Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Top ten ID science stories of the year

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Well, here are three of the top ten winner stories, and I have inserted some comments, with further stories to follow if you click on the link:

1. Authors William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II use computer simulations and information theory to challenge the ability of Darwinian processes to create new functional genetic information. This paper is in many ways a validation of Dembski’s core No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without intelligence, which argued that some intelligent input is required to produce novel complex and specified information.

[About time someone said the obvious. Darwinism does not work, Never has, never will. Kept alive by a taxpayer-funded, court-supported Darwin industry that is nearly a century old. A shame and a scandal, and a waste of tax money. For the moment, I will set aside the completely ridiculous quasi-religious obsequies paid to Darwin. It got so bad that Darwin was compared to Lincoln. And while we are here, Dawkins claims he cannot produce an original statement of his big no-design theory – though professionals associated with the goals of this site reconstructed it – and it doesn’t work. 

Like I said at the time – I own Highway 400 all the way up to the TransCanada – but I don’t have the documents and don’t know what I can tell you – which is what Dawkins said in response to their enquiries.

Note: I do not claim to personally own any part of the highway systems of Canada. It was only a jest in my case. I don’t know what it was in Dawkins’s case. That’s the trouble. Does he have the goods or not?]

2. June of this year. Dan Peterson, in a review of Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009) in the September 2009 issue of Spectator question of whether life is a product of unthinking matter or of an intelligent mind” and “this book is an engaging, eye-opening, and often eye-popping read”. In a series of university lectures and debates in the second half of the year Meyer defended his thesis that the information content in DNA and the biological machinery that processes that information is positive evidence for intelligent design. A companion three-minute animated video, visual illustration of Meyer’s points.

(Again, about time someone said the obvious.  About the vid, you can see it here at UD. It comes up regularly in the queue.)

3. The Collectivist Revolution in Biology. An essay by Mark Buchanan in the August issue of Nature announced the breaking with “many of the presuppositions of traditional evolutionary thinking.”

He highlighted its message with these words: “A coming revolution may go so far as to unseat Darwinian evolution as the key explanatory process in biology.” The essay is a contribution to crossdisciplinary thinking starting with an awareness of collective phenomena in modern physics.

[Well, you’d hope so, right?  There are underlying principles of life, and they are based on design.  If some profs need another job or could just retire on a pension, whose fault is that?

Look, we all pay for the Darwin rubbish whether it is about why men cheat on their wives or why women cheat on their husbands (because apes did it, supposedly, at some point? Who knows?).  We pay for it anyway, and we read the resulting nonsense in the Sunday papers.

That is the one single point of which I am reasonably, absolutely sure: We pay for it.

I cannot see a bit of good it has ever done anyone.

And I do not claim to know where this collapsing heap of nonsense will finally descend – that’d be useful info because it is where we can begin the rescue efforts. 

Go here for more. ]

