An Experimental Test of ID? Really?

You're too late, I've already made that point.

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/10/in_the_followin.html#comment-53512

So you did! I missed that.

RBH

It is worth making again however. This is one of the key points about the ability of ID to make any form of testable prediction. ID is inherently unfalsifiable until they describe or actually characterise what their mysterious 'designer' actually is. Behe has simply put forth a scenario where it's tails I win and heads you lose.

It seems like a simpler way to say all of this would be just:

Challenged to come up with an experimental test of intelligent design, Behe instead gave a (poor) example of an experimental test of evolution. In doing so he once again corroborated the old allegations that the "Intelligent Design" movement makes absolutely no positive arguments in favor of ID, only negative arguments against evolution.

I know of no designer "shielding" that would protect the experiment from interference, no Faraday cage that would keep the designer's meddling influence out.

It seems there is a flaw in the tin foil plan.

Bwhhhhaaaaaaaa
Hahahahahahahaha
Bwhhhhaaaaaaaa

Zarquon

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/11/tinfoil_hats_as_government_plot/

Thats all part of my Evil Plot

(holds pinky to corner of mouth)

I you familiar with "raindance psychology"?

What you are talking about is similar.

Consider.

You perform the raindance.

1. It rains, so the raindance worked.
2. It doesn't rain, so you didn't perform the raindance properly.

How dare you! I mean, really, how dare you take what the IDers say more seriously than they do!

The point is painfully simple: absent any constraints on what the designer(s) can or will do, there is no conceivable control condition that could make the discrimination we need, no condition that could disprove its(their) actions in anything resembling Behe's "thought experiment".

Really Donald M must you be so tiresome.
Why not just call it looking out of your eyes.

If you're going to use this argument, then you have to carry it all the way through. How can you be sure that some intelligent designer hasn't watched and affected the results according to his/her/its whims for every scientific experiment ever conducted?

— Donald M

In other words, its a meaningless objection.

"irreducibly complex"...who but, Creation/ID understands this to be an actual conecpt of Science???

Does the general scientific community accept the notion of "irreducibly complex"???

Or is this a term made up by the Creationist to justify their arguments???

> This is in the same category as the question 'how do you know we all didn't spring into existence five minutes ago with all our memories of experiences the way they are?'

That's true. And in the same category as ID. Because IDiots reject methodological naturalism, on which all science is based. You have just made an argument in favor of methodological naturalism (and science).

> In other words, its a meaningless objection.

And this part is false.

Steverino
Cheer up.

irreducibly complex is completely and utterly dead you won't be seeing it again anytime soon unless groupies are singing it in the streets.

It died on the witness stand in Dover
Behe "the man who thought he saw the mind of god" killed it with his own hands.
Weirder than fiction look up the transcripts

expect some new blizzard of BS sometime soon.

If you're going to use this argument, then you have to carry it all the way through. How can you be sure that some intelligent designer hasn't watched and affected the results according to his/her/its whims for every scientific experiment ever conducted? You can't restrict this argument to just evolutionary biology experiments. How do you know that it isn't possible that everytime an astronomer looks through his telescope, she only sees what the designer wants her to see? How do you know that the designer didn't affect Newton's calculations or Darwin's observations? This is in the same category as the question 'how do you know we all didn't spring into existence five minutes ago with all our memories of experiences the way they are?' In other words, its a meaningless objection.

If you're going to use this argument, then you have to carry it all the way through. How can you be sure that some intelligent designer hasn't watched and affected the results according to his/her/its whims for every scientific experiment ever conducted? You can't restrict this argument to just evolutionary biology experiments. How do you know that it isn't possible that everytime an astronomer looks through his telescope, she only sees what the designer wants her to see? How do you know that the designer didn't affect Newton's calculations or Darwin's observations?

— Domald M

In his comment 56490 Donald M has in fact argued that ID "theory" is unfalsifiable(apparently not noticing it) - a thesis ID advocates often reject very vigorously. Make up your mind - a little consistency would be a nice change.

The Achilles Heel to this entire argument is that it is premised on a Designer/s who is/are able to, and willing to, involve themselves in on-going natural processes. That's not what ID postulates. ID notes the positive evidence of "design" in nature; it doesn't postulate that this design is itself continously on-going. So this becomes a straw-man argument.

Let's look at the fossil record: what was the last major innovation and when did it occur? Homo sapiens. About 150,000 years ago. On that basis, it would appear the last "tinkering" that occurred, occurred at least 150,000 years ago. So, if we run this experiment with 10,000 generations of bacteria, that will take, let's say, 30 years; then the chance of tinkering is 30/150,000, which is 1 in 5,000. I think it's safe to rule out the "tinkering."

Why doesn't somebody run the experiment? Or are you afraid?

All you have done is demonstrate that laboratory results regarding either ID or creationism are ambiguous. In other words, all you have done is demonstrate that Darwinism has zero intellectual superiority over ID. Experiments purportedly validating evolution are equally ambiguous for exactly the same reasons you cite. Why then should we allow the teaching of one ambiguity over another?

As I pointed out to Rob Pennock at the NTSE conference in 1997, he should never get into a taxi. After all, the driver has the freedom to steer the taxi into oncoming traffic at any time. For that matter, driving a car oneself is probably unwise, given what other drivers might do.

And don't get me started about air travel.

Blast and Paul Cady

Just one simple question, come on show us how brave you really are or not.

Define the "Intelligent Designer."

We will assume there are no smoke detectors in the room.

— RBH

And now for something completely different but the same

A Zen Koan.

Not the Wind, Not the Flag

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: `The flag is moving.'
The other said: `The wind is moving.'

The sixth patriach happened to be passing by. He told them: `Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.'

This is actually an excellent point and an excellent discussion, because if the IDists were honest, this objections would force them to start describing their designer. They would have to resort to DesCartes' old saw that he is a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient designer who just wouldn't mess with things. Of course that forces them to admit that he is their Christian god. It pins them down. But since they will never say that, this objection effectively knocks their argument down. Truly this is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Nice work, Mr. Hoppe (and John).

Let's look at the fossil record: what was the last major innovation and when did it occur? Homo sapiens. About 150,000 years ago. On that basis, it would appear the last "tinkering" that occurred, occurred at least 150,000 years ago.

— blast

I'm not sure what Paul Nelson's point was, but I think he's agreeing with us here: that planning real behavior (or experiments) based on remote probabilities is unwise. (Though the remoteness of the probability of the kind of event that would render Behe's experiment sensible is a whole lot greater than of a fatal traffic mishap on any given car trip.)

I think the most noteworthy point of RBH's post is the last bit. I would flunk a middle-schooler for proposing this as an example of how science works. And this guy is a tenured professor. My condolences to Lehigh, and its alumni, past and present.

Actually, if you refrain from eating spaghetti anywhere near your experiment, your results should be fine. Oh, and be sure not to dress like a pirate either.

But seriously...

An experiment like this would be worthwhile. Here's why:

ID's target audience is *not* true believers. True believers *already* believe, and they'll believe just about anything if it comes from their ideological tribe. (e.g. Adam and Eve riding on dinosaurs.) ID's target audience is intelligent people who do not have specialized expertise in biology, information theory, evolution, algorithms, etc. In other words, their target audience is people that they can hoodwink by looking like science and using lots of scientific sounding jargon and (Dembski is the master of this one) impenetrable math.

Every once in a while a story about evolution (or other science topics) pops up on www.slashdot.org and this is demonstrated in practice. You'll get posters who argue for ID. They are not biologists, but they do tend to be technically inclined folk. This is ID's target audience.

