=30320997&an=0&page=1#Post30320997 At the time of that thread, I was in a struggle with understanding intuition better. Now, I feel I have a better - though not necessarily complete - grasp on intuition and it's limits. It has always been an interesting topic matter to me. Why any sense of beauty & awe in the first place?JGuy_{August 8, 2006
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The tail of the peacock also signifies beauty. Such things of beauty have little survival value. Darwin supposedly said such things in nature made him sick (I wonder why!). However, the scientists of his day viewed nature as constructed to make men wonder after the Mind which designed it all. Even with all the pain and misery in this world, it seems a bigger act of faith to accept that it's all some materialist accident.scordova_{August 8, 2006
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gorgeous! Examples of such gratuitous beauty are everywhere in the natural world. What has always been striking to me, ever since I was a child, is the way you can be driving along some country road, surrounded by the beauty of trees, flowers, birds, silence, and then you come to a town...where human beings have added objects to nature through agency: in 9 out of 10 cases, the human objects are noticeably ugly, shoddy and without the innate sense of beauty which is one of our nobler potentials. sad. Thanks for the lovely image.tinabrewer_{August 8, 2006
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Comrade, I think Bill was giving you his opinion of a certain scientific evidence against materialism (ie. unlikeliness & unwarrantedness of such beauty). Others may agree or not - Who cares? Why should scientific data control original thought or thinking? Or how could thought come from the scientific data alone in the first place? As I've used in examples in other forums, Einstein was an intuitive theorist. His intuition lead him; and the theories that followed changed science, gave novel predictions and explained material phenomena & associated scientific evidences. Besides, how can evidence be seen as evidence without as idea first of what it is that your seeing - ie. What leads you to think a certain way about the evidence? I'm not saying Bill was or was not intuitive about this. I don't want to speak for Bill --- Bill would you elaborate on any roles of intuition in the above? And , in your opinion, was I close to explaining this the correct way? Thanks in advance.JGuy_{August 8, 2006
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[In response to a comment by Comrade since deleted:] It is a question of rebellion. Scientific evidence leads me simply to regard materialism as nonsense.William Dembski_{August 8, 2006
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