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

Peter's response is somewhat mind baffling as it argues at the same
time that calling something scientifically vacuous cannot be discussed
without a mutually accepted definition or understanding of what is
science, and then he also argues that 'that's not science by any
definition I submit'. In other words, it may indeed be possible to
detect what is NOT science without a mutually agreed and shared
understanding after all.

Just like the definition of life is problematic, determining what is
NOT life is much more straight forward.
But since I have offered to submit to Paul's submission of a
definition of science so that we can explore the extent of the vacuity
of ID, I am looking forward to his contributions in this area.

In Christ.

On 9/17/07, Peter Loose <peterwloose@compuserve.com> wrote:
>
> 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 Wed Sep 19 12:03:50 2007