Tim wrote:
>>I think it's a wonderful way of approaching the question. I
>>agree I'm being more hard-nosed on this subject. That's because
>>I am a discussing this from the standpoint of doing science
>>(methodological naturalism). I'm also asking: "What does
>>proposing intelligent intervention get you, scientifically?"
Me:
>That depends on the subject being discussed. See my
>message concerning proof-reading and specificity.
>I wrote:
>
>" The moral to the story seems to be that the very core biotic processes
>that make life as it is intimating involve sophisticated, efficient,
>and elaborate proof-reading mechanisms. This clearly supports that
>the notion that cellular life depends not only on these very basic
>processes, but also on ensuring the processes exceed a certain
>specificity-threshold. Clearly, an ID scientist might want to
>employ various experiments to identify and quantify this specificity
>threshold. "
>
>Thus, as one example, what we can get scientifically from ID
>is a fresh perspective and impetus for exploring the extent to
>which proof-reading is intrinsic and necessary in this thing
>we call life.
Tim replied:
>I saw that post.
>Currently, we are limited to studying life as it currently
>exists.
When talking about what I was talking about, there is
no evidence that life existed in any other form.
>So if we were to measure some minimum "complexity
>parameter" required for any particular know form of life,
>you'd only have a static measurement for a particular form
>of life. If a bacterium's complexity measurement comes out to
>"5" and a single celled eukaryote at "8", that doesn't tell us
>whether a bacterium could evolve into a eukaryote. These
>measures may tell you very little about the possibility of
>transitional intermediates, which is a separate (but related)
>question. This question has been addressed previously by
>Hubert Yockey (directly, and through reports from Brian
>Harper). Yockey's conclusion: Not knowing how the transition
>from non-life to life may have occurred tells you nothing
>either way. It only says that you don't know -- We cannot
>exhaust all the "possibility space".
Ah, but I wasn't talking about a minimal complexity value
(although I think that would be another relevant avenue to
be explored from an ID perspective). But instead of arguing
this point, let's go back to your most excellent question:
"What does proposing intelligent intervention get you, scientifically?"
Now, let me quote something Chris recently posted to the group
that is also very good:
" But, what ID theory offers is *not* causal principle. It is merely a kind of
claim of historical fact, but with nothing to actually *explain* (except in
a "Just So" story way) the facts. It's *not* scientific explanation if it
does not *imply* the facts. Newton's theory of gravitation not only offered
an explanation in the shallow "Just So," sense, but also in the sense that,
given two planets moving in space, and certain knowledge about their masses,
etc., it would *imply* that they would behave in a fairly specific way. The
theory *implies* that a cannonball dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa
will take a certain time to reach the ground and that it will hit with a
certain speed. The ID approach would not be able to say more than, "Whatever
happens, the designer caused it." How useful is *that*? Could a "designer"
theory of physics make any predictions at all? No, not without introducing
some sort of causal *principle* like the theory of gravitation, or a claim
about the designer's motives and methods. Of course, if it does *that*, the
designer himself becomes superfluous unless there is some proof that he is
necessary for their to be such a principle (this latter approach has
actually been tried, but without success, for a number of reasons).
So, if ID theory is to have a future in journals and science generally, it
has to get off the stupid religion kick and actually *be* science. It has to
do something more useful in a *scientific* sense than provide a
non-predictive, non-implicative "Just So" story."
Now, ID will get us something scientifically if it follows the
advice of Chris Cogan (and even Glenn Morton). It has to come
up with claims and hypotheses that make predictions about the
world, claims that imply this or that should be found. One, I
suppose, could predict a spaceship will be found in Africa, but
the prediction/implication should have some theoretical grounding
in the concept of intelligent design.
