They Won’t Dance; They Won’t Mourn

_{Barry Arrington

March 17, 2018

Intelligent Design}

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“We played your a melody, but you would not dance, a dirge but you would not mourn.”

When we are discussing philosophy as it relates to ID, some A-Mat will invariably jump into the combox and howl “I thought this was a science blog; let’s get back to the science.”

Well, a few weeks ago GP put up an extraordinary brilliant science-heavy post. The Ubiquitin System: Functional Complexity and Semiosis joined together. As of today, there were 414 comments. I scrolled through the combox and noted there were ZERO comments from A-Mats.

Keep that in mind next time the A-Mats howl. We put up science posts, and they ignore them. We put up philosophy posts and the criticize them for not being science posts. Proving once again that coherence is not the A-Mats’ strong suit.

Comments

Allan Keith Sorry, but that is just the old god of the gaps argument. I gave you a very simple illustration as to how design detection is not based on a basic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the designer. It has nothing to do with "god of the gaps". The issue is the dogmatic rejection of the possibility of design even if design should be the best explanation. I don't think it is unfair to describe your argument as design can't be found in biology just because.tribune7_{March 21, 2018
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No time to respond.Upright BiPed_{March 21, 2018
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The conclusion that something was designed can be made quite independently of knowledge of the designer. As a matter of procedure, the design must first be apprehended before there can be any further question about the designer. The inference to design can be held with all firmness that is possible in this world, without knowing anything about the designer.—Dr Behe
And reality dictates that in the absence of direct observation or designer input, the only possible way to make any scientific determination about the designer and any process used, is by studying the design and all relevant evidence. Archaeology shows us how difficult it is to pin down a specific designer and methods used. And they deal with things that are within our capabilities to reproduce. We don't even start asking questions about the designer until after design has been detected. Mike Gene had an essay about Intelligent Design that opened with:
"What is Intelligent Design? If you ask a critic, he will probably tell you that ID is a disguised version of Creationism and nothing more than a Trojan Horse to get God taught in the public schools. If you ask a typical proponent of ID, he will probably tell you that ID is the best explanation for various biotic phenomena. For me, ID begins exactly as William Dembski said it begins – with a question":
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?
"The first thing to note about the question is that you don’t have to be a religious fundamentalist to ask it. You don’t have to be a religious fundamentalist to consider it. In fact, you don’t even have to be a religious fundamentalist to answer it."
ET_{March 21, 2018
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Gpuccio,
Design detection is, of course, based on what a designer can do and other non design scenarios cannot do. Functional complexity, semiosis, irreducible complexity.
Allan Keith
Which is true for artifacts for which we have a reasonable understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the designer. Do you have a confirmed example for which this is not true.
What are you talking about Allan? We have countless trillions of examples of functional complexity, semiosis, and irreducible complexity arising from intelligent design. We have not a single confirmed instance of functional complexity, semiosis, or irreducible complexity coming about from mechanical necessity, chance or a combination of the two (lots of hand waving and question begging, yes, indisputable confirmation, no). That is why when using the technique "inference to the best explanation," if one observes functional complexity, semiosis, or irreducible complexity, we infer the best explanation is "design by intelligent agent." Barry Arrington_{March 21, 2018
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Allan Keith:
Because design detection techniques are based on a a basic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the designer.
No, we know the capabilities by what they left behind. We would never have thought the ancients capable of building Stonehenge without Stonehenge. And even though we know that mother nature can produce stone formations there is just something about Stonehenge that screams for intelligent designers. If the Antikythera mechanism was never found we would never have thought those ancients were capable of producing such a thing.
However, if you are willing to posit the capabilities and the limitations of your designer of biology, we can start looking for evidence that is consistent with these.
Capable of producing complex, functional information. Capable of producing irreducibly complex systems. As Dr Behe said: "Our ability to be confident of the design of the cilium or intracellular transport rests on the same principles to be confident of the design of anything: the ordering of separate components to achieve an identifiable function that depends sharply on the components.” It is our knowledge of cause and effect relationships that gives us the design inference.ET_{March 21, 2018
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Gpuccio,
Design detection is, of course, based on what a designer can do and other non design scenarios cannot do. Functional complexity, semiosis, irreducible complexity.
Which is true for artifacts for which we have a reasonable understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the designer. Do you have a confirmed example for which this is not true. Tribune7,
No, they’re not. While experience helps, it basically comes down to ruling out what is inevitable by nature and possible by chance.
Sorry, but that is just the old god of the gaps argument.Allan Keith_{March 21, 2018
