Re: [asa] Rejoinder 5E from Timaeus -- to Steve Matheson

Hi Steve,

"I should stop. I look forward to hearing from you and others. "

Your words make a lot of sense to me.

I'll defintely try to get hold of Del Ratzsch's book - I'll put it on top of my Christmas list. :)

I needs to look into counter-flow. I sure do like this:

"So design is to be understood in terms of deliberate agent activity intentionally aimed at generating particular patterns. Pattern, in turn, is to be understood in terms of structures that have special affinities to cognition -- which correlate to mind. The agent activity involved produces artifacts that are defined via counterflow and that frequently exhibit familiar primary marks of agent activity and counterflow by which that activity and artifactuality can be identified. And where the correlation to mind is sufficiently powerful, further conclusions of designedness or even of the specifics of the design and intent themselves, can be warranted."

Yet it still seems to me that Monod was right - detecting design is akin to detecting another mind.

Mike

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Steve Matheson
  To: Ted Davis
  Cc: ASA List
  Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 10:16 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Rejoinder 5E from Timaeus -- to Steve Matheson

  Hi Timaeus--

  Just a few fairly quick comments and responses.

  1. I recommend you move Del Ratzsch's book (Nature, Design and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science, SUNY Press 2001) to the top of your reading list. I'm sure you will love the book. Del's project, in his own words (from the preface):

  "As I became involved in the growing design debate, it became clear to me that almost none of the foundational philosophical work essential for such debate to make real progress had been or was being done. The present book is thus not a piece of advocacy either for or against such claims. It is a philosophical attempt to clarify some of the conceptual landscape which productive pursuit of broader design debates must negotiate."

  I just can't give a high enough recommendation to the book. I'm not a philosopher, but I'm able to follow the reasoning without much problem, and I have been significantly reoriented by reading Del's work on the subject. For example, I used to identify design arguments as god-of-the-gaps thinking, in principle; Del demolishes that one in a few paragraphs. (In his more basic, and classic, book on philosophy of science: Science & Its Limits, IVP 2000.) I think you will appreciate the clarity he brings: the clearing away of nonsense leaves the way open for substantive thought on the questions we all think are interesting and important. And you can get it in paperback. :-)

  2. Here's the summary paragraph from the first chapter:

  "So design is to be understood in terms of deliberate agent activity intentionally aimed at generating particular patterns. Pattern, in turn, is to be understood in terms of structures that have special affinities to cognition -- which correlate to mind. The agent activity involved produces artifacts that are defined via counterflow and that frequently exhibit familiar primary marks of agent activity and counterflow by which that activity and artifactuality can be identified. And where the correlation to mind is sufficiently powerful, further conclusions of designedness or even of the specifics of the design and intent themselves, can be warranted."

  The idea is not that counterflow defines design. The idea is that agent activity results in counterflow, which frequently can be detected by us. Agent activity need not involve design, but design is defined as deliberate agent activity. So for example, an idly whittled stick will bear clear marks of artifactuality (i.e., counterflow) but not necessarily indicate design. Design, in other words, always involves counterflow, but the converse is not true.

  Ratzsch explains why "complexity" is really not a useful concept in identifying counterflow. (Dembski's discussions of "specified complexity" make some similar points, if I recall correctly.) Very simple artifacts can bear unmistakeable counterflow marks, while extremely complex objects and systems need not involve design or counterflow at all. Some forms of complexity might get our attention or arouse our suspicion, but what we really need to see is counterflow. This is precisely the problem with identifying design in natural objects or phenomena. The counterflow is not obvious.

  Now, I should acknowledge that I misunderstood your introduction of avian lungs into the Martian sculpture discussion: your intent was to show that we would use the same reasoning in design detection in both cases. I agree, and so would Ratzsch. But I do think it's important to further acknowledge that mere "complexity" is regularly advanced as evidence of design, perhaps by less sophisticated defenders of ID, and to agree that the mere complexity of the avian lung is simply not (by itself) indicative of design.

  3. Ratzsch convincingly establishes that counterflow can be identified at any or all of the three different aspects of the production of something: the initial state, the process, and the product or result. I take this to mean that the identification of counterflow in, say, the establishment of the first cell, followed by subsequent generation of the entire biosphere by "unaided nature," would be just as compelling evidence of design as would be the identification of counterflow marks in, say, mutation patterns in ancient hominids. (More accurately, it would indicate agent activity, but I think you know what I mean.)

