In a message dated 9/27/2000 4:02:53 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
sejones@iinet.net.au writes:
[...]
> Unfortunately Davies contradicts himself ruling out "a supernatural event".
> But yet another naturalistic explanation is hardly a "radically new idea"!
>
Perhaps not but a supernatural event is hardly a scientific idea. If one were
discussing faith then indeed supernatural events are of interest but not in
science.
[...]
> It is not generally realised that the naturalistic origin of life assumption
> is
> really a return to the old spontaneous generation hypothesis, as Wald
> pointed out (see tagline)
>
Not really. See my response to Susan.
>
> CC>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."
>
> There is no `having it both ways here'. Chris is confused by his own
> misleading *metaphor* - "selection". ID theorists maintain that
> *unintelligent* natural processes (including so-called natural
> `selection'),
> are insufficient to explain the origin of life.
>
The problem with that is that their arguments cannot exclude natural
selection as an intelligent designer. It's through equivocation that
intelligent design tries to eliminate natural designers but does this follow
logically? Nope
ID identifies design, not the designer. This means that ID cannot exclude
natural forces as the intelligent agent of design.
Wesley Elsberry:
"The apparent, but unstated, logic behind the move from design to
agency can be given as follows:
1. There exists an attribute in common of some subset of objects
known to be designed by an intelligent agent.
2. This attribute is never found in objects known not to be designed
by an intelligent agent.
3. The attribute encapsulates the property of directed contingency
or choice.
4.For all objects, if this attribute is found in an object, then we
may conclude that the object was designed by an intelligent agent.
"This is an inductive argument. Notice that by the second step, one
must eliminate from consideration precisely those biological
phenomena which Dembski wishes to categorize. In order to conclude
intelligent agency for biological examples, the possibility that
intelligent agency is not operative is excluded a priori. One large
problem is that directed contingency or choice is not solely an
attribute of events due to the intervention of an intelligent agent.
The "actualization-exclusion-specification" triad mentioned above also
fits natural selection rather precisely. One might thus conclude that
Dembski's argument establishes that natural selection can be recognized
as an intelligent agent. "
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html
> CC>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.
>
> This is what Chris, being a philosophical materialist, believes, but it is
> self-
> refuting. If Chris thinks that there is no essential difference between the
> intelligence of human intelligent designers and the `intelligence' of
> unintelligent of natural processes, then he must claim there is no
> essential
> difference between the outputs of such unintelligent processes and his'
> emails!
>
Here lies the problem that ID refuses to face: ID refers to an intelligent
design as if it could exclude non-natural designers. But ID is infered
through the elimination of chance and regularity. The term ID only seems to
lead to a confusion among its followers that it truely requires intelligence.
But if intelligence can be attributed to natural selection (as shown by
Wesley) then intelligence does not have the meaning that ID'ers seem to claim
it has. Chris is not saying that there is no difference, he is claiming that
natural selection by the environment can be sufficient. Your last assertion
is basically a non-sequitor.
> CC>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.
>
> This is just a dogmatic assertion based on Chris' materialistic philosophy.
> It
> is self-evidently absurd because "physics alone" never writes emails. It
> takes a *mind* to write emails. And it takes a *mind* to devise a self-
> refuting materialist philosophy which denies that the mind really exists.
False analogy. Emails do not arise through selection. I suggest that SJ some
time finding a better analogy. But even then analogies are quite limited in
their use. Perhaps he should address therefore Chris's argument?
>
> CC>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).
>
> See above on Chris (IMHO self-delusory) ambiguous use of words like
> "selection" and "intelligent".
>
If the word "intelligent" is ambiguous then surely the ID movement should
take the blame for it since it is from their argument that it can be
concluded that natural selection can not be excluded as an intelligent
designer. It's interesting and ironic to see ID'ers accuse others of
ambiguous use of words when it seems that ID is shying away from defining
terms such as intelligent design (see van Till).
> The problem with "physics" is any message it writes would all be
> repetitively the same. That is how SETI expects to be able to tell the
> difference between what "physics" transmits and intelligent designers
> transmit.
>
... --- ...
... --- ...
Yep that's surely a natural signal. SOS... So much for a poor analogy and a
non-sequitor.
> CC>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."
>
> Chris forgets that "selection" is only a *metaphor*.
>
> The point that Polanyi was making is that the intervention of something
> *more* than just unintelligent natural "physics" and chemistry was
> required. The title of his paper was: Polanyi M., "Life Transcending
> Physics and Chemistry", Chemical Engineering News, August 21, 1967.
