RE: [asa] Re: ID without specifying the intelligence?

As all this depends on a mutually agreed and shared understanding of 'what
is science?' and 'what is the purpose of science?' then absent such a
definition/statement/understanding progress will be, sadly, forever
impossible.

That crucial basic question cannot be avoided.

To the extent that opposing world-views means anything given this
fundamental uncertainty, then of course, that is actually declaring - it all
depends on your point of view? That's not science by any definition I
submit.

What does one call 'prejudice'?

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of PvM
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 4:33 PM
To: David Clounch
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Re: ID without specifying the intelligence?

 
Pun presented a paper in a religious journal to argue that ID is an
inference to the best explanation but remember ID does not explain
anything. It merely asserts X cannot be explained by
evolution/Darwinism, so we call it design. In fact, Pun incorrectly
identifies design and evolution as opposing worldviews.

<quote>Evolution and Intelligent Design (ID) are two opposing
worldviews from which many
contemporary intellectuals discuss the issues of origins of life. By
evaluating the various
Christian views of origins and the weaknesses of the evolution
paradigm, an attempt is made to present ID as an alternate paradigm.
Possible research programs based on the ID paradigm are proposed.
</quote>

He claims

<quote>4) ID is not a God-of-the-Gap stopper. ID is providing an
alternate research program to examine available data. It is
"methodically developing a line of research about which creationism
has been ambivalent." 19 Dembski proposed an explanatory filter which
can eliminate phenomena explainable by natural laws or by chance
before we can assign patterns such as those I have suggested in the
three domains of life. In other words, ID is a research program. It is
not a Godof-the-Gap science stopper: "God says it. I believe it. That
settles it for me!"
</quote>

It is 'I do not understand it thus God did it'. Remember that
Dembski's approach is what is the basis of ID and the reason why ID is
scientifically vacuous. Pun mentions some examples such as junk DNA.
But since ID does not address the designer, we don't know if the
designer would not allow junk in the DNA, and despite the recent
findings of function for non coding DNA, there remain much evidence
that a significant aspect of DNA is non functional. However, how does
ID reach this conclusion ?

So far ID has failed to take any action on these so called research
themes, showing that ID indeed remains a degenerative research program
to use Lakatos terminology.

Hope this clarifies. Needless to say I am not very impressed by Pun's
'arguments' but perhaps you can make a better one?

Pun also stated

ID's criteria for success :
1. Whether its arguments are sound,
2. Whether its evidence for design is solid,
3. Whether its critique of materialistic accounts of evolution holds up,
4. Whether it is developing into a fruitful scientific research program,
5. Whether it is convincing to people with no stake in the outcome of
this debate.

So far it seems that it is 0-5 for ID.

In "The Positive Side of Intelligent Design: A Response to Loren
Haarsma", PSCF 3-07, Behe attempts to argue that ID is a positive
argument. However here he conflates the argument by Paley with how ID
proposes to identify design.

<quote>Rather, in essence, Paley says we infer design when we see a
finely tuned system put together for a purpose.</quote>

The problem for Paley, and the design argument is that natural
processes can also lead to a finely tuned system put together for a
purpose, where purpose, in ID speak is nothing more than function (see
for instance Dembski).

There is nothing positive about the claim of intelligent design which
is simply the set theoretic complement of regularity and chance, in
other words, a negative claim. Behe correctly warns that "be careful
not to confuse the rebuttal of Darwinian claims with the positive
argument for design." And yet, that's all ID has to offer. Only
through conflation of various unrelated claims can ID pretend to be a
positive research programme.

Haarsma's article and rebuttal to Behe can be found in PSCD 3-07 as well

"Is Intelligent Design "Scientific"?
"The Filter Aspect of Intelligent Design: A Reply to Michael J. Behe"

Haarsma mirrors my arguments about scientific vacuity

<quote>The modern Intelligent Design (ID) movement can be understood
as one particular instance of this. Some activities of ID are clearly
"scientific" even under narrow definitions of that term, including
modeling of evolutionary population dynamics, investigating the
adequacy of known evolutionary mechanisms to account for specific
instances of biological complexity, and investigating the general
conditions under which self-organized complexity is possible.
Other activities of ID clearly go beyond science into philosophy and
theology; however, this fact does not render the scientific activities
of ID any less scientific. Rather than debating the demarcation of
science, the real questions we should be asking are: Are the
scientific arguments of ID good science? Are the philosophical
arguments of ID good philosophy? Are the theological arguments of ID
good theology?1
</quote>

I have written a recent posting on Dembski's filter in which it was
also revealed that Tom English joined Marks' research lab. Note that
Tom has presented some excellent arguments against Dembski in the
past, and to my knowledge Dembski has never responded to them.