So consider what an experiment showing the evolution of a really complex system like this would mean to *these* people. These people are not going to believe that the lowar'duh reached into the culture and poofed these adaptiations into existence. For them, such a demonstration would be pretty powerful.

However, I think it would take a *long* time. I think it would take more than 10,000 generations.

I know this is only barely on topic, but I also know someone on this thread can answer this. Is it true as I've heard that humans only utilize a portion of our brains, and, if so, how would that be explainable from an evolutionary standpoint? Do we have any other systems with excess capacity?

I'm not sure what Paul Nelson's point was, but I think he's agreeing with us here: that planning real behavior (or experiments) based on remote probabilities is unwise. (Though the remoteness of the probability of the kind of event that would render Behe's experiment sensible is a whole lot greater than of a fatal traffic mishap on any given car trip.)

— Russell

Blast and Paul:
you are making some totally unwarranted assumptions about the Designer, and as you know, that's supposed to be a big ID no-no.

Blast assumes that we can predict the Designer's future actions with some certainty based on a ridiculously incomplete understanding of the past (incidentally, Blast, I think most Christians would strongly object to your certainty that the Designer's last supernatural intervention in the physical world occurred 150,000 years ago). Note that Behe himself went out of his way to assure us, under oath, that ID can make no inferences whatsoever about the Designer from Its designs, other that It designed them.

Paul says that, like a taxi driver, one can safely assume the Designer has some sort of consistent long-term plan, or even benevolent attitude towards its charges' well-being. That seems fairly unwarranted from the same designer that put TTSS in bacteria (or if TTSS evolved from the flagellum, gave some bacteria the way of developing a deadly weapon by simply shedding some flagellar components - a big design oversight!). I don't see how one can rule out a Designer who likes to fool the damn' scientists to believe they evolved a flagellum in the lab, just for the fun of it, or, as RBH said, one who plucks flagella off bacteria to frustrate investigators.

To copy another of Behe's and ID's lines of argumentation, I would say that inferential analysis based on the only Designers we know about, i.e. us, suggests that Designers certainly don't shy away from designing elaborated pranks just for the fun of it. In fact, the way some current experiments are going in my own lab, the hypothesis of a supernatural Designer bent on frustrating researchers by tinkering with bacterial cultures seems highly supported by evidence. ;-)

As for Paul Cady, he just reiterates the point: if one sheds methodological naturalism, all sciences suffer and become just as powerless as ID. Not just "darwinism", but everything from experimental physics to pharmacology would make no sense if one could not work under the methodological assumption that supernatural intervention does not occur in empirically investigatable systems.

"We know nothing about the probability" and "the probability must be low" are not only different statements, they are mutually exclusive.

blast emitted: Let's look at the fossil record: what was the last major innovation and when did it occur? Homo sapiens. About 150,000 years ago. On that basis, it would appear the last "tinkering" that occurred, occurred at least 150,000 years ago. So, if we run this experiment with 10,000 generations of bacteria, that will take, let's say, 30 years; then the chance of tinkering is 30/150,000, which is 1 in 5,000. I think it's safe to rule out the "tinkering."

>>Is it true as I've heard that humans only utilize a portion of our brains, and, if so, how would that be explainable from an evolutionary standpoint? Do we have any other systems with excess capacity?<<

Complete myth, triggered by misunderstandings of early brain studies. I nice explanation (and the evolutionary significance) is found here: http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/brain-myth

Adam
The evidence (talk origins)is in and the debate is over (all their lies have been debunked) we are battling a blistering blizzard of blithering BS from the DI if those "intelligent target audience" don't get it now they probably never will. How many great series have been done on TV, they are just not interested.
The battle has moved to the courts, they have lost every case, what is needed is leadership from the top of government and the sane Churches.

"To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure, for mobility, say, grow it for 10,000 generations, and see if a flagellum, or any equally complex system, was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven."

Let's look at the fossil record: what was the last major innovation and when did it occur? Homo sapiens. About 150,000 years ago.

Please define "major innovation." How is Homo sapiens a "major innovation" with respect to H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis, or H. neanderthalensis? Does the emergence and diversification of Hippidion discussed here count as a "major innovation"? Why or why not?

Thanks, Imf3b. I was wondering why IDers would be pointing to obscurities like flagellum when human consciousness would seem to be sufficiently complex (i.e. too complex for them) for their purposes.

The Achilles Heel to this entire argument is that it is premised on a Designer/s who is/are able to, and willing to, involve themselves in on-going natural processes. That's not what ID postulates. ID notes the positive evidence of "design" in nature; it doesn't postulate that this design is itself continously on-going. So this becomes a straw-man argument.

— BlastfromthePast

Let's look at the fossil record: what was the last major innovation and when did it occur? Homo sapiens.

Why doesn't somebody run the experiment? Or are you afraid?

Alexey Merz

By George, I think you might be onto something there.
Wasn't the Ravenous Blugbatter Beast from Trall Intelligently Designed?

I'm not sure what Paul Nelson's point was [...]

I just hear this from ABC Radio in Australia.
It is the Saturday 29 October 2005 broadcast and can be found here.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/default.htm

There is a good piece on ID and the actuall theory of ID with all the explanations you need about 50 minutes into the broadcast. There the ID segment starts 38min into the broadcast.

I recomend everyone to listen to this.

All you have done is demonstrate that laboratory results regarding either ID or creationism are ambiguous. In other words, all you have done is demonstrate that Darwinism has zero intellectual superiority over ID. Experiments purportedly validating evolution are equally ambiguous for exactly the same reasons you cite. Why then should we allow the teaching of one ambiguity over another?

— paul cady

Let's look at the fossil record: what was the last major innovation and when did it occur? Homo sapiens. About 150,000 years ago. On that basis, it would appear the last "tinkering" that occurred, occurred at least 150,000 years ago. So, if we run this experiment with 10,000 generations of bacteria, that will take, let's say, 30 years; then the chance of tinkering is 30/150,000, which is 1 in 5,000. I think it's safe to rule out the "tinkering." Why doesn't somebody run the experiment? Or are you afraid?

— BlastFromThePast

Evilutionists are indeed hoopy froods.

To answer the question of why H sapiens is the last 'major innovation', that would be because ID is a desperate attempt to cling to the dogma that God (sorry, God or aliens with amazing technology)specially created humans in his (their amazing) image. If humans aren't the last major innovation, and are instead just another piece of the evolutionary puzzle, then they aren't special. If humans are special, then the religious dogma falls apart, and ID no longer has a purpose.

> The Achilles Heel to this entire argument is that it is premised on a Designer/s who is/are able to, and willing to, involve themselves in on-going natural processes. That's not what ID postulates. ID notes the positive evidence of "design" in nature; it doesn't postulate that this design is itself continously on-going. So this becomes a straw-man argument.

Don't try to obfuscate. ID does not - CAN not - exclude the Meddling Designer. Therefore Behe's proposal for experimental refutation of ID is in principle incorrect.

Moreover, since the Meddling Designer cannot be excluded by ID, NO kind of experiment can disprove ID. And Meddling Designer is logically the same as Supernatural Designer, because only the Supernatural Designer has the power to "ruin" even the best experiment and to remain unnoticed. And if ID excludes such designer, it fails too, because Supernatural Design is its whole point.

> All you have done is demonstrate that laboratory results regarding either ID or creationism are ambiguous. In other words, all you have done is demonstrate that Darwinism has zero intellectual superiority over ID. Experiments purportedly validating evolution are equally ambiguous for exactly the same reasons you cite. Why then should we allow the teaching of one ambiguity over another?