>
So far that's the argument ID is trying to support. Unsuccesfully so far it
seems. If their own arguments cannot exclude natural selection as the
intelligent designer...
> CC>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.
>
> Again, this "selective" is just a *metaphor*. The difference between *real*
> intelligent selection and unintelligent natural processes is seen in this
> excerpt I posted on the difference between undirected natural panspermia
> and directed panspermia:
That there can be difference between the two does not mean that there is
always a difference. In many cases natural design and "intelligent" design
are quite similar (assuming that ID could separate the two).
>
> CC>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?
> "Is it possible" - Chris sounds like Erich Von Daniken! Of course maybe
> *anything* is "possible", or at least can be *imagined* to be "possible.
>
> But it is also "possible" that Chris' materialistic philosophy is wrong!
Sure, it could be as wrong as your theological philosophy. But I thought we
were discussing science here.
>
> Not really. That nature can *appear* to resemble intelligent human
> selection in some respects is not disputed.
So how does ID approach this conundrum? How can ID separate apparant ID from
actual ID when it cannot even separate apparant intelligent designers from
actual intelligent designers?
> The whole point is that there are known empirical limits to such so-called
> natural `selection' in the living world today and no evidence of such
> natural
> `selection' in the prebiotic non-living world.
>
What empirical limits are there to natural selection I wonder? The evidence
for natural selection in the pre-biotic world will be harder to find due to
the limited evidence. Does this mean that one cannot provide for possible
pathways? I doubt it. Certainly the absence of evidence, although tempting to
ID'ers to use as evidence of design, should not be confused with evidence of
design.
[...]
> CC>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.
>
> That is so. My son has just completed his Bachelor of Engineering degree
> in Information Technology, with 1st class honours (he gets his brains from
> his mum!). As can be expected Information Theory was a major component
> of the course. He told me that Information Theory *presumes* an
> intelligent source and that unintelligent natural processes are regarded as
> *noise* to be compensated for and filtered out.
>
I am sure that you can support this with some evidence. It seems that those
in biology disagree with you. Perhaps you are relying too much on information
from a resource biased against non-intelligent sources. That hardly means
that natural selection cannot be an "intelligent source" just like ID cannot
exclude natural selection as an intelligent designer? It's just that
engineers are not interested in natural processes and want to filter out what
they consider noise. But what's noise in one area can be the signal in
another.
> CC>So, if farmers over a period of thousands of years produce a new
> >plant (such as cabbage), their activities are "a profoundly informative
> >intervention."
>
> Not really. They are just selecting out what information was already there.
> This can, at its lowest level (i.e. what Darwin called "unconscious
> selection", resemble natural `selection'.
>
That depends on the definition of information. If that is the case then
natural selection can do exactly what intelligent selection can do.
> The analogy between what Polanyi means by "a *profoundly* informative
> intervention" would be modern GM technology, introducing new
> information that never was there. For example, introducing fish genes into
> plants to make them more resistant to frost. A better example would be the
> creation of new genes from scratch, which have never existed in living
> things and inserting them into the germline. This is being mooted but to
> date it is banned.
>
Gene duplication but even natural selection and random mutations have been
shown to increase the information. So the argument that natural processes
cannot add information requires some work. It gets even better when realizing
that Dembski considers natural selection to be an evolutionary algorithm(s)
" Also, we can point out that Dembski considers natural selection to simply
be an element of the set of evolutionary algorithms
(<http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/ae/dembski_wa/19990913_explaining_csi.html>
)." Wesley Elsberry
> In the case of the origin of life, there are no genes in prebiotic,
> unintelligent
> matter, and no known unintelligent natural processes that can create the
> physical medium the genetic information is encoded upon (the `hardware'),
> let alone the information itself (the `software').
>
A yet to be supported assertion that seems to be more based on faith than on
reality. Since it has already been shown how natural processes can generate
information and since much work is done towards understanding the "hardware"
it would be hard to argue that there are no known unintelligent processes
than can created the information or even the hardware. It's hard to argue
against reality.
> CC>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.
>
> That natural process can destroy or reshuffle existing genetic information
> is
> granted.
