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Sorry Tin, Nature Does Not Do CSI.

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tintinnid attempts to undermine the design inference by noting:

Just because something can be made by man does not mean that all occurrences in nature must have an intelligent origin.

Agreed. You have been one of our most vocal critics in recent weeks. But that you would write this statement indicates you have a seriously flawed understanding of the ID project. I recommend that before you spend further hours on this website criticizing ID, that perhaps you might try to understand it first. Then, when you go to criticize it, you will be actually criticizing ID, and not some distorted caricature of ID you’ve made up.

You see, Tin, it does no good to criticize a distorted caricature of ID. Say you were in a gunfight and opposing you down the street were a life-sized cardboard image of the bad guy and the actual bad guy. Which one would you shoot at? I hope you see my point. Go study ID Tin until you actually understand it. Then, if after your studies you still want to criticize it, by all means do so. But if you continue to shoot at the cardboard image, don’t be surprised when you look down and find your arguments are lying on the ground bleeding. For example:

Humans can make diamonds, but not all diamonds are of intelligent origin.

This statement is certainly true as far as it goes but it misses the point. Here are pictures of two diamonds. One is “rough,” i.e., it was shaped by natural forces. The other one was is “finished,” i.e., it was shaped by intelligent forces. Can you tell which is which?

d78824bad5e0e1fbbf1ba1048fed847e

finished

Just because DNA carries information does not mean that it must be of intelligent origin.

You are certainly correct that natural forces (chance/law) can create tiny strings of information. For example, the famous Shakespeare monkey simulator after simulating monkeys typing 10^35 pages, got this string (the longest it ever got) from Act I, Scene I of Timon of Athens:

Poet. Good day Sir

For comparison purposes, here are the first few lines from that scence.

Poet. Good day, sir.
Painter. I am glad you’re well.
Poet. I have not seen you long: how goes the world?
Painter. It wears, sir, as it grows.
Poet. Ay, that’s well known:
But what particular rarity? what strange,
Which manifold record not matches? See,
Magic of bounty! all these spirits thy power
Hath conjured to attend. I know the merchant.
Painter. I know them both; th’ other’s a jeweller.

Take a good look at this number: 10^35. It is unimaginably huge. Yet in all of those pages a blind search was able to come up with only a snippet of Shakespeare.

Now, here’s my question for you. Is the DNA code more like the snippet within the reach of a blind search or is it more like the complete works of Shakespeare?

