ID neither explains nor predicts

But invariably they're talking about small-scale evolutionary changes that do not address the massive build-up of complexity that neo-Darwinian theory is supposed to be capable of explaining but gives no indication of being able to explain

— WAD

And let's not forget that Dembski also wrote:

"...designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor. Intelligent design offers a radically different problematic for science than a mechanistic science wedded solely to undirected natural causes. Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability."

If Dembski agrees with "...but a viable theory must have more than that. It must make predictions..." then he also agrees that ID is not a viable theory. I think we're all agreed.

Logic! Logic! Logic!

If the IDers were actually showing huge jumps between successive generations in any species, especially if the jumps were logically related to something an intelligent designer might actually want, they would be doing science. (Unlike Michael Behe, I find the presumed goal of killing off African babies with quinine-resistant malaria thoroughly repugnant.)
In fact, all the IDers have come up with is proof that very slow changes over a long period of time are difficult for human minds to grasp. But I think most evolutionary biologists already knew that.

Nuff said

— PvM

ID, therefore, is indistinguishable from "random chance" - in the sense of "anything goes". No outcome is excluded, as long as there are no constraints on what the designer(s) did.

If it is a fault of evolutionary biology not to account for something, it is surely also a fault of ID not to account for anything.

WAD wrote:

"But invariably they're talking about small-scale evolutionary changes . . ."

Presumably he wrote this as an example of some predictions that are actually made by evolutionary theory, in his opinion. Of course this directly contradicts:

" . . . but a viable theory must have more than that. It must make predictions which can be falsified or confirmed."

The fact that the theory cannot make detailed predictions about certain things (yet) does not mean that it makes no predictions about anything.

Once again, ID proponents accuse evolution proponents of exactly the sin that they themselves are guilty of committing. Once again they fall back on the juvenile argument: "I know you are but what am I". Once again they make the logical fallacy of assuming that: "if you can't explain everything to my satisfaction then I don't have to listen to anything you say".

Of course he is right in at least one sense. Modern evolutionary theory cannot predict everything that might occur in the future with great accuracy. It is also true that we lack a complete understanding of the processes that lead to increased complexity. So what? At least we are working on answering these questions. At least history tells us that some answers will probably be forthcoming. At least we are trying to increase our knowledge. What if we used that as a the criteria of how a theory should be judged? How would ID stack up then?

If Dembski or ID had shown the existence of one of these fundamental discontinuities, this would in fact be mind-blowing. If there were some kind of "law of conservation of information", where "information" (or CSI or whatever he calls it) could not be created except by an entity having more "information", this would revolutionize all of the sciences. Dembski would have a bigger effect on the course of the sciences than Newton (or Darwin!).

If it worked there would be predictions galore; we create a "controller" with limited CSI i, and we would know that the controlled entity would never "exhibit" more than i bits of information, which would limit its possible states. Or if the "real world" exhibits more than i bits of CSI in the form of noise, then a sub-i controller could not generate the necessary feedbacks to compensate. There would be massive engineering applications (and implications).

That's why inasmuch as YEC does violence to geology and OEC does violence to biology, so does ID do violence to statistics, information theory and the theory of computation. And just as the existence of a global flood 6000 years ago would massively affect the practice of petroleum geology, and a Deity being the only source of variation in the genome would massively affect cancer research, so to were "Dembskian Information Theory" a valid methodology pretty much all of statistical inference (and thus, e.g. epidemiology) would bite the bullet.

I think that after being smacked down all over the place, at this point ID is merely a way to keep scientists and scienctific divulgators busy while flat-out creationism expands by school vouchers and pressure on local governments.

At the same time that research in the Bible Code has taken off, research in a seemingly unrelated field has taken off as well, namely, biological design. These two fields are in fact closely related. Indeed, the same highly improbable, independently given patterns that appear as the equidistant letter sequences in the Bible Code appear in biology as functionally integrated ("irreducibly complex") biological systems, of the sort Michael Behe discussed in Darwin's Black Box.

"And let's not forget that Dembski also wrote:

...designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor. Intelligent design offers a radically different problematic for science than a mechanistic science wedded solely to undirected natural causes. Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability."