Wrong. We demonstrated that ID has zero intellectual superiority over the theory of evolution, not vice versa.

Experiments validating evolution are not at all ambiguous - unless one discards methodological naturalism. But if one does that, ALL science goes to the trash bin.

You can return to you cave.

The Achilles Heel to this entire argument is that it is premised on a Designer/s who is/are able to, and willing to, involve themselves in on-going natural processes. That's not what ID postulates. ID notes the positive evidence of "design" in nature; it doesn't postulate that this design is itself continously on-going.

Consider the fire ants currently colonising Australia by dint of their unique ability to form insanely large colonies without killing each other off.

Michael Behe is, at best, being disingenous when he claims that if, in his proposed experiment, the bacteria did develop flagella that he would declare ID falsified. We all know (as does Behe if he's honest with himself) that he would simply congratulate evolutionists on finally discovering the step-by-step process he's been urging them to prove (and take the credit for it too). Then he would say, "OK, so how about that human blood clotting system? That's way more complex... that one's gotta be designed."

Behe has far too much invested in his design beliefs. He will never admit he was wrong.

Heh - I like the idea of a Meddling Designer. Maybe we should start a collection? We could also have an Aloof Designer, an Evil Designer, a Lazy Designer, a Ditzy Designer, a Comic Designer, a Careless Designer, and so on.

I suspect you could find "evidence" for any of these, and a lot more, without having to look too hard.

Blast, if you provide the funding, I'll arrange for the experiment to be performed. I'm serious about this.

As a meta-experiment, we'll see how many people change sides when the results are in.

But seriously: the freedom of agents does not entail that one cannot reason about their likely actions. It is possible that an unobserved designer might try to foil all our experiments. It is possible that the taxi driver might choose today to commit suicide on the Kennedy Expressway, and take me with him. Do I --- does anyone --- really worry about that? No.

— Paul Nelson

Why assume I was trying to make a point? As an agent with (relative) causal freedom, maybe I was just goofing around in the back of the classroom with the other ID delinquents, stringing together non-sequiturs for my own amusement. But seriously: the freedom of agents does not entail that one cannot reason about their likely actions. It is possible that an unobserved designer might try to foil all our experiments. It is possible that the taxi driver might choose today to commit suicide on the Kennedy Expressway, and take me with him. Do I --- does anyone --- really worry about that? No.

— Paul Nelson

Mike Walker: You forgot Behe's proposed "The Designer is Dead" theory

Since Behe considers the bacterial flagellum
"irreducibly complex" (in spite of very clear evidence against this), all one would have to do is look for a mutation that significantly changes the bacterial flagellar motor mechanism in some way (perhaps by deactivating one of its components) but still allowed it to operate, even if at diminished efficiency. That would effectivley remove bacterial flagella from the ever shrinking body of his likely candidates for design. Of course, Behe would deny that such a test discredits the design argument.

Those aren't fire ants. They're just ordinary little black Argentine carpenter ants. Their ability to form enormous colonies is simply due to their utter lack of genetic diversity in the countries where they're introduced. I know this because I live in California, where these exact same ants have been for more than 25 years, and they now form a 'colony' about 500+ miles long. They're absolutely everywhere.

— Arden Chatfield

Yeah.

I, like, put some air and some water in a jar. And I, like, waited for three years man! And, like, no tornadoes or hurricanes happened at all in that jar. So, like, I guess this PROVES that the weather in intelligently designed.

But we all knew that anyway. The Bible says it's so.

Never mind...

So Behe is a Professor but lacks critical thinking skills and shows himself to be as stupid as pig dribble. But hey, according to Dembski he's "Dashing" so let's cut him some slack.

Paul Nelson said:

"But seriously: the freedom of agents does not entail that one cannot reason about their likely actions. It is possible that an unobserved designer might try to foil all our experiments. It is possible that the taxi driver might choose today to commit suicide on the Kennedy Expressway, and take me with him.

Do I --- does anyone --- really worry about that? No."

Except that foiling experiments and committing suicide and taking others with you are hardly on a par.

Surely we can expect anything from your God who created humans capable of monstrous atrocities that we see happening in the world all the time.

But seriously: the freedom of agents does not entail that one cannot reason about their likely actions. It is possible that an unobserved designer might try to foil all our experiments. It is possible that the taxi driver might choose today to commit suicide on the Kennedy Expressway, and take me with him.

The Achilles Heel to this entire argument is that it is premised on a Designer/s who is/are able to, and willing to, involve themselves in on-going natural processes. That's not what ID postulates. ID notes the positive evidence of "design" in nature; it doesn't postulate that this design is itself continously on-going. So this becomes a straw-man argument.

If you're going to use this argument, then you have to carry it all the way through. How can you be sure that some intelligent designer hasn't watched and affected the results according to his/her/its whims for every scientific experiment ever conducted? You can't restrict this argument to just evolutionary biology experiments. How do you know that it isn't possible that everytime an astronomer looks through his telescope, she only sees what the designer wants her to see? How do you know that the designer didn't affect Newton's calculations or Darwin's observations? This is in the same category as the question 'how do you know we all didn't spring into existence five minutes ago with all our memories of experiences the way they are?' In other words, its a meaningless objection.

I see another problem with Behe's experiment. Suppose such an experiment was done, and the bacteria evolved. There is no guarantee it would evolve a flagellum. Perhaps it will instead evolve a set of cilia to act as oars, or a jet, or some other method of moving. Evolution is not directed to a specific mechanism to achieve its goal; it operates on random mutations to previously existing structures. Even if the bacteria evolved it is very unlikely it would evolve exactly the same mechanism used by earlier bacteria.
So Behe's experiment, even if it succeeded in proving evolution, would mostly likely not disprove ID by his criteria.

I believe that Paul Nelson's inability to prevent himself from making assumptions about the motivations or charactaristics of the "unknown designer" is telling.

Remember this is from someone who's deeply involved in ID and has learned to couch his words extremely carefully. Others, like the soon-to-be-ex-Dover School Board (wow, it feels good writing that!) had few such inhibitions about attributing highly specific traits (i.e. the Biblical God) to the unknown designer.

Phillip Johnson and the other Wedgies are depending on precisely this fact to win the "war on materialism". They know that if they manage to sneak ID past the gatekeepers of science with the "unknowable" argument (which none of them believes for one moment), the ultimate objective of identifying the designer as the fundamentalist Christian's God will take care of itself (at least, in many, many parts of this country).

Fortunately for us, enough of the IDists have left a wide paper trail concerning their deceptions, that the gatekeepers are well armed. Will it be enough? We shall see.

Paul A. Nelson - "But seriously: the freedom of agents does not entail that one cannot reason about their likely actions. It is possible that an unobserved designer might try to foil all our experiments. It is possible that the taxi driver might choose today to commit suicide on the Kennedy Expressway, and take me with him."

In order to reason about the likely actions of the designer we need to know something about it first. So answer me this, Paul:

What is it about the designer that makes it reasonable for us to assume that the designer will not/does not interfere with scientific experiments, and how have you determined that the attribute or quality that makes tinkering with experiments unlikely is an attribute or quality that the designer actually possess?

But seriously: the freedom of agents does not entail that one cannot reason about their likely actions. It is possible that an unobserved designer might try to foil all our experiments. It is possible that the taxi driver might choose today to commit suicide on the Kennedy Expressway, and take me with him. Do I --- does anyone --- really worry about that? No.