How do evolutionary processes create information?
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/09/how_does_evolut.html

It seems that ID has chosen to rekindle the 'how does evolution create
information' question. See for instance "Richard Dawkins on the Origin
of Genetic Information" at EvolutionNews.org where spokesperson Luskin
presents this question. And yet, the question has been answered many
times, so why are ID activist ignoring these explanations or
pretending that it has not been answered succinctly and successfully?

One of the basic claims of ID is that processes of regularity and
chance cannot create complex specified information. ID relies here on
an equivocation of the term 'information' since ID's definition of
information is merely a measure of our inability to explain it. In
other words, unlike the complexity and information that science can
explain, ID relies on that which science cannot explain (yet?) and
calls it complexity or information.

Confused? I bet. Many ID proponents have similarly fallen victim to
the bait and switch approach here.

So whenever ID states that science cannot explain complex specified
information, all one has to do is point out the tautological nature of
the claim. When ID then switches to the more common definition of
information and complexity, it is trivial to show how evolutionary
processes can indeed generate in principle information and complexity.

The real question then becomes: Where these processes indeed involved
in the evolution of life on earth? While science provides a rich
framework to study these questions, ID is left at the sidelines,
unable to contribute anything relevant since it refuses to constrain
its designer, it refuses to provide pathways and processes.

And remember, whenever science proposes a pathway, all ID can do is
reject a strawman version of it, namely a pathways based on pure
chance. Of course, any non trivial scientific pathway is inaccessible
to the calculations needed by ID to make its case.

Back to the question of information and complexity. How does science
explain it? Not surprisingly via very simple processes of regularity
and chance: namely selection and variation. As many have shown, these
simple processes are sufficient to explain the information in the
genome. So now the question is not "how does science explain
information in the genome" but "how well do science's explanations
perform"? For that we have to take existing genetic data and determine
actual pathways. This historic reconstruction is not simple, although
there now exist a handful of examples where science has indeed
reconstructed the pathways, consistent with evolutionary theory.
ID may of course argue that science still has not provided all the
answers, but the mere fact that contrary to ID's predictions of an
Edge, science finds why evolution succeeded.

A good example comes from the work on evolvability and RNA. Contrary
to ID's predictions, RNA shows scale free networks, which themselves
can be explained by simple processes of gene duplication and
preferential attachment. These scale free networks provide a rich
environment for evolution to succeed since it both contributes to the
robustness as well as the evolvability of RNA.
The reason is that most RNA structures are close to most other RNA
structures in sequence space. In other words, most any RNA structure
can, via mutations in its sequence, reach any other RNA structure
where most of the mutations are in fact neutral. Such findings help
understand why evolution appears to proceed in stasis followed by
rapid changes. This is exactly what the evidence suggests and the work
on RNA has explained this evidence.

So perhaps ID proponents can help us understand how ID explains the
origin of information in the genome? But it is unlikely that we will
here any further details on this matter. ID has chosen to remain
scientifically vacuous

    Dembski wrote:

<quote> As for your example, I'm not going to take the bait. You're
asking me to play a game: "Provide as much detail in terms of possible
causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian
position." ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it's not ID's task to
match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If
ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for
certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method
of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But
there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems
that is what ID is discovering."
</quote>

Finally, I would like to remind the reader that even if ID were
correct that evolutionary algorithms cannot do better than random
search, random search is an almost trivially effective search
See for instance this link

    Tom English wrote:

<quote> The obvious interpretation of "no free lunch" is that no
optimizer is faster, in general, than any other. This misses some very
important aspects of the result, however. One might conclude that all
of the optimizers are slow, because none is faster than enumeration.
And one might also conclude that the unavoidable slowness derives from
the perverse difficulty of the uniform distribution of test functions.
Both of these conclusions would be wrong.
    If the distribution of functions is uniform, the optimizer's
best-so-far value is the maximum of n realizations of a uniform random
variable. The probability that all n values are in the lower q
fraction of the codomain is p = qn. Exploring n = log2 p points makes
the probability p that all values are in the lower q fraction. Table 1
shows n for several values of q and p.
    It is astonishing that in 99.99% of trials a value better than
99.999% of those in the codomain is obtained with fewer than one
million evaluations. This is an average over all functions, of course.
It bears mention that one of them has only the worst codomain value in
its range, and another has only the best codomain value in its range.
</quote>

In a related note, Tim Lambert and others explore the cherry picking
of global warming deniers at
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/cherry_picking_confirmed.php

<quote>
Earlier I suggested that surfacestations.org was cherry picking by
showing a station with warming as an example of a "bad" station, and a
station with no warming as an example of a "good" station. Of course,
it could have turned out that I was wrong, and those were the
temperature trends of typical "bad" and "good" stations. But now
they've classified one third of the stations and you can see that the
cherry picking has been confirmed -- the trends are the same for
"good" stations (in red) and "bad" stations (in green).
</quote>

So despite carefully selecting stations the overall trend remains
virtually the same between 'good' and 'bad' stations, showing the
robustness of the findings of global warming. The effort to indict
Hanssen's work once again has failed miserably.

Lambert has done some excellent work around the Lancet study of Iraqi
casualties as well see the latest at "New survey puts Iraqi death toll
at more than one million"
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/new_survey_puts_iraqi_death_to.php

On 9/16/07, David Clounch <david.clounch@gmail.com> wrote:
> When a professor of biology publishes in the literature that ID
> scientifically contains content and he proposes ways to investigate
this,
> this directly contradicts the assertion that ID is scientifically vacuous.
> Therefore it is indeed extremely germane to the question at hand, and is
> not at all irrelevant.
>
> Please don't get the idea I agree with Pattle Pun. I merely think that
> when scientists write such articles the contents of their articles need
to
> be addressed prior to boldly claiming the articles to be "vacuous".
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 9/14/07, PvM <pvm.pandas@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I argue that ID is vacuous. Whether or not the content of these
> > articles are vacuous is irrelevant.
> >
> > So let's focus on the issue at hand, which is not about methodological
> > naturalism, or scientism but about the scientific vacuity of ID.
> >
> > Why does it seem to be so hard to point to scientific contributions of
ID?
> >
> > On 9/14/07, David Clounch <david.clounch@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > > Why is ID not science ? SImple, it is based on an eliminative
> > > > argument, and conflates common terminology to lead its followers to
> > > > conclusions that do not follow from the premise. The abuse of
> > > > terminology like information, complexity has done a lot of
disservice
> > > > to science and religious faith.
> > > >
> > > > So to ask you a question: What has ID done with regard to DNA and
> > > > biological structures? Anything worth reporting on from a scientific
> > > > perspective? I'd say, nothing, nothing at all.
> > >
> > >
> > > This has been addressed in various places in PSCF. For example,
> professor
> > > of biology Pattle Pun wrote an article dealing with this in Volume 59,
> No.
> > > 2, June 2007.
> > >
> > > I've been wondering why there isn't more discussion of the content of
> the
> > > PSCF articles on this ASA list.
> > >
> > > Another article in that same issue touches scientism. Its by Ian
> > > Hutchinson, head of the department of Nuclear Science and engineering
> at
> > > MIT.
> > >
> > > And then there is a fascinating piece in the Sept 2007 PSCF by Harry
> Lee
> > > Poe and Chelsea Mytyk (biologist and a med student at UofMo) on
inventor
> of
> > > the term Methodological Naturalism, Paul deVries.
> > > The term first appeared in print in "Naturalism in the Natural
Sciences"
> in
> > > Christian Scholars Review in 1986. It seems to have been invented to
> solve
> > > a theological problem with the interface between Christianity and
> science.
> > > It seems to be a Christian concept which has been distorted into
> > > metaphysical naturalism by both Christians and non-Christians alike.
> > >
> > > If someone wanted to seriously argue that the content of these
articles
> is
> > > "vacuous" then the thing to do is submit a rebutting article (or at
> least a
> > > rebutting letter) to the journal.
> > >
> > > Thank you,
> > > David Clounch (ASA member)
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
>
>

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Received on Mon Sep 17 12:14:35 2007