Comments
johnnyb:
How is it _not_ an ID paper? It is about how functional information is or is not created, and how it should be quantified if it is found. That is precisely the domain of ID.
As the paper says nothing about functional information, I'm not sure what you're referring to. If you're talking about targets, everything in the paper is independent of whether the given targets are functional in some sense or not. If you're talking about problem-specific information, the paper does not address the creation or source of such information. (And it quantifies problem-specific information only in a sense of providing a numeric lower bound.)
ID is not restricted to biology. In fact, one of the first technical works on ID was about design by humans.
I'm curious what technical work you're referring to.
Therefore, a paper showing how, where, and how much design occurs within different types of systems seems to me to be straightforwardly an ID paper.
But the paper doesn't attempt to show that. It simply quantifies the efficiency of various search mechanisms, making no claims regarding their origins. If it were to say that better-than-random performance is necessarily by design (which Dembski and Marks seem to hint at outside of their peer-reviewed work), the implications would be rather strange. That would mean, for instance, that selection is always by design, i.e. that there is no such thing as natural selection. Our universe is chock-full of causes and effects. When I drop a stick in a river, it finds its way to the lake. Does ID theory say that gravity is necessarily intelligent, or necessarily designed, simply because it causes the stick to reach the lake with better-than-random probability? Regarding the question of whether this paper is an ID paper or not, I suppose it comes down to semantics. If we define "ID papers" broadly enough to include everything that deals with design or quantified information, then there are thousands of peer-reviewed ID papers, and would seem that the publication of this one shouldn't be a big deal.R0b
January 19, 2010
January
01
Jan
19
19
2010
11:52 AM
11
11
52
AM
PST
R0b - How is it _not_ an ID paper? It is about how functional information is or is not created, and how it should be quantified if it is found. That is precisely the domain of ID. ID is not restricted to biology. In fact, one of the first technical works on ID was about design by humans. Therefore, a paper showing how, where, and how much design occurs within different types of systems seems to me to be straightforwardly an ID paper.johnnyb
January 18, 2010
January
01
Jan
18
18
2010
05:49 PM
5
05
49
PM
PST
Denyse @ 8:
Who said it was an ID paper?
Well, one of its authors describes it as a "pro-ID article", and ARN says, "This paper is in many ways a validation of Dembski's core ideas in his 2001 book, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, which argued that some intelligent input is required to produce novel complex and specified information." That sure sounds like a depiction of an ID paper.
So in any article explaining why Darwinism isn’t true, we need a sentence proclaiming why it is.
But, as I said, the article makes no attempt to explain why Darwinism isn't true.R0b
January 18, 2010
January
01
Jan
18
18
2010
01:22 PM
1
01
22
PM
PST
ROb at 7, Who said it was an ID paper? Almost everyone who wants to get published must pay homage to Darwintrash. So in any article explaining why Darwinism isn't true, we need a sentence proclaiming why it is. Otherwise, all heck will break loose in the tax burden Darwin industry. If you think I believe any of it - you have never met an old-fashioned hack. It's becoming a scandal, really. I do not know how life began, why the trilobite died out, or how the tyrannosaur or Neanderthal man died. And I am convinced, based on evidence, that no one else does either. We have interesting theories, in the same way we have interesting theories about Jane Austen's private life. (= author of popularly filmed romance novels) If that's all - file it under popular culture, not science.O'Leary
January 18, 2010
January
01
Jan
18
18
2010
12:46 PM
12
12
46
PM
PST
Denyse:
About time someone said the obvious. Darwinism does not work, Never has, never will.
The only problem is that the paper doesn't say this. It says that evolutionary processes work, and it quantifies how well they work. Which raises the question of why ARN continues to characterize it as an ID paper. There is nothing about intelligence or design in it, no attempt to challenge evolutionary theory, and no valid logical connection between the math and ID claims.R0b
January 18, 2010
January
01
Jan
18
18
2010
10:02 AM
10
10
02
AM
PST
I can’t imagine anything I would like better in the whole wide world than self-organization...
Wouldn't self-organization first require, well, a self?Mung
January 17, 2010
January
01
Jan
17
17
2010
11:39 PM
11
11
39
PM
PST
I can't imagine anything I would like better in the whole wide world than self-organization - but it does not really happen. There is a big mess of cans in my library, due to the fact that I was using a bust fridge as a storage compartment. Recently, a handyman suggested that he might know how it might become a working fridge again, if he can find a capacitor that works for that fridge. So I cleared the cans out - and does anyone imagine that that the current "can mess" in my library is going to organize itself? I just hope it doesn't become a trip hazard. There is another huge mess in my office, this time of periodicals from which I need to razor articles I have written and then file. Given where I live, I never know what I might be charged for. Anyone who has a reasonable proposition for how those articles will self-organize all by themselves should get in touch with me real soon. Forget the cans. I can give them to the food bank if I can lug them all that way.of O'Leary
January 17, 2010
January
01
Jan
17
17
2010
06:24 PM
6
06
24
PM
PST
There is a BBC program here in the UK at the moment called "The Secret Life of Chaos", where the presenter makes a case for Biological order arising by Natural Selection as a purely Self-Organising process. Chaos is brought in to excuse the inability of this theory to predict anything. [Its fatal flaw is that Self-Organisation produces basically simple order and repetition. Even self-similarity in fractals is basically simple: a new and subtle kind of repetitiveness.] Re. the HGT example, I am not a biologist, but I work with computers a lot, so I would not be surprised to discover that genes are designed for plug-and-play use. This example is in the context of an unusual complex system where the animal is capable of stripping out whole organelles for use without destroying them. I have never heard of anything like this before before, and that is quite spectacular. I follow biology but I dont practice it, so I dont understand all the subtleties of PCR and sequencing, but even if the sequence turns out to be exactly the same one, that does not automatically imply natural HGT: it could be designed HGT. To show that natural HGT is even plausible, a truly neutral (amaterialistic) science would require justified numerical estimates for the probability of the transfer happening via natural processes. Yes, designed HGT is a possibility. In computing we call it 'not reinventing the wheel'.andyjones
January 17, 2010
January
01
Jan
17
17
2010
04:38 PM
4
04
38
PM
PST
Mrs O'Leary, I agree that the Dembski and Marks paper was the top ID event of 2009, with Signature in the Cell a close second. I'm sorry that I haven't finished the book, I was hoping AussieID and I could do a kind of joint review of it for UD. The publication of the Dembski and Marks paper emphasizes a point also very much at the center of Dr Meyer's book - that the study of evolution can be detatched from the biological context in which it was originally popularized, in order to better study its limits. We can and must understand evolution in the abstract, as well as the particulars of real world biology.Nakashima
January 17, 2010
January
01
Jan
17
17
2010
04:27 PM
4
04
27
PM
PST
Hi Denyse. The link at the bottom of the post ("Go here for more") takes you to a new page ( http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/3/2010/01/12/2009_top_ten_darwin_and_design_science_n ) which features the top story and then links to another Web site ( www.arn.org/top10. ) for the rest. However, this link doesn't work, because of the dot at the end. Just thought I'd let you know. By the way, the complete list of stories can be found at http://www.arn.org/top10/2009newsstories.pdf or at http://arn.org/top10/2009newsstories.pdf .vjtorley
January 17, 2010
January
01
Jan
17
17
2010
04:24 PM
4
04
24
PM
PST
O'Leary, Just a minor correction. For those looking for it, Mark Buchanan contributes to Nature Physics, not nature. Same press. He article is not pro-design per se, but argues other non-Darwinian mechanisms like Horizontal Gene Transfer might contribute. Generally, it seems like these mechanisms are considered "add-ons" to classic Darwinism, for instance, the PNAS paper he cites sees HGT dominating "early and small" (my words), with vertical descent dominating later and in multicellular animals. Though, in a really fantastic HGT story, check out photosynthetic sea-slugs: http://iowagenetics.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/a-photosynthetic-animalsome-background-on-ahmed-moustafas-pnas-paper/ I wonder if anyone has a design perspective on how to incorporate these mechanisms? Maybe design such that genes are interchangeable blocks? Frontloading of the seaslug to accept cholorplasts?REC
January 17, 2010
January
01
Jan
17
17
2010
02:17 PM
2
02
17
PM
PST

Leave a Reply