Comments
Still refusing to answer the second (more important) question?
Barry, what about false premise don't you understand? Here, this should help:
Premise: a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion
Maybe the word is too difficult for you. Maybe this term is easier for you to understand:
Loaded Question: a question with a false or questionable presupposition, and it is "loaded" with that presumption.
You are trying to get me to say that the words of shakespeare are more like DNA than the snippet is. But since you are making the false inference that evolution functions in a way analogous to your literary monkey, the question itself is irrelevant. It would be like me asking you if you were still beating your wife, and only accepting yes or no as an answer. [and just to be clear, I am not trying to suggest that Barry beats his wife. I don't even know if he is married].tintinnid
October 23, 2014
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H'mm: This, from Thorton at 6, seems to be a capital example of DDD #8:
The ID community has declared the molecular configuration of DNA to contain the hopelessly vague metric “CSI”. The ID community then makes the unsupported assertion that only intelligence can produce “CSI” so therefore DNA is designed. You couldn’t make a more circular argument if you tried.
Complex, specified information that in this case functions in DNA based on expressing a code and algorithms for protein assembly is "hopelessly vague"? Let's recall what Crick wrote to his son Michael, March 19, 1953 on what DNA was:
"Now we believe that the DNA is a code. That is, the order of bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page of print is different from another)"
How do we make sense of this comment post as opposed to another, or gibberish produced by at random typing? Or the like? The specific, well-matched functionally specific arrangement of letters in a string data structure, which is just how DNA strings work to produce proteins with the aid of Ribosomes etc. DDD #8 sums up the particular form of selective hyperskepticism at work here: refusing to acknowledge the reality of FSCO/I and its reliably known, characteristic cause . . . functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information. As in the common sort of thing we encounter in computer files, in text in books, in computer programs and more, and extending to organisation [which can be reduced to strings with aid of AutoCAD etc] we have information-rich functionally specific organisation too. But, but but we can tangle the discussion Dembski made into rhetorical pretzels and make it look like hopeless confusion. Yes, that is a well known tactic in less than charitable or less than honest debate. To make sense of Dembski's metric for practical purposes simply carry the log reduction exercise and as DDD #8 links, you can easily see that it is about an info beyond a threshold metric, which three years ago was reduced to: Chi_500 = I*S - 500, bits beyond the solar system threshold. I being an info metric, S a dummy variable defaulting 0 --> chance is adequate explanation, and on being set based on objective warrant for functional specificity says you have 500 bits or more to go before Chi_500 is positive. If positive, you are beyond a needle in haystack threshold on steroids for our solar system, use 1,000 bits for the observed cosmos. The point being, 500 - 1,000+ bits of FSCO/I cannot reasonably be accounted for by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity, only design is routinely observed as relevant cause. On trillions of cases in point. For just one instance consider the Internet. Likewise, go through a library. Look at cars, buildings and many other things manifesting FSCO/I where we directly know the cause. Try a beaver dam. In every case, the cause is design, and the required needle in haystack search in a config space of 3.27*10^150 possibilities, where the limited number of possible observations of 10^57 sol system atoms each observing trays of 500 coins 10^14 times every s, show us why this is a needle in haystack challenge. The ratio of sampling possibilities to the config space is as one straw to a cubical haystack as thick as our galaxy at its central bulge. A blind search of that relative scope for such a stack superposed on our galactic neighbourhood will with all but certainty come up, straw. Where the first issue we re looking at is the FSCO/I in the living cell, with a genome starting out at initial level as 100 - 1,000 kbits. Not 500 - 1,000. Doubling in scope for every additional bit. As for novel body plans, we are looking at just on tgenome 10 - 100+ mn bits, with ev ery good reason to understand that the requirement for many specifically arranged components to achieve function confines us to isolated islands of function in the space of possible configs, so the real challenge is not hill climbing within an island, but finding the shore of an island. If you doubt me, simply reflect on isolation of thousands of protein fold domains. And to substitute hill climbing for island finding is a strawman caricature of the issue. In short the body plan origin macro evolutionary challenge is by no means so simple as has often been extrapolated from finch beaks and whatnot. But, but but we can tangle all of that up in pretzels of confusion too. So what, one can do the same with a lot of pretty well established mathematics or science or phil etc.Start with trying to explain what sqrt -1 is and what it does in complex frequency domain analysis for one. Time for fresh thinking. KFkairosfocus
October 23, 2014
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Still refusing to answer the second (more important) question? I will tell you why you are refusing to answer that question. You do not have the courage to contemplate where a truthful answer to that question will lead. Coward.Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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OK Barry, if you insist. The cut diamond is designed but the raw diamond is not. But can you distinguish between an uncut natural diamond and an uncut manufactured (designed) diamond? Since your second question is based on a flawed premise, which I explained in great detail with no attempt by you to rebut, there is no point in answering it. However, if you would like to explain why your analogy is relevant, I am all ears.tintinnid
October 23, 2014