  4. Now to your question. First you wrote this:

  -------

  In order to be sure that we have “evidence of action counter to the expected action of nature operating freely”, we have to know what nature does, or can do, when it is ‘operating freely’.

  -------

  Yes, exactly.

  Then you pointed out that "Darwin-lovers" believe that nature is capable of generating complexity and integration "unaided," while "Darwin-doubters" do not believe this. And I think you have that right. This led you to identify one type of ID position as the view that Darwinian evolution is "nothing but one long counterflow." I like it a lot. It helps us see how we're viewing the world differently. Let me reiterate that I find nothing intellectually disreputable in that position.

  And then you asked:

  -------

  Why is Darwinian evolution itself not a counter-intuitive theory from the outset? [...] Do we not see, in our observations of nature, a natural “flow” toward either degradation, or at best stasis (cows always begetting cows, etc.)? Do we ever see any marked advance in integrative complexity in living systems, other than that which we introduce in the breeding-yards or in the genetics lab, via human intelligence?

  -------

  This, my friend, is the heart of the matter. This is the only question worth discussing, in my opinion; assertions by you and other ID proponents that there is something incongruent about simultaneously embracing "darwinism" and Christianity are utterly unconvincing, because they are completely wrong-headed, as Ted and others have made abundantly clear. But this question...this is the one. So let me take a few paragraphs to attempt an explanation of why I see the living world differently than you do.

  In short, I do see relentless change as the natural flow in organisms. And I see the generation of integrated complexity, through completely natural means, as not only "natural" but as a basic characteristic of life on earth. And so I find the proposal that organisms have evolved naturally to be consistent with what is daily accomplished by "unaided nature."

  First, the fact of relentless change. I see numerous examples of significant biological change occurring through selection and "chance" in the presence of immense genetic diversity. I read that measures of rates of evolutionary change through geologic history are consistent with rates of evolutionary change observed and measured today. (In fact, rates of change observable on human time scales are thought to be orders of magnitude FASTER than rates of change over tens of millions of years.) When I consider the profound genetic diversity of populations, shown recently to be significantly underestimated when single-nucleotide changes are the exclusive focus, in combination with the many genetic forces that maintain diversity, I am unsurprised by the suggestion that selection and drift can lead to rapid and dramatic change. My understanding of these genetic forces, in combination with rapidly-accumulating genetic data showing the precise genetic relationships among taxa, leads me to expect that the genetic changes that distinguish cows from cowbirds and cowboys occurred through the same mechanisms that govern genetic change today. I just don't see any reason to suspect that this process, among all the amazing processes in biology or the rest of creation, must have required extraordinary agent activity.

  Second, the fact of natural generation of integrated complexity. I'm a developmental biologist. My scientific interests lie specifically in the area of how cells and embryos generate integrated complexity. A single cell is transformed into a fully formed mouse in 18.5 days. That's a spectacular example of the de novo generation of integrated complexity; indeed, the mind boggles at the feat. The achievement of a bacterial cell duplicating itself is still an amazing thing, perhaps less amazing than the making of a mouse but just as clearly evincing the generation of integrated complexity by "unaided nature." I'm not saying that developmental biology rules out design -- hardly. I'm saying that I look at evolution in the same way I look at development, or at cell division, or at the control of gene expression. They all do amazing things, awe-inspiring, stunning, jaw-droppingly astonishing things, in which integrative complexity is the inevitable result. And amazingly, they all seem to proceed by mechanisms we can refer to as "unaided nature." For me, there is nothing uniquely extraordinary about the idea that life arose and diversified "naturally" in our world. Extraordinary? By all means. Uniquely extraordinary, in need of a fundamentally different explanation? No.

  Now this doesn't mean I've ruled out agent activity, nor do I mean to assert that counterflow will never be found in the development of the living world. I am intrigued by discussions of front-loading, and I think it's fair to say that there are no compelling darwinian accounts for the development of early life and specifically of intracellular nanotechnology (protein machines). No ID proponent has ever shown that known mechanisms of evolution are insufficient to account for the tree of life, but neither have evolutionary biologists demonstrated that they are. In other words, and in summary, my expectations of the natural world are very different from yours and from those of ID proponents in general. But I'm trying to distinguish what I expect from what I know.

  I should stop. I look forward to hearing from you and others.

  Steve Matheson

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Received on Sun Oct 12 00:32:04 2008