— Paul A. Nelson

A new flagellum in 10,000 generations? A ridiculous test. Not only would evolution not work that quickly, it also assumes that development of a flagellum is the only way that a microbe could adapt to the selective pressure. There's a myriad of other ways that adaptation to selective pressure could take place; one can't make a prediction about how it would happen. Absurd.

It seems there is a flaw in the tin foil plan.

I must say, this has proved a particularly ID-devastating post and subsequent discussion. Thanks to RBH and all involved, especially Blast, Paul Nelson and Donald M!

I spotted that big gaping hole in Behe's experiment as I was reading the transcript several weeks ago. Posted my thoughts on several sites, and also to a journalist at the York Daily record. I was waiting for other people to catch on. Seems that everyone was way behind me... ;)

I might have taken this discussion more seriously, had I not just a few weeks ago attended Chris Adami's lecture at the AAAS in Washington, DC. Adami said that his Nature paper on the evolutionary origin of complex features was intended to test Mike Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity.

Not a word about how the designer might be capricious. Yes indeed -- the designer might be wildly capricious. Might be an infant deity. Might be a team of adolescent, bad-humored super aliens. Might be the FSM, blessed be He of Noodly Power.

But Adami focused on irreducible complexity, and how it could be achieved via an evolutionary pathway: i.e., on the very real empirical content of Behe's position. Great talk, and (I imagine) the grounds for future discussion between Behe and Adami.

Yet how could that be? How could Adami have spent so much time working on his Avida experiments, with Behe's position in mind for testing? Surely Chris should have realized it was all a waste of time, given that the designer -- that mischief maker! -- could have tweaked Chris's computer simulations at any moment.

Never came up.

ID is untestable. In principle. No, wait -- ID is false, because we tested it. No, that's wrong, too: ID is untestable and false. No, that's still not right: ID is untestable, also false (because we tested it), a danger to the culture, and an overture to theocracy.

Maybe the designer is a taxi driver. Not a suicidal one, however. Well, maybe he's a little depressed. That's it: he's a morose spaghetti monster driving a Yellow Cab on the southside of Chicago. A White Sox's fan, but still blue because his meatballs are cold, and no one thinks he made the bacterial flagellum.

The comments about the motivation(s) of the designer remind me of the "omphalos" arguments still put forth by some creationists. That is, that the designer has designed a world that looks old, has fossils, and even Adam had a navel. So, how does ID keep one from invoking an omphalos argument?

How does testing Behe's arguments for irreducible complexity add up to a test for intelligent design? Seems to me that IC is an argument against evolution, not an argument for ID.

Some ID claims are in principle testable. Some ID claims are not. The latter are the ones people like Behe tend to make. Since there is no official ID theory--as you sometimes admit, Paul--it's not clear whether the statement "ID is testable" is true or not.

Anyway Paul, suck on Dover. You cretins deserve it.

Hey Paul if you want to see how honest your DI buddies are, check out the new Dembski post on Ed Brayton's site.

Your boy is a liar.

So Mr. Nelson, when Behe was testifying under oath that one is not entitled to assumptions about the designer, was he lying then or are you lying now?

ID is untestable. In principle. No, wait --- ID is false, because we tested it. No, that's wrong, too: ID is untestable and false. No, that's still not right: ID is untestable, also false (because we tested it), a danger to the culture, and an overture to theocracy.

Oh, and since the Rev. Flank isn't here, do you categorically condemn the dangerous lies of HIV/AIDS denial published in the magazine on whose editorial advisory board you sit, or are you equivocal about this?

the freedom of agents does not entail that one cannot reason about their likely actions

All you have done is demonstrate that laboratory results regarding either ID or creationism are ambiguous. In other words, all you have done is demonstrate that Darwinism has zero intellectual superiority over ID. Experiments purportedly validating evolution are equally ambiguous for exactly the same reasons you cite. Why then should we allow the teaching of one ambiguity over another?

change "and" (after validate) above to "any"

Hey Mr Nelson, I have some questions for you that you seem to keep running away from.

Since I got tired of typeing them all the time, I put them up on the web so everyone can see for themselves:

http://www.geocities.com/lflank/nelson.html

Feel free to answer at any time, Paul.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Yep, that's what I thought.

Why assume I was trying to make a point?

... and after having yet another good laugh at Blast's expense, all i have to say about his latest incoherent missive is that i think god poked him in the eye and caused him some serious brain damage...

no, wait, that would be "tinkering", wouldn't it?

Hey Blast, may I ask how it is that YOU happen to know what God -- er, I mean The Unknown Intelligent Designer -- would or wouldn't do?

Paul Nelson wrote: Adami said that his Nature paper on the evolutionary origin of complex features was intended to test Mike Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity.

The distinction that seems to be escaping you is that Behe's arguments can and have been tested. RBH's point is that the test that Behe describes is a joke. Are you really blind to it, or are you just trying to wriggle away from the position you've taken?

Why won't you answer the challenge? You've claimed--in contradiction to Behe--to be able to predict the behavior of an unidentifiable Designer.

As ALR noted, the question for you is, when Behe was testifying under oath that one (presumably including you) is not entitled to assumptions about the designer, was he lying then or are you lying now?

But Adami focused on irreducible complexity, and how it could be achieved via an evolutionary pathway: i.e., on the very real empirical content of Behe's position.

Yes, and RBH's point is that Behe was avoiding addressing the empirical content of his own position. Why won't you do Behe's experiment? Why won't Behe?

Hey Donald, how do you know what when a doctor gives a patient medicine for some condition, that it's really doing anything at all, and that God -- er, I mean The Unknown Intelligent Designer -- isn't just reaching down form heaven to POOF away that disease?

Since there is simply no way for you to know with absolute certainty that any medicine does. . . well . . . anything at all, I'm kind of curious. When you get sick, do you take medicines? Do you go to a doctor? Why? Are you, after all yo0ur handwaving and blustering, just an atheist at heart, who asks his materialistic naturalistic doctor to use materialistic naturalistic medicines to cure your materialistic naturalistic diseases?

No need to answer me, Donald. I know you won't anyway, and besides, you really don't have any way of knowing with absolute certainty that I even exist --- maybe God, er, I mean The Unknown Intelligent Designer, is just POOFING the thought into your head that I actually exist? Can you demonstrate otherwise? Can you demonstrate with certainty that ANYTHING exists, or that you are not just a disembodied brain flaoting in a jar in someone's lab somewhere?

Gee, solipsism is fun, isn't it. But if I were you, I wouldn't base my theology on it.

The issue, Paul, is not the testability of ID or even IC, but rather the utility (or lack therefof) of Behe's proposed means for falsifying his suggestion for the origins of the bacterial flagellum. Behe's method fails because he does not, indeed he cannot include in his study a negative control.

As for Adami et al., I think it should be noted that the IDist responses usually take one of two forms. The first - "it's" not really IC - betrays the uselessness of the concept of IC as a tool for teasing out suggestions of design. The second - injection of CSI by something or someone - is in fact a manifestation of the shortcoming that RBH (and John before him) points out. Any experimental success will be explained away by ID supporters by invoking "injection of information". Since such an event is not something that is deliberately done by the experimental scientist, this means that it is in principle impossible to design a testable hypothesis that pertains to ID, because it is impossible to design the necessary controls.

Paul, you apparently guided Dembski along these lines when he wrote NFL - at least that's what I recall in the section pertaining to SELEX. The awkward excuse you and Dembski use to avoid the implications of SELEX establishes that ID is not amenable to the sort of experimental study that most of us are familiar with.