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@Barry 9 I'm reasonably familiar with the operation of DNA, but I read that link when I have a moment. But I was asking exactly what you meant by "The DNA code" in you question to tintinid. CSI threw me though though, my first thought was that your OP was going to be about forensics! I didn't pick up that you were discussing abiogenesis, but if so, why bring up DNA at all. I don't think I have ever seen it suggested that the first self-replicators had DNA or even RNA. That would require Intelligent Design.Tamara Knight
October 23, 2014
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Tin @ 21. Fail. Here we have DDD #2: The Turnabout Tactic. I was actually waiting for you to pull this stunt. You don’t disappoint. Now, here’s another question. How is my refusal to answer your question after you’ve demonstrated you are unwilling to engage in a reasoned discourse different from your cowardly refusal to answer my questions in the first place? More advice: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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Bar: Tin, you are a coward.
Since you refused to answer my question, which is relevant, I guess that we are a couple of cowards.tintinnid
October 23, 2014
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Tin, when you continue to comment on a thread after your cowardice has been exposed, it only makes things worse for you. Look, one of two things is true: 1. You are unable to answer the questions. 2. You are unwilling to answer the questions. You don’t come out looking good either way.Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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Mahuna: So Darwinism is pre-eminently about Probabilities of specific known sequences of genes mutating to get from Species X to Species Y.
This is the same error that Bar made. Using probabilities the way that you and Barry are is appropriate if species Y (or a Shakespeare sonnet) is the goal. But there are no predetermined goals, no destiny. To illustrate. What is the probability that you as a unique individual exists? You obviously exist so the answer is one. But, if we step back in time one generation, what is the probability that an individual identical to you will exist On October 22, 2014? To calculate this you would have to take into account the probability that your parents will meet and hook up, and the probability that the one specific ovum out of 400,000 from your mother would be fertilized by the one specific sperm out of hundreds of million from your father. The probability, therefore, would be extremely small. Step back in time a few more generations and the probability that you will exist will be vanishingly small, effectively zero. Therefore, based on the same logic that Barry has used (Shakespeare writing monkeys), you don't exist. I regret having to inform you of this. This conclusion is obviously absurd. As is Barry's analogy to monkeys and Shakespeare.tintinnid
October 23, 2014
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tintinnid:
The analogy you used (Shakespeare) is not how evolution works.
Mysterious ways- your evolution sounds like God.Joe
October 23, 2014
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The more we learn about DNA the more it is described as a language, software, instructions, or even a literary novel. How would that apply to Darwinian evolution? Well, to paraphrase David Berlinski’s story - On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote : Imagine that one novel “the Quixote” is the first and only novel in all creation (which is analogous to the first cell). Blind men copy this novel by hand over and over - during the transcription process, errors are made which just by chance create entirely new novels - such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In time, the printing press is developed and mass copies are created of course with more errors. The errors beget new novels that are inadvertently being created now in new languages. Ultimately, all known works of literature from Ulysses to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich are accidently created from copies of the one book - the Quixote. There you have it – the origin of man in a nutshell. Of course, everyone knows that a novel is just an entertaining work of fiction ; )Heartlander
October 23, 2014
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mahuna,
But the proponents of ID have been waiting for 20 years for even the simplest proof for an alternate theory, and no such proof has ever been produced
Interesting that you should put it that way. See my "No Bomb After 10 Years" post that I just now put up.Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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Tin: "I didn’t think that I needed to answer your question" You've dodged the questions and now you've attempted to justify your dodge. Fail. Tin, you are a coward. Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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"Bar, you are committing a common error with regard to understanding of evolution. You are looking at the end product and trying to back calculate the probability of this occurring." Um, why is this a "common error"? Darwinism says that all existing life came about by "descent with modification", that the modifications are random mutations, and that only the "best" of the random mutations survive to reproduce through the mechanism of "survival of the fittest". So Darwinism is pre-eminently about Probabilities of specific known sequences of genes mutating to get from Species X to Species Y. And so the simplest way to determine the string of changes needed to get from X to Y is to start with Y and work backwards to X. A number of these changes are very hard, such as having a Y that can drink saltwater and a proposed X that cannot. What ID theorists remark upon is that in every case where an attempt has been made to map out a sequence of intermediate random changes between, say, a bear and a whale, the number of changes turns out to be huge (I think Berlinski says he gave up when he hit 50,000) and the time estimated for those changes to occur randomly and produce viable offspring (since the common medical term for a gene mutation is "birth defect") is many orders of magnitude greater than the known time between any proposed common ancestor and the oldest