Doesn't this make the explanatory filter meaningless? You could never know or understand the inventor and/or identify what they invented because it would always remain beyond your grasp. One would not be able to seperate what was simply ignornace about a subject that COULD be understood with more knowledge, versus one that was not understood but could never be understood because it was designed by a unidentifiable designer who creates products that defy prediction.

Erich von Daniken (among others) anticipated intelligent design. IDers would do well to study the history and utility of God of the Gaps theories.

Either Dembski doesn't understand what "prediction" typically means in science, or he's deliberately being obtuse.

Explanatory power and "prediction" often mean the exact same thing. Yes, we knew that life appeared to be related prior to "predicting" it, which is why Aristotle and Linnaeus used terms which normally indicate blood relatedness for their categories of life, despite the fact that neither believed in evolution. It was when evolutionary theory "predicted" relatedness that it was finally explained, however, hence its predictive power is also its explanatory power. Likewise with the geologic column and the progression of life, the results were already known, it was theoretical prediction that was missing prior to evolutionary theory.

Most of science works that way. You see the galaxies flying apart, you try to "predict" it using a theory which entails an expanding universe. What Dembski and other theists seem to be doing is confusing science and religion, yet again, and believing that science ought to predict what is not entailed by theory in order that they might have faith in it. As we've been telling him, however, science is really not religion.

In the theoretical sense, prediction of known data differs not at all from prediction of what is not known but is discovered to be the case later on. Practically, there are problems of (usually unwitting, in all likelihood) selective use of data and conforming theory to expectations when the "results" are already known, which is why prediction of the unknown is more impressive.

But are we really lacking in "true prediction"? Hardly. I don't have any reference for this, but I have read that something fairly akin to Archaeopteryx was predicted (illustrated, as I recall) as a transitional prior to Archie's discovery.

Tiktaalik is well-known to have been called a triumph "predictive paleontology," which could as easily be called a triumph of "predictive evolutionary theory". Of course it was desired to be discovered in order to answer questions, which is to say that not everything about it was predicted (the exact "arm" configuration, particularly), but that an intermediate (indeed, transitional) form would be found in strata from that time period and that it would be intermediate between fish and amphibian in various ways was predicted.

To be sure, had Tiktaalik not been found we wouldn't consider evolutionary theory to have been refuted. Evolution's predictions are probabilistic, not "deterministic". However, the probabilistic predictions are rampant, and have frequently been verified.

Look, how would one even determine that something is transitional except that evolution makes predictions concerning transitionals between any putative ancestor and its evolved descendants? The inherent predictions of evolution are why we know that Archaeopteryx is little different from the ancestor of the birds, and also why we know that it is not the direct ancestor. Similarly with the hominin line, the broad predictions make transitionals identifiable, no matter that much disputing of how close Lucy is to our ancestor goes on.

Likewise with DNA comparisons. Chimps were predicted by evolutionary theory plus morphological characteristics to have DNA closely related to us (some thought gorillas might be closer, which is not the case). The 98% figure was surprising, and is disputable, but essentially the prediction has been fulfilled whatever the figure one might use.

Having written all of this, I have to add that I doubt that Dembski considers these to be predictions of "Darwinism," for IDists suppose that any type of evolutionary theory ought to give the same predictions. This is manifestly not true, so that known evolutions which involve intelligence, while useful analogies, are considerably different from those which do not (the latter being notably biological evolution).

Thus languages borrow words without constraint from other languages. Similarly with auto and airplane evolution (royalties must be paid, however). These evolutions are also marked with rational design, quite unlike evolution.

Lamarckist or other theories of biological evolution could "predict" what we see for one simple reason---because they had no actual mechanism and were circularly claiming that what we see was the result of "striving" or what-not. Only "Darwinism", in their parlance, has the constraints to make any sort of predictions, at least respecting change (conservation of DNA might be conceded to the scientific parts borrowed by IDists).

Behe and Dembski cannot predict anything about transitionals, for there need not even be any transitionals under the ID scenario (ID isn't compatible with creationism simply because they're both political, they're politically tied together because neither has any scientific constraints, only religious ones). They can't predict anything about genomes, because the "designer" can poof up new material at will and without restriction.