Yet how could that be? How could Adami have spent so much time working on his Avida experiments, with Behe's position in mind for testing? Surely Chris should have realized it was all a waste of time, given that the designer --- that mischief maker! --- could have tweaked Chris's computer simulations at any moment. Never came up.

my theory, which is mine, that belongs to me is this: God (whoops start again...) The Intelligent Designer took a lot of trouble to cover his tracks - otherwise people that believed in him wouldn't need 'faith' - they'd have hard evidence of his existence. Everyone would be a beleiver, everyone saved: result: overcrowding in Heaven; unemployment in Hell and Southern Baptist Churches (from an idea of Douglas Adams') But now Dembski and the lads are onto him; so now he's involved in desperate attempts at cover-up; "why oh why did I leave that smoking flagellum lying around?" - he's got to do something to hold back these ID sleuths somehow: slip them some Oxycontin? No, tried that, plant cash on them?, bad idea: brainwave! - do the voting machine trick - why not? it worked before: however he gets too keen so the results in one ward betray intelligent design!!!!. Oh No! - the only thing to do now is to get on the phone to his agent on earth, Pat Robertson, to pave the way for some devine vengance to destroy the evidence (plague of frogs/locusts, tempest, earthquake etc - universal flood being ruled out of course)- that way no sane person will believe its the ID when it happens! I'm confident that the 'missing votes' affair will blow his cover and the whole thing will come to be known as "Cashmangate" or "Frogate" or "Dembskigate" or something. Now who says the far-right have the monopoly on conspiracy theory? - and where did I leave my happy pills?

Behe wrote:

"To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure, for mobility, say, grow it for 10,000 generations, and see if a flagellum, or any equally complex system, was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven."

I know of no designer "shielding" that would protect the experiment from interference

Scientists and the well wishers of science (as opposed to charlatans and their factotums) are decent folk. So even after having read their grandiose assertions ('standing room only'; 'we find ourselves in debate') folks at PT assume IDCists are trying to say something. As for whether IDCists take this discussion seriously or not; it is irrelevant. Their opinions on science are valueless to the scientific community. Science is very hard work and people who make their money writing tracts for cranks simply aren't there. Well for some time they will be taken seriously after that they become interesting research subjects.

Donald was objecting to my observation that positing an unconstrained designing agent implies that no possible control condition is possible. Donald here ignores the fact that an unconstrained designer is not my argument: it is ID's argument. It is ID that says that we need know nothing of the designer, and hence cannot invoke properties (skill set, intentions, frequency of action, etc.) to explain anything. And that leads directly to Donald M's conclusion: on the ID conjecture, we can have no reliable knowledge --- the designer might well have created the whole shebang last Tuesday, complete with all evidence of a deeper past. But that is a pragmatically useless notion, and science is nothing if not pragmatic. It uses what works, and as Donald M makes clear, the ID conjecture doesn't work. Hence, as several people have noted, we have methodological naturalism. Absent the assumption (and assumption it is) of methodological naturalism, and absent the assumption that natural laws and processes are not whimsically interfered with by unknown agents in unknown ways on unknown schedules, science is impossible. Unconstrained ID truly is a science-stopper.

"People are, of course, perfectly free to stipulate such definitions [of science] if they wish. What no one is free to do, however, is to make such stipulations, erect on those stipulations various prohibitions concerning what science can and cannot consider, then claim that what science produces under those prohibitions is truth, rational belief, accurate mirrors of reality, self-correctiveness, or anything of the sort. The character of the results will be constrained by the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the original stipulations. If nature does not ignore design and if design factors into relevant empirical structures, then any science built on proscriptions against design will inevitably fall into one of two difficulties. Either it will be forever incomplete (the...promissory note being forever passed along but never paid), or it will eventually get off track, with no prospect of getting back on track (key elements of the track having been placed beyond permissible bounds of discussion), thereby turning science from a correlate of nature into a humanly contrived artifact."

Examination of artifacts does indeed yield some clues about possible characteristics of a designer

, if you decide that a flagellum is an "artifact" of such nature, then you are just using a perfectly circular argument

What compelling reason is there to assume that all natural phenomenon will yield to materialistic explanations?

What compelling reason is there to assume that all natural phenomenon will yield to materialistic explanations? If we have no such compelling reason, then how can MN be regarded as a regulative principle of science? Furthermore, there is no scientific test for MN, nor any way conceivable way to conduct one. It is, as RBH said, an assumption, but is it the right assumption or even a good assumption? I think not. Absent compelling reasons to think that all natural phenomenon will yield to purely materialistic causes, then imposing MN on science restricts science arbitrarily.

Donald, why can't you jsut come right out and say that the designer is God, and that your basic bitch is that science is "atheistic" and doesn't opay any attentnion to your religious opinions?

Why be so evasive, deceptive, and dishonest about it? Why not just pipe right up and SAY it?

Why lie about it?

So, not only has god not done any major tinkering with anything anywhere in the world in the last 150,000 years, but you're considering the addition of a flagellum to be on par with the changes needed to define our species from our last ancestor? That is just hilarious!

— Ved Rocke

Blast assumes that we can predict the Designer's future actions with some certainty based on a ridiculously incomplete understanding of the past (incidentally, Blast, I think most Christians would strongly object to your certainty that the Designer's last supernatural intervention in the physical world occurred 150,000 years ago).

— Andrea Bottaro

For the moment I will aside the rest of your, um, argument. Apparently, you think that H. sapiens has existed for 150k years, then it must have taken 150k years to evolve. You exhibit reasoning skills found in inly one species.

— Alexey Merz

Please define "major innovation." How is Homo sapiens a "major innovation" with respect to H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis, or H. neanderthalensis?

— Sean Foley

But ID is consistent with this supposed strawman, therefore ID doesn't rule it out either. Must be nice to be right all the time!

— Evil Monkey

I would be interested to see the results of such a long-term experiment. Maybe we could get one step closer to on-demand macroevolution.

— Alex L

If humans aren't the last major innovation, and are instead just another piece of the evolutionary puzzle, then they aren't special. If humans are special, then the religious dogma falls apart, and ID no longer has a purpose.

— Tiax

Moreover, since the Meddling Designer cannot be excluded by ID, NO kind of experiment can disprove ID.

— John

And Meddling Designer is logically the same as Supernatural Designer, because only the Supernatural Designer has the power to "ruin" even the best experiment and to remain unnoticed. And if ID excludes such designer, it fails too, because Supernatural Design is its whole point.

— John

So you're saying that there is designing, but no designer.

— Arden Chatfield

I do wish that those who espouse the cause of ID would try to get their act in gear and agree on a consistent set of statements. You claim that the designer is predictable is a safe assumption; Blast claims that the designer only intervenes intermittently; Behe says that you're both in error for making such statements.

— Rilke's Grandaughter

According to Behe, ID postulates only that we know nothing at all about the designer. Surely tacking a flagellum onto a bacterium constitutes the designers "involv[ing] themselves in on-going natural processes" at some time or other. So Blast's premise fails on ID's own claims. And ID postulates nothing at all about the frequency of interventions --- like Nelson's claim, Blast's is ad hoc, designed to save the ID conjecture from an uncomfortable fact about ID "theory", namely that it puts no constraints at all on what can happen. That must include no constraints on the frequency of intervention. Nelson and Blast are in the same hole: in order to save the conjecture they must impute an ad hoc property to the behavior of designer(s), the frequency of action.

— RBH

Hey Blast, may I ask how it is that YOU happen to know what God --- er, I mean The Unknown Intelligent Designer --- would or wouldn't do?