known fossils for the new creature. In fact, several specialized animals (e.g., bats) appear in the fossil record so fully "evolved" that they are identical to their modern descendants. The RANDOM appearance of not merely a new species but a new Order with no known ancestors is so highly improbable that it can be considered "mathematically impossible". So, Darwinism does not appear to offer a reasonable theory of how life diversified and also cannot off a reasonable theory for The Origin of Life. Darwin himself of course accepted the Biblical explanation that Jehovah created the "started set" of lifeforms. And the theory then proposes that Darwinian Evolution then used methods Darwin himself could not explain to produce the diversity we see today. ID arose as a competing theory in the late 20th century as biochemists came to understand the very lowest and simplest properties of cells and concluded that Darwinism could never explain what we now know to be true about biological systems. The Theory of Intelligent Design can of course be refuted by demonstrating (even on paper) that Darwinism or some new theory can better and more simply explain the origin and diversity of life on Earth. But the proponents of ID have been waiting for 20 years for even the simplest proof for an alternate theory, and no such proof has ever been producedmahuna
October 23, 2014
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Bar: Tin, you did not answer either of my questions.
I didn't think that I needed to answer your question because it is based on a faulty premise. The analogy you used (Shakespeare) is not how evolution works. Now, please answer my question (yes, I know it was not a specific question, but please humour me). How many pages would it take before any English phrase of similar length would be produced? Even though this analogy is poor, it is much closer to how evolution works than yours is.tintinnid
October 23, 2014
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Welcome to UD Thorton.
The ID community has declared the molecular configuration of DNA to contain the hopelessly vague metric “CSI”.
Buzzzz (that was the sound of the buzzer going off when a Darwinian makes a claim that is not only spectacularly wrong, but easily demonstrated to be so). The ID community did not come up with “CSI.” Here is materialist Leslie Orgel from 1973:
living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity.
Here’s a hint Thorton. Try to do just a smidgen of basic research before you make a claim like that. You will find that you don’t make yourself look like a fool quite as often.
The ID community then makes the unsupported assertion that only intelligence can produce “CSI” so therefore DNA is designed.
And just as soon as you show us an example – FOR GOD’S SAKE THORTON WE WILL GO AWAY IF YOU WILL GIVE US EVEN ONE EXAMPLE – of natural forces creating Orgel’s CSI, we will back off on that claim. [question begging not allowed] BTW, do you care to take a stab at either of the questions that Tin dodged from the OP?
You couldn’t make a more circular argument if you tried.
You don’t seem to understand what a “circular argument” is.
Here’s a counterexample: I claim DNA contains “grabbldyfrantz”. I assert that only natural processes can produce “grabbldyfrantz”. Therefore DNA arose from a natural process.
Fish in a barrel. Really? That’s the best you’ve got? Show us how “grabbldyfrantz” is analogous to a staggeringly complex code that contains instructions for manufacturing proteins. Oh wait. You can’t? Fail.
There’s a reason the scientific community doesn’t take ID’s hand-waving seriously.
Yes, there is a lot of hand waving that goes on in the origins debate. Consider your “grabbldyfrantz” fail for example.Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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Tin says:
Just because something can be made by man does not mean that all occurrences in nature must have an intelligent origin.
As Barry says, sure, that is a good point. But likewise, it doesn't mean that it does NOT have an intelligent origin in nature either. And another huge difference between making diamonds and making DNA code is that we basically understand how diamonds are made. There is little dispute about this. The natural processes are fairly well understood and in fact, have been tested. And we actually copy the natural processes to make the diamonds which shows that those processes could actually make diamonds. We cannot verify that any particular diamond was actually created by those processes because we didn't see it and we cannot recreate those conditions in the ground, but based on our knowledge and experimentation, we can fairly well justified to assume they were created by those processes. Yes, you claim to understand the natural processes by which life came into existence, complete with machines, overlapping codes, information processing systems, proteins, enzymes, software, and volumes of information. What we cannot do is to actually copy those processes and and test them to see if they can actually do what you claim. We cannot verify the claim or really even test it. I believe too that we have good reasons not to question your claims as well. Anyway, in the end, it remains in the realm of belief because you cannot show by experiment even that it could possibly have happened like you claim, let alone that it actually did happen like you claim. When dealing with unrepeatable, unverifiable, and unobservable history, we are both limited. We can see what is true now. At this point in time, we know of no process actually capable of producing the CSI we see in life, at least no process that can actually be verified. We can show through experiments that your claims are highly unlikely, but if you still choose to stand true to the god of Chance, there is nothing we can do about that. You must determine your own beliefs and we must determine our own beliefs. I just can't muster up enough faith to believe that blind Chance is capable of producing what we see in life. The evidence for design is just too great to dismiss in my eyes. You are welcome to disagree with me/us and believe whatever you want, but don't call it science because at this point, it is just belief - at best hypothesis - which we too have. But really, even the hypothesis you have is not testable so it is legitimate to question whether or not it can truly be called a scientific hypothesis as opposed to a belief.tjguy