Now, I have argued that I consider Dembski's CSI positive evidence
of ID for two simple reasons. It conforms nicely to the pattern
of data we observe to occur when a free and intelligent mind
imposes itself on the world (ie, CSI follows from ID). Secondly,
if we exclude the thing in question, life, the world is a very poor
generator of CSI (Paul Davies nicely explains this in his latest
book). Thus, I focus on the existence of life and find primae
facie evidence that specificity is part of the core of what we
call life, namely, proof-reading. I thus predict
that if life is indeed the effect of ID, this proof-reading exists
for a rational, engineering reason, namely, life as we know it
requires a minimal level of specificity if it is to exist and
propagate. ID then might be used to decipher a minimal
specificity threshold required for life.
But let me add something that I found today in light of
Chris' claim that ID needs predictions/implications about
the world. I knew that proof-reading (a reflection of
specificity) was involved in DNA replication and translation.
make sense. But I then begin to think that if life was designed
such that proof-reading was essential, proofreading in a key step in
the pathway of information flow was missing, namely transcription.
I thought that an intelligent designer going to the trouble of
implementing proof-reading mechanisms during the replication
of DNA, the charging of tRNAs, and in the anticodon-codon
interactions would likewise ensure fidelity in the intervening
step, that of transcription. If indeed specificity is crucial to life,
we would expect to see it at all levels of information flow and
it would not make *rational* sense to proof-read the anticodon-codon
interaction, but not the generation of codons represented by
the mRNA.
Now, I do know quite a few things about transcription, but my
focus has largely been on initiation and termination. I had no
idea if elongation involved proofreading and have never heard
this to be suggested. But based upon ID-reasoning, I predicted
(this morning) proofreading did occur during transcriptional
elongation. This seems to me a clear implication of ID in
light of my descriptions.
So I just did a literature search. You guessed it - I was right.
Several papers have come out that have identified proofreading
function not only in RNA polymerase II (and RNA pol from
E. coli), but also certain transcription factors (TFIIS) appear
to enhance this activity (I can supply the references to anyone
who is interested). If I had not discovered these papers, I
would have still predicted the discovery of such activity and
this would serve as a major impetus for scientific experimentation.
While this may not be an earth-shattering discovery, this
demonstrates to me that ID can "get us something scientifically."
And I think ID would make progress if it adopted this incremental,
prediction-confirmation approach as long as it begins to pull
various processes/hypotheses ultimately into a larger whole.
And in my opinion, an ID theorist would have much better spent
his time trying to uncover proof-reading function in transcription
than looking for a secret message in the gene that was transcribed.
Continuing to answer the question, ""What does proposing intelligent
intervention get you, scientifically?", I replied:
>Or consider the backward wiring of the vertebrate eye. The non-ID
>approach sees nothing anomolous about this and simply accepts
>this odd "design" as the results of natural selection jury-rigging things
>together. Thus, there is no need to probe further. But an ID approach
>(that proposes the eye was designed) might look for a rationale behind
>this wiring that exposes a previously undetected level of sophistication
>and elegance.
Tim replied:
>And, very likely, indistinguishable from a natural explanation.
>Why should we thinkg that evolved, jury-rigged systems would
>not display some level of sophistication or elegance?
It is true that evolution via natural selection/drift provides no
predictions/expectations about the essence of biological systems.
But the question is what ID gets us scientifically, not whether
it gets us something natural selection doesn't get us (given
that natural selection gets us anything we can imagine, you'll
never be able to distinguish between the two in a silver-bullet
type of manner). Here ID would give us the impetus to more deeply
probe the system as it is portrayed as something no intelligent
mind would put together (this, of course, assumes one has reason
to think the eye was designed in the first place). If it was jury-rigged,
there is no reason to look for a rational reason for the construction.
That it simply works is good enough.
Thus, what I am trying to show is how ID can work *independently*
of evolution via natural selection. ID predicts a *rational* design,
and thus has more constraints than evolution via natural selection.
It's not a question of whether the eye was made by ID or natural
selection. It's a question of whether the basis for claiming it
was not designed by an intelligent agent is indeed sound.
Mike