RE: Fibbonacci and other mathematical patterns in shells

From: Josh Bembenek (jbembe@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Aug 15 2003 - 10:16:31 EDT

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    Sarah- Thanks for the responses, my comments below:

    "The answer is no. The argument over "pan-adaptionism"
    is not whether or not pan-adaptionism is wrong. There
    is near-universal agreement that it is wrong. That is,
    traits having nothing to do with survival can become
    fixed because they are "spandrels" or "byproducts"
    or even through "luck" (eg, founder effect) and naturalistic
    mechanisms suffice to explain this. Your question
    assumes pan-adaptionism, it appears to me, in that
    you are stating that traits that are not adaptive undermine
    the claim that naturalistic mechanisms are sufficient
    to produce them (ie, intelligent intervention is not
    required). They do not."

    -This is not exactly the claim I wish to defend. My question, regardless of
    the ability to defend this specific claim, is on target. If we find
    extremely complex phenomena appearing all over creation that has no other
    purpose than to produce complex patterns and beautiful organization of
    shells, etc. it is much harder to suspect that naturalistic mechanisms
    continue to produce these in the absence of functional meaning. One can
    hypothesize natural mechanisms that you offer, but there are problems.
    First, we don't fully comprehend how these properties emerge, so giving a
    mechanism for their derivation is premature. Second, if RM&NS is the
    overall basis for understanding the origin of biological systems, then
    highly complex phenomena derived in the absence of any or extremely weak NS
    does not fit well with the hypothesis. Your suggestions are possible
    hypothises, but it is EASIER to defend RM&NS when NSive pressure is an
    obvious component of the equation for the structure's existence. Thus, my
    question about ease of defending a particular position still stands, even
    considering your mechanisms, which I do not disregard.

    "And it would be also wrong I think to say that looking
    at explanations in this way undermines Christian concepts
    of God. In fact, this is the piece of ID that truly confuses
    *me*. I thought Christians were supposed to believe
    that God is revealed in everything, and I don't understand
    the ID approach of looking for God by essentially dusting
    for the fingerprints of the designer (see, for example,
    Dembski's "what every theologian should know about..."

    First, the article is long and I haven't the time to read it currently.
    Perhaps later. Second, I don't defend or believe every word of every
    "design" theorist in the world. Finally, I think many feel God is revealed
    in everything, however only certain things can bear the revealing in such a
    way as to become empirically detectable. The difference isn't in the
    revealing, but the empirical detecting.

    David Wrote:

    "It is definitely the case that the mollusks can build the shells without
    having much intelligence; the highly intelligent ones have little or no
    shell."

    -This falls well in line with your GAINFIST analogy. You are creating
    strawman-like arguments out of ID here. Specifications in protein sequence
    aren't dependent upon us defining some sort of semantic meaning out of them,
    but directly relate to function. My toes were created without my personal
    intelligent design, however this says nothing about their derivation from
    ultimately intelligent causation.

    "Shell color has very little known function in many cases. It has been
    demonstrated that having a wide variety of patterns within a species can
    help keep predators from forming a search image that is effective for the
    entire species. Some species obtain pigments from the food; if they also
    live on it, using these pigments can serve as camouflage. Mother-of-pearl
    is both pretty to us and useful to the mollusk because of its structure, as
    the color is an interference pattern produced by the numerous tiny stacked
    plates of aragonite which also produce a very strong but somewhat flexible
    shell.

    On the other hand, many species cover the shell (with a dark protein layer,
    with tissue, or with algae and epifauna) and many live permanently buried;
    color seems useless to them. Color does not preserve well in the fossil
    record, though traces of the pattern often can be detected in well-preserved
    material (e.g., spots or stripes visible but color faded away). Thus, there
    is limited direct evidence about the evolution of the color patterns. In
    general, the color patterns may be derivable from relatively simple
    algorithms, but often with mathematically chaotic results."

    -As always, interesting facts of biology that I was unaware of, thanks.

    "The fact that mollusks make aesthetically pleasing patterns that serve no
    known function for the animal could be taken as an evidence of design in the
    traditional sense of involving a designer with aesthetic inclinations.
    However, such design is not amenable to the sort of approach used by ID
    analyses. I think that I will never sell a poem as lovely as a shell, but
    Dembski is looking instead for a shell that is more complicated than the
    poem."

    -I wouldn't jump the gun toward assuming no function, yet before a function
    is found, I would say it is more difficult to argue for their indirect
    causation through RM&NS. Your assertion of sea shells being beyond the
    reach of ID's analysis is correct since we don't really have all the
    information about how they are formed. And so it is also out of the reach
    of being explained by mechanisms mentioned by Sarah. All of these are
    simply within the realm of possibility at this point. Our differences
    reside around just how difficult a poem a sea shell is, David. I personally
    see an exquisitely refined poem in the biochemistry of life processes which
    produce shells, fibonacchi patterns, flagella, or whatever. Regardless of
    whether or not RM&NS is the algorithm that can solve these riddles, we
    ultimately need more quantitative and probabilistic answers to lay the issue
    to rest. Blanket mechanisms to solve problems of unknown complexity don't
    cut it as scientific explanations (that's why they are called hypothesis and
    most would benefit from clearly specifying when they are suggesting
    scientific explanations and viable hypothesis), as all agree. We simply
    disagree on what the final answer may be. I'm willing to accept that RM&NS
    may not solve all of the riddles in light of the ignorance we have about
    these systems (NOTE: This is in sharp contrast to arguing that RM&NS and
    Sarah's mechanisms will NOT solve any riddles--something I do not advocate
    despite the occasional abuse of my words), others seem quite committed to
    never permitting such a ludicrous possibility, despite our ignorance.

    Josh

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