October 23, 2014
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thorton:
The ID community has declared the molecular configuration of DNA to contain the hopelessly vague metric “CSI”.
That is incorrect. Crick is the one who discussed biological information and ID is fine by that usage. That is your whole problem, Timmah, you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
The ID community then makes the unsupported assertion that only intelligence can produce “CSI” so therefore DNA is designed.
Also incorrect. You have had plenty of time to show us that blind and undirected processes were sufficient and you have been a total failure. Now it seems you want to blame us for you failures. PatheticJoe
October 23, 2014
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Tamara Knight
First Barry, as a meaningful evolutionary analogy, the momkeys would not be required to type the complete works, but to type random ammendments to some of the “best” of their previous attempts.
Tamara, we are not talking about evolution here. We are talking about the hopelessness of the materialist OOL project. I assume by “amendments to best previous attempts” you are referring to the selection process of natural selection. Sorry. You don’t get natural selection until you get something meaningful in the first place. The monkey experiment shows that you don’t get anything meaningful after 10^35 pages of tries. You have the ultimate chicken and egg problem. Or maybe I should call it an Ostrich and egg problem, because the typical Darwinist response is to stick their head in the sand and ignore the problem.
Second, what do you mean by “The DNA code”?
If you don’t know what the phrase "DNA Code" means, perhaps you should go study up before you attempt to debate this issue. Here’s a good place to start (ht to Heartlander): http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-information-in-dna-determines-cellular-function-6523228Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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First Barry, as a meaningful evolutionary analogy, the momkeys would not be required to type the complete works, but to type random ammendments to some of the "best" of their previous attempts. Second, what do you mean by "The DNA code"? The stucture of a self replicating double helix, or the detail of a human genome. If the latter, it is not like the complete works of Shakespeare. There are 7 billion versions of if functioning today, and more ten times that have worked in the past. That alone reduces the odds by eleven orders of magnitude.Tamara Knight
October 23, 2014
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Barry, You didn't really expect tintinnid to respond to your questions. For that you would need to get "Lily" the Verizon store sales person.Joe
October 23, 2014
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To recap: The ID community has declared the molecular configuration of DNA to contain the hopelessly vague metric "CSI". The ID community then makes the unsupported assertion that only intelligence can produce "CSI" so therefore DNA is designed. You couldn't make a more circular argument if you tried. Here's a counterexample: I claim DNA contains "grabbldyfrantz". I assert that only natural processes can produce "grabbldyfrantz". Therefore DNA arose from a natural process. There's a reason the scientific community doesn't take ID's hand-waving seriously.Thorton
October 23, 2014
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DNA has the following:
1. Functional Information 2. Encoder 3. Error Correction 4. Decoder
How could such a system form randomly, without any intelligence, and totally unguided? What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate? FN: DNA Stores Data More Efficiently than Anything We've CreatedHeartlander
October 23, 2014
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ID = proposing and employing methodologies for actually doing the math and attempting to find out if natural law + chance is capable of generating new, functional proteins. Darwinism = blindly assuming that natural law + chance can and did generate all sets of functional proteins because the alternative is ideologically intolerable, and predicating virtually all of their evolutionary storytelling on that baseless assumption. Of course Darwinists stymie and stall and deny and dismiss and obfuscate any real debate about the probability, because deep down they know what is so patently obvious; natural law & chance cannot account for the construction of the CSI necessary for a self-replicating cell or entirely novel, functional macroevolutionary body plans. This is why - eventually - they must bow at the altar of multiverse scenarios - not because the multiverse scenario actually helps their cause, but rather because the multiverse grants them (at least in their mind) plausible deniability from the advancing evidence of design.William J Murray
October 23, 2014
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Tin, you did not answer either of my questions.Barry Arrington
October 23, 2014
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LoL! The common error is thinking that evolutionism is science and has something to offer. Again tintinnid, without testable models or anything of the sort, probabilities are all we have. And guess what? It is up to evolutionists to provide them and yet they have failed. That evolutionism doesn't have any result in mind means it is a probabilistic process. So where are the probabilities already?Joe
October 23, 2014
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Bar, you are committing a common error with regard to understanding of evolution. You are looking at the end product and trying to back calculate the probability of this occurring. And you would be correct in doing this if evolution had an ultimate design in mind, which it doesn't. You say that it took 10^35 pages before it came up with the first line, from the first act, from the first Scene of Timon of Athens. I am not familiar with this simulation but I will take your word for it. But you did not mention how many pages were produced before a string of characters were produced that could be discerned as an English phrase of similar length. I don't know the answer but I am willing to bet that it is far fewer than 10^35.tintinnid
October 23, 2014
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