>
That natural processes can also create genetic information should also be
granted:
Evolution of Biological Information, T. D. Schneider, Nucleic Acids Research,
28(14): 2794-2799, 2000 as of 2000 July 4
http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/
Or
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 97, Issue 9, 4463-4468, April 25, 2000
Vol. 97, Issue 9, 4463-4468, April 25, 2000 Christoph Adami*,, Charles
Ofria,¤, and Travis C. Collier¦
"To make a case for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity in
biological evolution, complexity needs to be both rigorously
defined and measurable. A recent information-theoretic (but intuitively
evident) definition identifies genomic complexity with the
amount of information a sequence stores about its environment. We investigate
the evolution of genomic complexity in populations
of digital organisms and monitor in detail the evolutionary transitions that
increase complexity. We show that, because natural
selection forces genomes to behave as a natural "Maxwell Demon," within a
fixed environment, genomic complexity is forced to increase. "
> I would even be prepared to grant, *if it could be shown empirically* to
> actually happen, that in the existing *living* world, natural processes
> might
> be able to generate a limited quantity of genetic information 1-bit at a
> time.
It seems that research is way ahead of what you are willing to grant.
[...] snip
> But in this case we are talking about the *non*-living
> world. Recently there was an article about the *minimum*
> amount of genetic information needed to construct a
> living, self-feeding, self-maintaining, self-reproducing,
> organisim, and it needed at least 300 genes:
>
"Likewise, at this rate, roughly an entire human genome of bits (assuming
an average of 1 bit/base, which is clearly an overestimate) could evolve in a
billion years,
even without the advantages of large environmentally diverse worldwide
populations, sexual
recombination and interspecies genetic transfer. However, since this rate is
unlikely to be
maintained for eukaryotes, these factors are undoubtedly important in
accounting for human
evolution. So, contrary to probabilistic arguments by Spetner [36,32], the ev
program also
clearly demonstrates that biological information, measured in the strict
Shannon sense, can
rapidly appear in genetic control systems subjected to replication, mutation
and selection
[33]. "
Tom Schneider Ibid
[...]
> I don't know how many bits of information this would be, I presume it
> would be *thousands*. What Chris has to show is a *non-living*
> unintelligent natural process that can build the information content of 300
> genes, just to get started.
>
See above
> CC>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*)?
>
> See above. There is no dispute that natural processes of differential
> survival
> and reproduction (aka natural `selection') can reduce and reshuffle
> existing
> genetic information in the *living* world.
>
And that mutation and natural selection can generate information
> CC>Due to "a profoundly informative intervention," there are hardly any
> >members of the human race with IQ's less than twenty any more.
>
> I am not sure what Chris' point is here.
>
IQ indeed makes for a poor argument since it based on a distribution curve.
> CC>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.
>
> See above. Chris is, as usual, trying to redefine words out of existence
> that
> threaten his materialistic philosophy!
>
ROTFL. I'd suggest that you deal with "intelligence" as it applies to natural
selection first.
[...]
>
> CCThe 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.
>
> See above. There is no dispute that genetic information exists, and it can
> be
> recombined and reduced. It may even be able to be increased, but there is
> little or no hard evidence for that.
>
Again contradicted by the evidence it seems.
> Even Pierre Grasse, holder of the chair of Evolution at the Sorbonne for 30
> years, past president of the French Academy of Sciences, editor of a 28-
> volume encyclopaedia of zoology, of whom even his opponent Dobzhansky
> conceded, "his knowledge of the living world was encyclopedic", did not
> know where the information in living things came from:
A 1977 source... Dear SJ, please realize that this in scientific terms is
ancient research. Why not focus on those who have more recently addressed
these issues? Revelling in ignorance of others is hardly a convincing
argument.
CC>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.
>
> Again this is begging the question. That "the *information* in their DNA"
> came solely from their "internal and external environments" is what needs
> to be demonstrated.
>
> Chris just *assumes* that it *must* be so, because to him there *is*
> nothing else.
>
So far nothing else seems to be required.
> CC>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.
>
> Apart from the "desperately" we agree on this at least! Now Chris better
> break the news to FJ (aka Pim).
>
FJ agrees with Chris that ID has so far been unable to exclude natural forces
as the "intelligent designer". I am surprised that SJ is still confused about
this issue. I am amazed how the ID movement has been quiet to the excellent
comments by Wesley Elsberry that showed how natural selection for all
practical purposes is an intelligent designer.
> CC>Sorry, kids, but if physics and chemistry are intelligent enough
> >to do the job, your designer might not be such hot stuff anyway.
>
> Agreed with the "if"! But as even Darwin said, "But Oh, what a big `if'"!
Indeed, but that's what ID hoped to show that it could not be the intelligent
designer. So far with little success. So far science has done quite well in
explaining the reality around us. What has ID to offer ? Not much I'd say.
Other than showing of course that natural selection could be the intelligent
designer. But that was hardly what the ID movement had in mind when they
defined ID. If ID is defined to exclude natural designers then ID cannot be
tied to Behe or Dembski's filters reliably anymore.
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