No, Dembski, you're either disingenuous in supposing that "explanatory power" and "predictivity" are necessarily separate in science, or you're almost completely without any scientific knowledge whatsoever. That said, yes, evolutionary theory is used to predict, indeed even to identify, the range of possibilities in transitionals. Furthermore, it predicts that homologous organs will be based upon homologous genes (it should be noted that creationists a while back were trumpeting the "fact" (which was no fact) that homologies were not due to homologous genes, precisely because even they knew that the opposite was a prediction of evolutionary theory). And these were predicted before they were known, in many cases.

So yes, predictivity, or explanatory power, is abundantly manifested in evolutionary theory. ID remains where it's always been, without predictivity and without explanatory power.

Glen D
http://geocities.com/interelectromagnetic

I think that after being smacked down all over the place, at this point ID is merely a way to keep scientists and scienctific divulgators busy while flat-out creationism expands by school vouchers and pressure on local governments.

— kay

Doesn't this make the explanatory filter meaningless? You could never know or understand the inventor and/or identify what they invented because it would always remain beyond your grasp. One would not be able to seperate what was simply ignornace about a subject that COULD be understood with more knowledge, versus one that was not understood but could never be understood because it was designed by a unidentifiable designer who creates products that defy prediction.

To Glen D -

"Explanatory power and "prediction" often mean the exact same thing. Yes, we knew that life appeared to be related prior to "predicting" it, which is why Aristotle and Linnaeus used terms which normally indicate blood relatedness for their categories of life, despite the fact that neither believed in evolution. It was when evolutionary theory "predicted" relatedness that it was finally explained, however, hence its predictive power is also its explanatory power. Likewise with the geologic column and the progression of life, the results were already known, it was theoretical prediction that was missing prior to evolutionary theory."

Extremely well said. This is a point that is often not recognized, especially among non-scientists.

For years I have contended that part of the ID scam is to bait critics into (1) charges of "sneaking in God" and "ID 'is' creationism"

that only increase public sympathy to ID's feel-good sound bites,

and (2) obssessing on the designer's identity and defending evolution, while letting the IDers off (Dave)Scot-free on what the designer did and when.

harold wrote:

"I hate it when those of us on the same side have to engage in a dispute, but..."

NEVER feel bad about doing this. The real reason there are more than one side to this debate is not so much that the different sides have reached different conclusions, but more that the reasoning when those conclusion were reached is different. Bad arguments need to be disputed no matter which camp they come from.

Harold,

Certainly ID has the 2 independent problems you mention. I think we agree that the purpose of ID is to indirectly promote whatever brand of creationism the particular audience prefers, and to discourage debate among the irreconcilable differences among the various versions.

I'll grant that we may be reading the reactions of different segments of the public --- I read a lot of editorials and letters-to-the-editor that praise ID but not creationism, and often pounce on any "ID 'is' creationism" quote. They appear far more than monthly, and, along with ID activism, may be responsible for the increase in "undecideds" in "creation evolution" polls. Such writers are more educated, and more likely to be "in on the scam" than the average evolution denier. But the memes propagate, so everyone who criticizes ID needs to be clear as possible as to the strategic differences with classic creationism, and also take every opportunity to remind everyone that what someone promotes is not necessarily what they personally believe. I hope you are correct that Dover citizens are representative of Americans in general in mostly seeing through the ID scam even before the trial, but I am including the designer-free "teach the controversy" approach in ID (only IDers promote it anyway), and for that I have read that 60-70% of the public, including ~20% that claim to accept evolution, approve of it.

Again, we may not be reading all the same books and articles, but when I see "what happened and when" addressed, it is almost always an "evolutionist" defending the claims of evolution (which is necessary of course) rather than forcing the anti-evolutionist to come clean on their version.

I hope you are correct that Dover citizens are representative of Americans in general in mostly seeing through the ID scam even before the trial, but I am including the designer-free "teach the controversy" approach in ID (only IDers promote it anyway), and for that I have read that 60-70% of the public, including ~20% that claim to accept evolution, approve of it.

I don't know what's more sad, the contributions to the UD blog by its authors or the contributions to the UD blog by its commentators. Just skimming the responses to this particular Dembski piece is telling enough.