At 06:19 PM 09/17/2000, you wrote:
>Reflectorites
>
>On Fri, 15 Sep 2000 11:44:15 EDT, FMAJ1019@aol.com wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>SJ>Note "New lines of thinking" and "new modes of thinking" are needed.
> >There is one "mode of thinking" they all reject out-of-hand, namely
> >intelligent design! If in fact intelligent design was how the origin of
> life
> >happened, then they are doomed to frustration forever trying to find out
> >how it happened by unintelligent natural processes.
>
>FJ>If they accepted ID then why would there be the need for more research?
>
>Why would there not be "the need for more research"? Knowing something
>is designed would not preclude finding out more about how it was
>designed.
>
>Indeed, if design is scientifically demonstrated it would probably
>be the biggest shot in the arm for "research" *ever*.
>
>FJ>It's
> >the present approach which has lead to new discoveries, new lines of
> thinking
> >etc.
>
>That's not what Dose said in the quote I posted. Here it is again:
>
> "More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the
> fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better
> perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on
> Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on
> principal theories and experiments in the field either end in
> stalemate or in a confession of ignorance. New lines of thinking and
> experimentation must be tried. ...The flow sheet shown in Figure 2
> is a scheme of ignorance. Without fundamentally new insights in
> evolutionary processes, perhaps involving new modes of thinking,
> this ignorance is likely to persist. (Dose K., "The Origin of Life:
> More Questions Than Answers", Interdisciplinary Science Reviews,
> Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, pp.348,355).
>
>"New lines of thinking ... new modes of thinking" does not mean endlessly
>recycling old ways of thinking. There is *one* new mode of thinking that
>science has steadfastly tried to ignore for the last 140 years and that is
>*design*!
Chris
Since this "new" mode of thinking has been around for thousands of years,
I'm not at all sure why you *call* it new. Even in a modern form, it's been
around since Paley, *200* years ago.
>Here is an earlier ID prediction on OoL that has so far proved true:
>
> "Notice, however, that the sharp edge of this critique is not what
> we *do not* know, but what we *do* know. Many facts have
> come to light in the past three decades of experimental inquiry into
> life's beginning. With each passing year the criticism has gotten
> stronger. The advance of science itself is what is challenging the
> nation that life arose on earth by spontaneous (in a thermodynamic
> sense) chemical reactions. Over the years a slowly emerging line or
> boundary has appeared which shows observationally the limits of
> what can be expected from matter and energy left to themselves,
> and what can be accomplished only through what Michael Polanyi
> has called "a profoundly informative intervention.". When it is
> acknowledged that most so-called prebiotic simulation experiments
> actually owe their success to the crucial but *illegitimate* role of
> the investigator, a new and fresh phase of the experimental
> approach to life's origin can then be entered. Until then however,
> the literature of chemical evolution will probably continue to be
> dominated by reports of experiments in which the investigator, like
> a metabolizing Maxwell Demon, will have performed work on the
> system through intelligent, exogenous intervention. Such work
> establishes experimental boundary conditions, and imposes
> intelligent influence/control over a supposedly "prebiotic"
> earth. As
> long as this informative interference of the investigator is
> ignored,
> the illusion of prebiotic simulation will be fostered. We would
> predict that this practice will prove to be a barrier to solving the
> mystery of life's origin." (Thaxton C.B., Bradley W.L. & Olsen
> R.L., "The Mystery of Life's Origin," 1992, p.185. Emphasis in
> original.)
Chris
This is almost pure argument from authority and ignorance (not a pretty
combination), and, unfortunately, one hardly to be trusted. Now, if there
were just some *facts* involved instead of just Thaxton's, Bradley's,
Olsen's, and Polyani's *opinions*, we might have something.
As usual, ID theorists want to have it both ways. They want to claim that
*selection* cannot be responsible for what we see out of all the
googolplexes of variations we would see if *all* of them from the beginning
survived and reproduced, and yet, no matter *what* selection mechanism is
used in research (probably even including random selection), they *also*
want to claim that the researchers "will have performed work on the system
through intelligent, exogenous intervention." That is, they will claim that
a systematic selection criteria, of any sort, is "intelligent, exogenous
intervention."
But, if "intelligent" selection is all that's required to make one a
"designer," then the environment, via chemistry, and physics, is all
that's needed for "intelligence," because they are severely selective at
the margins, and thus leave life *only* the option of producing enough
variations to enable it to adjust, or go extinct. Since functionality
requires a certain kind of structure (one capable of taking in energy and
performing life-sustaining actions), *PHYSIC* alone provides a fundamental
and major selective mechanism. Moreover, it is "intelligent" in that it is
anything but random; it is systematic and *permanent* (no organism can ever
escape it's limitations and requirements).