— RDLenny Flank

irreducibly complex is completely and utterly dead you won't be seeing it again anytime soon unless groupies are singing it in the streets.

Hey Blast, you're babbling again.

Now, about those genes for cobra venom in a garter snake . . . . ?

It is not correct to say that ID says we need know nothing of the designer. What IDP's have said is that the identity of the designer is not relevant. Examination of artifacts does indeed yield some clues about possible characteristics of a designer. Archaealogists do this all the time. So do biologists. Doesn't a scientist researching, say, dino bones get some clues about the characteristics and behavior of an animal that has never been observed alive just by looking at the fossils? In the same vein, we do have some clues about the charactersitics of a possible designer in nature by what nature itself shows us.

Your argument confuses what characteristics a designer might posses with the identity of the designer. We can gain clues to the former without knowing the latter.

Q. Now does the conclusion that something was designed, does that require knowledge of a designer? A. No, it doesn't. And if you can advance to the next slide. I discussed that in Darwin's Black Box in Chapter 9, the chapter entitled Intelligent Design. Let me quote from it. Quote: The conclusion that something was designed can be made quite independently of knowledge of the designer. As a matter of procedure, the design must first be apprehended before there can be any further question about the designer. The inference to design can be held with all the firmness that is possible in this world, without knowing anything about the designer. Close quote. (Bolding added)

It is not correct to say that ID says we need know nothing of the designer. What IDP's have said is that the identity of the designer is not relevant. Examination of artifacts...Archaealogists do this all the time. So do biologists. Doesn't a scientist researching, say, dino bones get some clues...designer in nature by what nature itself shows us.

We observe order and complexity in all sorts of natural systems. Based on that, it would be reasonable to assume that if some of that order and complexity ... then the designer would also be a being of order and complexity, rather than capriciousness and disorder. Your argument confuses ...We can gain clues to the former without knowing the latter. If the design we observe throughout natural systems is real an not merely apparent, ...What isn't correct is to say that since we don't know the designer's identity, then we can't know anything at all about him/her/it.

Donald M: Examination of artifacts does indeed yield some clues about possible characteristics of a designer.... In the same vein, we do have some clues about the charactersitics of a possible designer in nature by what nature itself shows us.

Forgive the OT comment, but now the current pontiff seems to have given an opinion on ID. At least that's what this msnbc article says. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10007382/

And here's my beg for a click-through: http://atlantarofters.blogspot.com/2005/11/pope-addresses-id-issue.html

Isn't it fair for me to term the Darwinian notion that it took evolution a billion and a half years to go from bacteria to yeast, while taking evolution only, what, less than a million to go from primate ancestors to homo sapiens as hilarious?

What seems ridiculous is the kinds of notions that PTers want to apply to the designer. By the way, "k.e.", the only thing important for us to know about the "intelligent designer" is that he is (1) intelligent, and (2) able to design.

As to "interventions", I limited myself---as I believe you should---to creative, biological interventions

If inteventions are happening all the time, and there's no evidence of it, then is it really happening?

Isn't it fair for me to term the Darwinian notion that it took evolution a billion and a half years to go from bacteria to yeast, while taking evolution only, what, less than a million to go from primate ancestors to homo sapiens as hilarious?

What seems ridiculous is the kinds of notions that PTers want to apply to the designer. By the way, "k.e.", the only thing important for us to know about the "intelligent designer" is that he is (1) intelligent, and (2) able to design.

As to "interventions", I limited myself---as I believe you should---to creative, biological interventions.

(And, let me add, it is perfectly within the character of the Judeo-Christian God, if, for argument's sake we want to go down this road, to act in such a way as to leave hardly a trace of his activity. In other words, there will probably be some kind of fully naturalistic "cause", some empirical step, if you will---but one we can't fully understand.)

Blast wrote

"By the way, "k.e.", the only thing important for us to know about the "intelligent designer" is that he is (1) intelligent, and (2) able to design."

OK Blast you really got me on that one congratulations !!!!

.....oh ...... Wait

Define "He."

Now before You answer

a) God
b) I don't know,I wont say or some other piece of nonsense

Consider this

How do the Intelligent Designer and God get on.

Does God get the upper part of the universe and Intelligent Designer the other

Does GOD get the Day and Intelligent Designer the night

Do God and the Intelligent Designer enter a cosmic ring and fight it out from before time began until the universe goes cold and dark.

Does god the the exiting bits and Intelligent Designer the dull bits

Is God the Intelligent Designer's Mother ?

Did God design the Intelligent Designer ?

Is the Intelligent Designer God dressed up in a cheap tuxedo?

OR is the Intelligent Designer

1.A clever scheme of Industrial Deception
2.Dreamed up by a bunch of crazed deviants
3.Trying to push a radical Fundamentalist denial of reality
4.And their strict literal reading of Gen1. Gen2. on to the people.
5.By a reverse paradigm shift of public thinking
6.By removing knowledge and replacing it with ignorance.

All this reminds me of a Sidney Harris cartoon, showing two scientists before a chalkboard densely populated with arcane-looking equations. In one section the equations are cleared and "Then a miracle happens" is written. Forgot the caption, sorry; but your guess would probably be close enough.

Brian Spitzer:

We need more here like you.

ID advocates want to put God in a box.

By the way, "k.e.", the only thing important for us to know about the "intelligent designer" is that he is (1) intelligent, and (2) able to design.

In place of understanding we must content ourselves with knowledge. We don't understand how quantum mechanics works, but we know that it works. So too, we don't understand how a designer imparts information into the world, but we know that a designer imparts information. (Italics original)

Dembski's inane ramblings are nothing more than pure metaphysics completely empty of meaning except in prayer.

In fact as someone pointed out before his work/method/motives would make a good subject for Charlatans 101

This approach toward Behe is like using a nuclear bomb to kill a fly, and makes me concerned that not just Behe, but many on our side don't understand basic issues of scientific methodology and logic. Behe says "In fact, intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal. Here is a thought experiment ... To falsify such a claim"

One need not talk about designers, or intelligent design at all, to refute such stupid rubbish. "falsifying" a claim is not the same as falsifying a theory. Suppose some evolutionary biologist makes some claim that is then shown to be false. Does this falsify the theory of evolution? Of course not. Falsifying a claim only falsifies the theory if the claim is implied by the theory. But ID does not imply that the flagellum could not have evolved, any more than it implies bacterial drug resistance could not have evolved. ID has no specific empirical implications at all -- and this is unfalsifiable.

This approach toward Behe is like using a nuclear bomb to kill a fly

I won't consider whether 10,000 generations in a lab culture is sufficient to model hundreds of millions of years of single celled organisms on earth,

Q. And I just want to ask you a question about this grow it for 10,000 generations. Does that mean we have to wait 10,000 years of some sort to prove this or disprove this? A. No, not in the case of bacteria. It turns out that the generation time for bacteria is very short. A bacterium can reproduce in 20 minutes. So 10,000 generations is actually, I think, just a couple years. So it's quite doable. Q. Have scientists, in fact, grown bacteria out to 10,000 generations? A. Yes, there are experiments going on where bacteria have been grown for 40,000 generations. So again, this is something that can be done. Q. So this is a readily doable experiment? A. That's correct.

Right on Morbius

Its a total waste of time to whap the inanities the slackers come up with.

That one simple logical statement

ID has no specific empirical implications at all --- and this is unfalsifiable

is all the is needed.

