On the Intelligent Design Facebook page, a discussion developed, courtesy Timothy Kershner, on common descent, as understood by ID theorist Michael Behe. A question arises about common descent vs. universal common descent, and a distinction seems worth making.
Common descent is the sort of thesis which needs only sufficient evidence to be a reasonable hypothesis in a given case. If dogs, wolves, and coyotes can interbreed, common descent is a reasonable explanation. Maybe all frogs can’t interbreed, but common descent might be a reasonable account of similarity in their genes and body form.
Of course, where life forms look very much alike but have significantly different genes (like the olinguito), we do have a problem. The problem warns us not to make common descent into some kind of ideology (a warning many will be proud to ignore or think it their duty to ignore).
And by the way, it is no use to say, “Well how else could it have happened?” If there can be evidence for any proposition, there can also be evidence against it. And we may not have anything like the information we need in order to assess the preponderance of the evidence at this time.
Universal common descent—that all life forms arose from a single cell—is more of a radical philosophical claim. It can’t really be demonstrated; in any event, the differences between the bacteria and the archaea, among others, have suggested to some researchers that it isn’t even likely.
The sheer unlikelihood of life coming to exist at all is not an argument for universal common descent; it is an argument for a non-random origin of life. If a random origin of life were true, however, early life could have arisen a number of times under favourable conditions, with the individual nascent life forms having no necessary familial connection with each other. A person who is philosophically committed to universal common descent must reject that account on purely philosophical grounds, because there may never be definitive evidence one way or the other.
On the whole, limited, demonstrable common descent is a more reasonable and less contentious claim.
I prefer to talk of natural origin of life, rather than random origin of life.
It is my assumption that if life arose naturally, then it probably arose multiple times. However, in a “survival of the fittest” situation, most of those early starts to life are probably gone without a trace.
What we see as life today may have involved symbiotic unions of indepently arising proto-life forms. And again, there might be no trace of what was there before such symbiosis occurred.
I’m not a biologist, so I don’t engage in coffee room discussion with biologists on OOL topics. But I suspect that the view I expressed above would be within the range of possibilities that they consider. I don’t think they are nearly as doctrinaire about this as you take them to be.
Sure, they talk about a single common ancestor. In the “Operating Systems” class that I am teaching, I will give a simplified account of virtual storage. Simplified accounts are useful for communication, so as to not get too bogged down in details that usually don’t matter at the particular level of discussion.
Neil,
Do you think it is possible to store information without using an arrangement of matter/energy? If you agree that it is not possible by any other means, then you might want to explore what must happen at the material level in order to retrieve that store from the medium and have it come to create the effect it specifies.
🙂
The key question is how limited? I don’t think you would be laughed out of a biology conference for hypothesising that prokaryotic life began several times. You would be heavily challenged – but you could have a serious debate – as you say, some serious scientists do believe that.
You would be suggesting something very controversial if you thought e.g. that frogs and wolves did not have a common ancestor. Setting aside the fossil evidence – you would be proposing that either
1) a complex multicellular life form had sprung into being overnight
or
2) different prokaryotic strains had separately evolved into wolves and frogs thus requiring two massive transformations rather than one.
Well seeing that we can’t even get a prokaryote to evolve into something other than a prokaryote it is obvious that universal common descent is a non-starter.
BTW Neil, design is natural…
Yesterday I saw a debate involving the guy who made this following video
In the debate, the guy who made the preceding video was complaining that some atheist was trying to attack him by saying he was a creationist and/or a Intelligent Design advocate and that he did not believe in evolution (apparently he does not know that ID is, because of its minimalist claim, also compatible with common descent). He said that he had no reason to doubt evolution (i.e. common descent) and that he further complained that it was sheer hubris on the atheist’s part to presuppose that belief in evolution implied belief in atheism. He complained that the atheist was making a huge blunder in philosophical reasoning to presuppose that it does. Everyone involved in the discussion sided with him in his assessment that the atheist was in huge error philosophically. As a bystander, this was all quite interesting for me to watch, since I knew for a fact that he had decimated the overall atheistic position in his video by reference to experiments in quantum mechanics that show as such. And this is exactly the point that was brought up over and over again to the atheist. The universe is not atheistic in its structure it is Theistic! Thus the atheist has no right to presuppose atheism from common descent.
The ‘Top Down’ Theistic Structure Of The Universe and Of The Human Body
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NhA4hiQnYiyCTiqG5GelcSJjy69e1DT3OHpqlx6rACs/edit
Getting past hypotheticals and to actual empirical evidence, what can we say about the origin of life. First and foremost, we now have evidence for photosynthetic life suddenly appearing on earth, as soon as water appeared on the earth, in the oldest sedimentary rocks ever found on earth with no evidence of prebiotic chemical signatures.
Moreover, the simplest photosynthetic life on earth is exceedingly complex, too complex to happen by accident even if the primeval oceans had been full of pre-biotic soup.