Oh, but I forgot; selection cannot control the flow of variations that are
actually produced, and therefore cannot be responsible for the "profoundly
informative intervention." Of course, we could add that, over periods of
tens of millions of years, many environments have provided their own
specific selective factors, such as temperature, moisture, oxygen levels,
water pressure, the presence or absence of many materials, and threats from
other organisms. Is it possible that these, too, contributed to the
"profoundly informative intervention" by leaving *only* the variations that
meet the informational requirements imposed by their environments? If you
kill off all the lighter-colored members of a species, is it not true that
the ones that survive over many generations will be the one's that look
like they've been "informed" to be darker? If biological inviability kills
off the variations that do not have the means of adequately processing
nutrients, will it not be the case that those that remain, if any,
absolutely *must* be (barring further occasional variations) the one's that
have been "informed" as to how to process nutrients effectively?
Oh, right. I forgot. Naturally occurring variations only count as
"information" when they are selected by human beings, not when such factors
as the physical *requirements* of surviving and reproducing are all that's
involved. So, if farmers over a period of thousands of years produce a new
plant (such as cabbage), their activities are "a profoundly informative
intervention." but when *predators* or disease or food supplies do it,
there's no informative intervention at all, right? Water, temperature,
gravity, etc., have no informative effects, even though the fact that they
or their lack can kill unsuited variations would seem, indeed, to be
information of a sort. If you found that a significant percentage of each
generation of a species was getting killed off by something while nearly
all the rest were thriving, do you not think that we could possibly get
*information* from examining both the living and the dead in detail
(perhaps *genetically*)?
Why, surprise of surprises, we *can* sometimes do this. Much of medical
research is devoted to precisely such questions as what *genetic*
differences do healthy people have from people who develop certain medical
problems? More significantly, we have, in many such cases, found definite
and testable answers to such questions.
Due to "a profoundly informative intervention," there are hardly any
members of the human race with IQ's less than twenty any more.
What *is* the "profoundly informative intervention"? Simple: failure to
reproduce, often caused by *death*. This is about as profound as an
"intervention" can possibly get. Death (of a gene) "teaches" the species
not to use that gene very often. Survival of a gene, because of it's
effects, "teaches" the species to keep on using that gene heavily.
Thus, there *is* a profoundly informative intervention, for sure, but it's
not at all the one Thaxton and others would like. It is the laws of
physics, chemistry, and local requirements for survival of genes and
genomes forcibly intervening into the affairs of every species and removing
information that doesn't work. The entire issue can be analyzed *solely* in
terms of information, in that we have a "producer" of information
(variation, modification of genetic material), and a severe filter that
only lets *some* information survive. Thus, the genes of all organisms
reflect the history of their past environments (including the organismic
environments of the cells they were in, etc.). Thus, if we had a large
number of a wide variety of species from all over at all periods during the
past 3.8 billion years, we could reconstruct many of the details of both
their internal and external environments from the *information* in their
DNA. We would find which organisms were predators and which prey, and even,
in many cases, which preyed on which. We would find out much about climate,
about availability of water, and so on, because, though the information
went in randomly (or semi-randomly) via variational mechanisms, *survival*
of the genes and their information content was by no means random.
The problem with physics, chemistry, and actual local physical conditions
being the "intelligent" designer is only that *that's* not the "intelligent
designer" that nearly all the ID crowd desperately *wants* to be the
designer. Sorry, kids, but if physics and chemistry are intelligent enough
to do the job, your designer might not be such hot stuff anyway. It might
turn out to be some deranged old alien from a galaxy far, far away, who has
been idling away his waning years by occasionally manipulating a codon or
two to produce a variation that might not otherwise have occurred.
Or, perhaps his *sole* function has been to attempt to *thwart* evolution
of new life forms. Maybe the "Cambrian Explosion" occurred when he was
momentarily diverted by some other hobby. Maybe all he does is occasionally
*prevent* a really novel and otherwise-beneficial development from
continuing. For example, for all we know, there might have been a new
variation to the human brain and body would have given us all a life span
of two hundred years or more and vastly more intelligence (including of
sorts not normally measured on IQ tests), and this "intelligent designer"
noticed it and murdered the people it first occurred in so as to ensure
that this variation would not get passed on.
That is, there is no guarantee whatever that the "intelligent designer," if
it exists, is anything at all that ID-theorists would find to their liking,
especially since what they mostly seem to *like* is a mythological,
mentally ill, and morally deranged character from the Bible. It is doubtful
that any designers who would be interested in creating or manipulating life
on Earth would be so screwed up, though I suppose it's possible. Just very
doubtful.
I know: Much of this has all been pointed out before, many times and in
many ways. But my formulation above seemed sufficiently different, deriving
as it did from ID-theorist's own claims, that I thought it was worth passing on.
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