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Allan Keith Because design detection techniques are based on a a basic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the designer. No, they're not. While experience helps, it basically comes down to ruling out what is inevitable by nature and possible by chance. Here's something to ponder: Is life inevitable by nature? Why do we only see life coming from existing life?tribune7_{March 21, 2018
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Allan Keith: "Because design detection techniques are based on a a basic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the designer." Why? That's simply not true. Design detection is, of course, based on what a designer can do and other non design scenarios cannot do. Functional complexity, semiosis, irreducible complexity. It's just as simple as that: Conscious designers can do some things that other things cannot do. That's how we detect design from the designed object.gpuccio_{March 21, 2018
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ET,
Why? Why can’t tried and true design detection techniques be used in biology?
Because design detection techniques are based on a a basic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the designer. Or on observing the designer actually building something very similar to the artifact in question. However, if you are willing to posit the capabilities and the limitations of your designer of biology, we can start looking for evidence that is consistent with these.Allan Keith_{March 21, 2018
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JDK: I do not know enough, at all, about the origin of life (and I don’t think anyone does) to ascertain if b is true.
Jdk, in GPuccio’s question to you, there is no need to know ‘enough’ about the origin of life. He asked you if you would infer design given that there is no (naturalistic) explanation. He asked you to assume, arguendo, that no such explanation exists. Your answer seems to be “I do not know enough about naturalistic explanations of OOL”. Again, you are being asked to assume that naturalistic explanations are non-existent — and therefore irrelevant —, and if you would, in that case, infer design.Origenes_{March 21, 2018
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Allan Keith:
For something like this to be effective, it must be calibrated against similar biological structures that are known to be designed.
Why? Why can't tried and true design detection techniques be used in biology?ET_{March 21, 2018
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jdk I also am open to there being a pervasive “intelligence” in the world, but not one that just occasionally steps in to accomplish something that could not otherwise happen as part of its continual presence. But ID would not be able to determine a miracle.tribune7_{March 21, 2018
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Allen Keith For something like this to be effective, it must be calibrated against similar biological structures that are known to be designed. That's a standard so loaded it is Kafkaesque. You wouldn't calibrate a caliper with a graduated cylinder, you would calibrate with an object of a known width. In the same sense, design identification would be calibrated against objects of known design, and it wouldn't matter if the object was animal, vegetable, mineral or something else only that it was of known design.tribune7_{March 21, 2018
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I will respond sometime this evening— no time now.Upright BiPed_{March 21, 2018
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jdk: OK, I respect that. :)gpuccio_{March 21, 2018
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RE 91. If b is true. I will limit myself to the topics I listed back starting with 56. I do not know enough, at all, about the origin of life (and I don't think anyone does) to ascertain if b is true. I also am open to there being a pervasive "intelligence" in the world, but not one that just occasionally steps in to accomplish something that could not otherwise happen as part of its continual presence. However, such a belief on my part, if I were to claim it as a held belief, as opposed to a speculative metaphysical possibility, would be a faith-based choice, not a scientific claim at all.jdk_{March 21, 2018
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Tribune7,
It is not “pretending”. It is developing a method to conclusively determine design, successfully testing it on known objects of design and then applying it to biology.
For something like this to be effective, it must be calibrated against similar biological structures that are known to be designed. What is missing is this calibration. Comparing it agains man made structures does not qualify. That would be like calibrating a pair of callipers with a graduated cylinder.Allan Keith_{March 21, 2018
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UB at 89: my "more vague/less specific" summary of what you said was an attempt to see if I understood the main point you were trying to make. Paraphrasing someone else's point to see if you understand is a good, constructive discussion technique. I still don't see that you have explained how “the physical requirements of pi has been unequivocally found in a biological object.” That is is really the only thing in this discussion with you that I am interested in, re 61-62.jdk_{March 21, 2018
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jdk at #77: "To gpuccio at 71: Yes, although this situation is much more contrived, as you’re assuming the astronauts would somehow know how to compare what they found to these amino acid sequences." Well, that's not really a problem. Let's say that they are intuitive people, and they realized that the sequence presented repetitions of the same 5 bit sequences, 21 of them, and they thought they could correspond to the 20 AAs + a stop signal. At that point, it would not be really difficult to decipher the code. But my point is another one: In biological genomes, we have exactly that. The sequence of a lot (about 20000 in both humans and c. elegans, for example) of functional proteins, written in a symbolic code. And there is absolutely no explanation for that configuration of nucleotides. The RV + NS theory fails miserably and cannot explain that simple fact. And if your understanding of biology does not allow you to see that, and you are not available to try to improve that understanding, unfortunately I cannot do anything else than state that simple truth. But: admit for one moment that what I say is true, and that we have absolutely no explanation for that configuration of nucleotides in biological genomes. Then I ask you: if that is true, why shouldn't we infer design for those biological objects? The scenario is the same. a) We have exactly the same special configuration as in my mental experiment (the sequence of 20000 functional proteins in symbolic form). b) There is no explanation available for it. c) We know nothing about the possible designer. So, if you infer design for the wall on the distant planet, as you said at #77, why wouldn't you infer design for genomes on our planet? (of course, if b is true)gpuccio_{March 21, 2018