There is actually a molecular machine, that surpasses man made machines in engineering parameters, that is integral to the photosynthetic process:
If that was not bad enough for materialistic atheists, they must maintain that this photosynthetic ‘miracle of naturalism’ must have happened at least 6 different times:
Moreover, as it all of the preceding was not bad enough for the atheistic naturalist, it is now found that photosynthesis uses ‘non-local’ quantum mechanical principles to accomplish its job. At the 21:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr Suarez explains why photosynthesis needs a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, cause to explain its effect:
Summary,,, Photosynthetic life appears on earth much sooner than atheists predicted that it would. Photosynthetic life is exceeding complex from the start directly challenging what the atheistic naturalist would presuppose for the beginning of life. Photosynthetic life is dependent on ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, cause in order to accomplish photosynthesis in the first place which is completely antagonistic to the atheist’s starting materialistic presuppositions.
Mark Frank:
It only took one massive transformation to get from prokaryotes to frogs and wolves? That’s quite the jump.
And I like option 3, which Mark didn’t post:
3) Complex metazoans were designed and somehow made their way to this planet- How they were designed, by whom, when, where and how they made it here are questions to be answered, proving that the design inference is not a scientific dead-end (as is the “just happened”, ie non-design scenario)
Moreover the genetic evidence for common descent is not nearly as strong as we were once led to believe by neo-Darwinists,
At the 12:40 minute mark of the following ‘The Dictionary of Life’ video, Dr. Nelson describes the breaking point for Darwinian scenarios from the genetic evidence:
The genetic “evidence” for universal common descent (UCD) amounts to nothing more than “It surely does look like UCD to me.”
Moreover the fossil evidence does is not nearly as supportive of common descent as we were originally led to believe by neo-Darwinists:
As well, the Cambrian explosion is not the only place the very un-Darwinian, disparity precedes diversity, pattern is found. The pattern is also found after the Cambrian explosion:
Moreover, contrary to the cartoon drawings depicting man evolving from apes, rigid scrutiny of the fossil record also supports the abrupt appearance of homo sapiens.
OT: Natural Selection Is Empty – Michael Egnor – August 30, 2013
Excerpt: Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini’s book What Darwin Got Wrong was published in 2010. Having read it now, perhaps belatedly, I can report that it is a masterpiece. Fodor is a leading philosopher, and Piatelli-Palmarini is a leading cognitive scientist. Their analysis of natural selection is meticulous and devastating. They are both atheists — they do not come to this debate with theistic presumptions. They demonstrate that natural selection is, in their word, empty. It’s a meaningless concept that should be abandoned. –
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....75991.html
Upright BiPed
I’m not sure that I see the point of the question.
Information is an abstraction. As a consequence, what counts as information and what counts as storing information is a matter of human conventions.
At a time past, information was stored as sound waves circulating in mercury delay lines. Does that count as “an arrangement of matter/energy” given that the arrangement is continually changing?
Mr Rickert, contrary to your belief that,,
,,It is now found that information is a real physical entity. A real physical entity that both matter and energy reduce to:
Here are my references for the claim that energy and matter both reduce to information:
In fact the entire human body is theoretically reducible to quantum information
Moreover quantum information/entanglement is found to be conserved
Additionally, encoded ‘classical’ information such as what we find encoded in computer programs, and yes, as we find encoded in DNA, is found to be a subset of conserved ‘non-local’ (beyond space and time) quantum entanglement/information by the following method:
Thus Mr. Rickert, your assertion that ‘information is an abstraction’ invented by humans is found to be false;
Verse and music:
Independent Birth of Organisms. A New Theory that Distinct Organisms Arose Independently from the Primordial Pond, Showing that Evolutionary Theories are Fundamentally Incorrect
Neil:
If biological life were natural it would not require an origin.
To theists such as myself, God cannot not exist. God is therefore, the most natural being of all. Wouldn’t you say? It’s what I call metaphysical naturalism. 🙂
If biological life has it’s origin in God, wouldn’t that qualify as a natural cause? If not why not?
An interesting nuance to the quantum teleportation video I referenced at the bottom of post 13 is that they talk of having to entangle each and every one of the material particles of the human body, on a one by one basis, in order to teleport a human body successfully. But what they have failed to point out in the video is that we now know that there is already massive quantum entanglement within the human body, in every protein and DNA molecule of the human body:
Thus, if one holds a Theistic view of reality as I do then, considering that massive quantum entanglement is now found within the entire human body, arguably for every material particle of the human body, then one could reasonably argue that the entire human body is already primed for teleportation! And verses in the Bible, such as the following ones, become a whole lot more feasible for us to believe as far as what physics is telling us about how reality is actually constructed:
Music:
supplemental note:
It can be an abstraction, but it doesn’t have to be. There are those who view information as a fundamental entity, on par with matter and energy. Matter and energy require information (for their existence) just as much as they require each other. And information requires matter and energy…
J: There is no good reason to infer abstract [non-concrete], therefore non-existent. This is just ideologial materialism speaking, and it needs to be directly reminded of its self-referential incoherence and sent to the dunce corner with the proper cap. KF
Hi Denyse — on a related note, i’ve recently posted a list of “Behe responds to critics Of IC” articles that span from 1999 -2010 and was wondering if perhaps Michael (or someone else) could writeup one singular “new” paper / article that meshes all of the points into one paper so we can see what he still advocates, what has changed (ect), as well as having a convenient “one paper” reference guide?
Thanks.
Matter is an abstraction, so is energy.