"Define the Theory for ID without reference to the magical ?".

no buts

no ifs

no weaseling

no postmodernist reality denying equal time bunk

no postmodernist redefining the language stuff

no mind wandering metaphysical nonsense.

do remember tho, when considering how SCIENTISTS should react to behe's drivel, that much of what is posted here on PT is directed at NON-scientists, who often need very clear, step by step directions.

It seems like a simpler way to say all of this would be just: Challenged to come up with an experimental test of intelligent design, Behe instead gave a (poor) example of an experimental test of evolution.

— Andrew Mead McClure

Suppose that we did that same experiment as I talked about earlier. Suppose a scientist went into a laboratory, grew a bacterium that was missing a flagellum under selective pressure for motion, waited 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 generations, and at the end of that time, examined it and saw that, well, nothing much had been changed, nothing much had changed. Would that result cause Darwinian biologists to think that their theory could not explain the flagellum? I don't think so. I think they would say, number 1, that we didn't wait long enough; number two, perhaps we started with the wrong bacterial species; number 3, maybe we applied the wrong selective pressure, or some other problem. Now leaving aside the question of whether those are reasonable responses or not, and some of them might be reasonable, nonetheless, the point is that, it's very difficult to falsify Darwinian claims. What experiment could be done which would show that Darwinian processes could not produce the flagellum? And I can think of no such experiment.

That one simple logical statement ID has no specific empirical implications at all --- and this is unfalsifiable is all the is needed.

This topic has been covered to death, but I'd like to add that Behe's dishonest, strawman "experiment", if carried out, actually would produce evidence for evolution.

Would it produce flagellae? Probably not -

1)The theory of evolution doesn't predict that similar selective pressures will lead to exactly the same adaptation in every case. In fact, it would be astounding if flagellae exactly like the ones that evolved in the past evolved again independently. The demand that they do so is just the ultimate childish goal post moving.
2) Ten thousand generations is not very many; we might not expect major morphological changes.
3) Selective pressure for "motility" is a broad, non-specific suggestion.

Nevertheless, if the experiment were carried out, bacteria with adaptations for whatever motility was being selected for would emerge. And you can take that to the bank.

Unfair indeed. There is an enormous genetic, biochemical and physiological difference between bacteria and yeast, and almost none between, say, chimpanzees and humans. In fact, there are prokaryotic species that display MUCH more difference, proportionally, than what separates us from any other primate species.

I'm getting a headache. ID advocates here, including yourself, have previously made a whole lot of inferences and/or assumptions about the Designer; that It acts only very rarely, with some predictable regularity, that It must have some sort of consistent, rational behavior, that It doesn't play pranks for pranks' sake, even that It is a "being of order and complexity".

I could imagine the Designer not even "designing' anything new in Behe's cultures, just materializing a flagellated bacterium where before there was none. Just a run of the mill miracle, like the fish and bread thing. Or is one of the attributes of the Designer who designed the enormous complexity of life, including human consciousness, that It cannot, or does not, pop a measly bacterium into existence? I thought that the inference from the "design evidence" would be that It can do even more spectacular feats.

What can we infer about the nature of a Designer from the fact that It leaves just enough evidence of design to utterly confuse us?

what makes you think it took a billion years to go from bacteria to yeast? what makes you think that has ANY relevance whatsoever to the point at hand. truly mind boggling.

— Sir Toejam

Blast forgets the manufacturing step. IDists must also assume that the designer(s) must be able to actually manufacture biological stuff --- an unmanufactured design is not detectable, is it? How the designers manipulate matter and energy, of course, is an unexamined mystery, and where the debitage of the manufacturing process went is another mystery.

— RBH

What's much better is Darwin's take on this: "I can't imagine how the eye evolved little bit by little bit---it staggers my imagination. But the problem is simply that I'm not imaginative enough." That's great science, isn't it? Or am I just imagining things?

Organs of extreme perfection and complication. To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

Forgive the OT comment, but now the current pontiff seems to have given an opinion on ID. At least that's what this msnbc article says. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10007382/ And here's my beg for a click-through: http://atlantarofters.blogspot.com/2005/11/pope-...

— The Sanity Inspector

It seems only ID proponents can tell God what to do!

But, indeed, I don't feel we'll ever discover something that says, oh, there's God at work, plain and simple. So, lo and behold, science is left alone to be science. I would think that that's good news for the PTers.

Nelson:

> I might have taken this discussion more seriously, had I not just a few weeks ago attended Chris Adami's lecture at the AAAS in Washington, DC. Adami said that his Nature paper on the evolutionary origin of complex features was intended to test Mike Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity.

So you are at loss because you cannot address the argument, so you casually dismiss it, claiming it is not serious. What a "scientist".

> Not a word about how the designer might be capricious. Yes indeed --- the designer might be wildly capricious. Might be an infant deity. Might be a team of adolescent, bad-humored super aliens. Might be the FSM, blessed be He of Noodly Power.

Very bad!

> But Adami focused on irreducible complexity, and how it could be achieved via an evolutionary pathway: i.e., on the very real empirical content of Behe's position. Great talk, and (I imagine) the grounds for future discussion between Behe and Adami.
> Yet how could that be? How could Adami have spent so much time working on his Avida experiments, with Behe's position in mind for testing? Surely Chris should have realized it was all a waste of time, given that the designer --- that mischief maker! --- could have tweaked Chris's computer simulations at any moment.

Well, sorry, but since you can't exclude supernatural designer, how can you be sure that she didn't tweak'em?

Of course, simulations and experiments are a good way to debunk particular pronouncements by you IDists. You say that if we specify how exactly this or that IC feature evolved then ID will be disproved. This is false - as long as there are other IC systems, IDiots can claim that ID is not disproven, but still it would be very useful to do it once, because it would be psychologically convincing. It would disprove some central claims by ID proponents, but it would not disprove the unfalsifiable ID "theory".

By the way, IDiots are dishonest because basically they pretend that either some feature evolved or it was designed. They somehow exclude chance with hand-waiving (specifying some arbitrary probability bounds). And yet, since IDiots cannot exclude that there are many universes (maybe an infinite amount of them), they cannot LOGICALLY claim that if the feature could not have evolved, it was designed. (Sure, chance hypothesis looks absurd and ad hoc, but even it is more plausible and parsimonious than design hypothesis. At least the chance hypothesis does not involve some Unspecified Designer of Unknown (but surely supernatural) Power who cre^H^H^H designs through some unknown mechanisms for unspecified reasons. Therefore ID fails at a very basic level - its conclusions do not follow from its premises. In THIS sense - yes, ID can be debunked. Not scientifically, but logically.

...but intelligence and free will is to instinct what Mt. Everest is to a sand castle. (And, I would add, qualitatively different.)...

Donald M:

> We observe order and complexity in all sorts of natural systems. Based on that, it would be reasonable to assume that if some of that order and complexity were the result of purposeful design, then the designer would also be a being of order and complexity, rather than capriciousness and disorder.

Well, um, no.

> What isn't correct is to say that since we don't know the designer's identity, then we can't know anything at all about him/her/it.

Maybe so. Still, we cannot exclude the Meddling Designer. We can assume - like you did - that Designer isn't Meddling, but then we can just ASSUME that the whole ID thingy is crap.

> Free of that worry, it isn't at all unreasonable to infer actual design by what we observe in some natural systems.

Actually, it is. Unless you prove the existence of this Designer beforehand.

> What is unreasonable is to assume that all natural phenomenon must have a natural cause and therefore there can be no actual design in any natural system.

This is assumed only for methodological purposes. That's why it is called METHODOLOGICAL naturalism. There's no way around it. Only MN can exclude unknown supernatural influences, without which experiments don't have much meaning.