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Hola! Mung :)Upright BiPed_{March 21, 2018
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Jdk at 78
I wrote, “Seems like you are saying that written or spoken representations of pi, and by extension all mathematics I would think, don’t have a physical nature subject to the laws of physics, in the same way a molecule does. If that’s what your saying, that seems pretty clear.” You didn’t respond to that: is that the gist of what you are saying?
I believe I was fairly explicit as to what is meant by pi being a “rate-independent symbol”. It is an observation about different types of informational mediums, and I provided a fairly concise and understandable distinction between a rate-independent medium and one that is not. Such distinctions are important, as they come into play in a fuller physical analysis of information bearing systems. So (far from not responding) I gave you an explanation and asked if the explanation was sufficient for you to understand the term. You responded by saying “not particularly” and then suggested a more vague/less specific interpretation of what I had said. I don’t think replacing a more explicit explanation with a less explicit explanation is particularly useful, so I asked what part of my explanation you did not understand. You responded in comment #69 by punting the explanation entirely.
Your explanation was certainly not sufficient to support your claim that “the physical requirements of pi has been unequivocally found in a biological object.”
My explanation was a response to you saying that you did not understand what I meant by the term “rate-independence”, which is one of the physical requirements for the symbol "pi" to exist.
You also didn’t respond to my question, “On the other hand, I don’t know why you would call a pheromone a symbol.”
Because that is what it is (a signal, a medium, a symbolic representation, a symbol vehicle to convey information), typically excreted by an organism outside the body and received by another organism of the same species. You may want to note that when physicists describe the physical workings of such systems, anthropocentric ambiguities (what is a symbol, what is a signal, what is a sign, what is a representation) become irrelevant, as they all have the same key material requirements in order to function.Upright BiPed_{March 21, 2018
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Yes, jdk, unlike your position ID makes testable claims. Did you have a point?ET_{March 21, 2018
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to Mung at 85. UB's explanation of rate-independence was not sufficient to explain his claim that “the physical requirements of pi has been unequivocally found in a biological object.” That is the issue that I brought up with him.jdk_{March 21, 2018
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to Mung at 84: from the Discovery Institute. "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." This is what I meant. Also, the above definition implicitly means best explained scientifically, and not metaphysically. I think what I wrote is fairly comparable to the DI definition.jdk_{March 21, 2018
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Upright BiPed:
Is that explanation sufficient?
It was awesome. Even I could understand it. It didn't even mention semiotics.Mung_{March 21, 2018
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jdk:
2) whether somehow we can determine that some things happen in a way that could not happen by natural processes alone: i.e., by some direct application of intelligence in a way that is usually not present in most natural processes.
The question is misguided. It assumes facts not in evidence. There is no basis in science for things happening "by natural processes alone." And there is no scientific test that has or even can establish whether intelligence is present or absent in "natural processes." It;'s a verbal shell game where "natural process" is just another way of saying a process that acts in the absence of any intelligence, and that is just begging the question.Mung_{March 21, 2018
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jdk:
Adding to the list, I am interested in probability and its application to the real world, and as a long-time math teacher, I believe I am qualified to talk about certain aspects of that topic,
But most people here are probably not qualified to talk about probability. jdk:
I haven’t discussed your pet subject, semiotics, because I don’t have enough knowledge about the biological details.
There is plenty that can be learned about semiotics that has nothing to do with biology. Why not start there?Mung_{March 21, 2018
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Now, let’s say, always in my mental experiment, that the astronauts find instead, on the same wall and in the same distant planet, the symbolic representation, always in binary form Here's something to consider regarding the astronaut exercise: The astronauts find the symbols on the wall. They go to another part of the cave and find the same symbols etched backwards. They go back to the first etchings and place a mirror to it. A protein forms on a flat rock in front of it. Should design be assumed or do you decide to mess with the dungeon master?tribune7_{March 21, 2018
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It looks like the ID critics are quick to criticize ID but very slow to try to defend their position. Typical and still very tellingET_{March 21, 2018
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jdk- mRNA codons are the symbols that represent amino acids. The genetic code is arbitrary meaning it isn't determined by laws of chemistry or physics. I will let UB answer for himself.ET_{March 21, 2018
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