> What compelling reason is there to assume that all natural phenomenon will yield to materialistic explanations?

We cannot know beforehand that they will. But without naturalistic assumptions one cannot even start doing science. Why did that apple fall? Was it because of some natural force, or because some Gravitation Fairies made it fall? And how can you exclude the existence of the Gravitation Fairies? Well, you can't. Boo-hoo.

> If we have no such compelling reason, then how can MN be regarded as a regulative principle of science? Furthermore, there is no scientific test for MN, nor any way conceivable way to conduct one.

And there shouldn't be. Duh!

> It is, as RBH said, an assumption, but is it the right assumption or even a good assumption? I think not. Absent compelling reasons to think that all natural phenomenon will yield to purely materialistic causes, then imposing MN on science restricts science arbitrarily.

It restricts science to facts of the natural world, and cuts off all potential supernatural influence. If we take all supernatural nonsense into account, there will be no science. If we choose to allow only some parts of it which we like (e.g. Supernatural Designer, but not Gravitation Fairies), then we're arbitrarily choosing from the set of supernatural entities.

Oh, by the way, critique of MN might have at least some merit if some supernatural event would be demonstrated at least once. Alas...

Blast:

>> Moreover, since the Meddling Designer cannot be excluded by ID, NO kind of experiment can disprove ID.

> This is the very point I'm disputing.

Well, simply saying that you're disputing this point is meaningless.

>> And Meddling Designer is logically the same as Supernatural Designer, because only the Supernatural Designer has the power to "ruin" even the best experiment and to remain unnoticed. And if ID excludes such designer, it fails too, because Supernatural Design is its whole point.

> What you write is completely hypothetical.

I'm not sure what your point was in writing that. Since Designer is completely hypothetical, we can only hypothesize about him. Since you can't exclude the Meddling Designer hypothetically, ID is untestable.

> And, if taken seriously, would vitiate the desire of any experimenter to spend time and energy in the lab. So, the fact that everyday biologists do spend time in their labs and work hard proves either that they don't take this kind of silliness seriously, or that the proposition is itself untrue.

That's true, that's why ID is not science - it rejects methodological naturalism. This rejection leads to the very results you describe.

> If they don't take it seriously, then why should I. If it is untrue, then you have no argument.

But we are not talking about biologists, who work on MN assumptions. We're talking about ID. Really, you're stupid. Or a troll.

That's bakwas. Lousy analogy. Mt.Everest and a sand castel can be defined objectively, measured and compared wrt a number of different properties. What is intelligence and what is free will? And what is instinct? There are a few narrow operational definitions that can be used to behavior apart from that these words are utterly useless.

— Shiva

This is the very point I'm disputing.

— John

John: Well, simply saying that you're disputing this point is meaningless.

To use the word "proportionally" above, salvages to some degree your statement's reasonableness; but not sufficiently. There are two issues that scream out: the time frame, and the degree of difference. Certainly man is on a continuum with the rest of creation, but intelligence and free will is to instinct what Mt. Everest is to a sand castle. (And, I would add, qualitatively different.) This huge difference is conflated into a time period which, in relation to paleontological time, is miniscule. Let's just admit that.

— BlastfromthePast

If these inferences are not logical, or consistent with what is evident in the world, then please correct us.

Did you get banned from Dembski's site, Blast? your incoherent ramblings would be far better suited there.

I once posted on this blog that liberals, when they cannot win an argument, as a last resort question the meaning of words. I took a lot of grief for that. But, Shiva, I suspect you're a liberal.

Blast, the problem, as you have exhibited OVER AND OVER again, is that you are physically/mentally incapable of recognizing logic and consistency. If i were an IDiot, i would be scrambling hard to try and NOT include you as one of "us". You just make them look even worse.

— Sir Toejam

I often notice that conservatives, when they cannot win an argument, as a last resort refuse to acknowledge gray or complex areas of inquiry and instead insist that any concept can be adequately dealt with in monosyllabic sound bites. Blast, I suspect you're a conservative.

— H. Humbert

Why is slander necessary, by the way?

As another alternative, maybe you would be happier joining these folks in creating their own seperate little world, Blast:

http://www.christianexodus.net

Is this an observation, or a caricature?

When it comes to the area of evolution, who would you say takes the simplistic approach and who the complex? Is RM+NS the answer to everything? Or, is life too complex to be reduced to such a simple formula? What side of the argument do you find yourself on, may I ask?

It was a theory teased out from the raw data and carefully affirmed through decades of new findings

... and before some idiot comes in and interprets what i said to mean that evolutionary theory isn't falsifiable, those thousands of tests i mentioned were directly set up with falsifiable predictions in mind to begin with. Thousands of little pieces that make up a gigantic pile of evidence.

ID can't even produce 1, little, tiny, piece in support, for the same reasons it can't even be developed into a working theory to begin with.

Hey Blast, where are those cobra venom genes from a garter snake?

What seems to be the problem?

I remember talking to a physicist at the Univ. of Lousville a number of year past. He said that phsyicists don't really think of mass as something solid, but rather as simply a form of energy (E=mc^2). The electron, in relativized quantum mechanics, is considered to have no spatial extension: it's considered no more than a "geometric point". So maybe a rethink of what a "disembodied" Designer can, and cannot do, is needed here.

I once posted on this blog that liberals, when they cannot win an argument, as a last resort question the meaning of words. I took a lot of grief for that. But, Shiva, I suspect you're a liberal.

I gave an example based on the fossil record demonstrating that the odds of a "meddling designer" gumming up an experiment can be considered to be negligible.

Sean, if I push the time further back---which you seem to be suggesting---it only strengthens my argument.

I'm not suggesting you push the time further back. I want you to define your terms. What is a "major innovation"? How is Homo sapiens a "major innovation" with respect to earlier or (formerly) contemporaneous species of the same genus?

I can't help but notice you didn't answer my question about Hippidion.

Bonus question:

You state that the "last major innovation" was the emergence of Homo sapiens ca. 150kya. Why don't the extinctions of H. neanderthalensis and H. erectus count as "major innovations"? Both of these events occured after the emergence of H. sapiens. Are these extinctions examples of Intelligent Design? Why or why not?

I can't help but notice you didn't answer my question about Hippidion.

That's because Blast refuses to actually read any real science articles, or anything that would in any way impart doubt to his worldview.

Ah. Thanks for the clarification; I don't read the comments very often and this is my first run-in with the guy.

this is my first run-in with the guy

Donald: "What compelling reason is there to assume that all natural phenomenon will yield to materialistic explanations?"

JonH: We cannot know beforehand that they will. But without naturalistic assumptions one cannot even start doing science.

why don't you spell it out for us, Donald? i'd rather not track down a book for something you should be able to express clearly if it is something you find so clear.

please, tell us how science not based on naturalistic assumptions works.

i note that blast has ignored my challenge.

i repeat:EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN OF THE DESIGNER!

I can't help but notice you didn't answer my question about Hippidion.

Donald, I'm still waiting for you to tell us how to test any non-naturalistic hypothesis using the scientific method.

(sound of crickets chirping)

I'm also stuill waiting to hear you explain to me who you think knows any more about God than anyone else does, what he knows that no one else does, and how he knows it.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Oh, and I also asked you to explain to me why you have to lie and be evasive about the fact that your desigenr is just God, and your basic gripe is that "science is atheistic".

(sound of crickets chirping)

please, tell us how science not based on naturalistic assumptions works.

Well, this thread has apparently run its course. Comments are closed.

RBH