This Week in Intelligent Design - 05/04/11

So humans design stuff for various reasons or no reason at all, and so the intelligent designer(s) must have designed stuff for some reason or no reason at all (or some mysterious reason we can't know about and shouldn't even ask). I think I've got it!

If humans were designed, whoever did the design is not our friend.

2) Intelligent agents can rapidly infuse large amounts of information into systems. True, but they can also take it away from systems. This happens far more frequently than you might at first think. Plus, the level of information change might not be large – human designers can work rather slowly at times, especially when they’re given access to the Internet.

he fact that a phenomenon is (transiently) information has nothing to do with whether or not it was “designed”.

The one question ID fans never seem to answer is "what is the 'irreducibly complex' difference between a human and a chimpanzee?". I mean, who really cares, theologically, whether God (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster) created the first DNA? If you can't show that some added "information" was needed to make a human out of a common human-chimp ancestor, then you're wasting your time as far as Christian fundamentalists are concerned.

In my field of endeavour, "information" is that which allows one system to gain useful knowledge of the state of another system.

"Useful" is, unsurprisingly, entirely context dependent.

And the "another system" may often be the supersystem of which the recipient system is a subsystem.

One could respond to Luskin's hand-waving with a good many relevant facts and questions--like by asking why convergence, clearly something that only makes sense in evolutionary context, would be expected at all with "design," which simply can and usually does actually copy designs without much regard to lines of descent.

But there's a general question that they can't answer, which is, "Why is life highly constrained by the past as entailed by evolution, and not relatively unconstrained by the past as expected from intelligence?"

His blithering is meant to obfuscate that question, rather than to deal with it.

Glen Davidson

But there’s a general question that they can’t answer, which is, “Why is life highly constrained by the past as entailed by evolution, and not relatively unconstrained by the past as expected from intelligence?”

Glen Davidson said: But there's a general question that they can't answer, which is, "Why is life highly constrained by the past as entailed by evolution, and not relatively unconstrained by the past as expected from intelligence?"

Human designers often adapt what was available before in their designs, but sometimes they just come up with something entirely new.

Shebardigan said: In my field of endeavour, "information" is that which allows one system to gain useful knowledge of the state of another system.

eric said: If the output of a system is a string of random* numbers, then i have gained useful knowledge that the system is a random-number generator.

So design proponents would probably reject your definition as too inclusive of things they don't consider real information. :)

mrg said: An engineering way of putting this is: "Why are there no 'clean sheet of paper' Designs in nature?" Human designers often adapt what was available before in their designs, but sometimes they just come up with something entirely new.

Shebardigan said: In this context, it is worth noting that no ancient hand-axe was actually "designed". Various primates who were used to bashing things with rocks discovered that some shapes of rocks were better at separating stuff into bits than other rocks were, and they tended to keep those rocks around, and look for other rocks that had similar shape for use when the original "found" rocks wore out or broke. In the event that no similar-shaped rocks were around, the primates who had played around with banging rocks together noted that, using the right kind of banging, you could make a rock with the same characteristics as the found-on-the-ground hand axe rocks. They were not designing, they were manufacturing copies. Over time, certain inadvertent changes to the general axe-rock pattern turned out to be better at hacking things to bits than the original, so those tended to be more often duplicated by rock bangers.

Bio-Essays editor Andrew Moore has weighed in on whether we ought to acknowledge the reality of Design:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201190011/pdf

Not surprisingly, this resulted in the latest instance of breathtaking inanity from Dishonesty Institute mendacious intellectual pornographer Casey Luskin:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/04/the_newspeak_of_evolutionary_b045551.html

Am sure Luskin is probably aware that Ken Miller has defended the existence of Design in Nature, including evolutionary biology, by arguing that we need to acknowledge its existence and its emergence via natural processes like Natural Selection, so we can refute Intelligent Design creationist claims that the existence of Design "proves" the existence of an Intelligent Designer(s) (who could more likely be Klingons or the Time Lords, not Yahweh or Zeus IMHO).

Or perhaps an inter-planetary design coalition.

Moore may be slightly overstating a good case -- I wince at some of the anthropomorphisms in documents by people who should know better, but I think terms like "evolutionary strategy" may be hard to displace.

However, Luskin is in unusually absurd form: "The nerve of those guys to suggest that they ought to stop explaining their ideas using clumsy and inaccurate terminology that we have found only too convenient to exploit."

In this issue Jacques Dubochet asserts that a major reason for the lack of public acceptance of evolution is a fundamental misunderstanding of its core concepts: many people think of evolution producing modifications with an aim, e.g. ‘eyes in order to see’, ‘legs for walking’, rather than in terms of directionless variation, and natural selection without motivation, design or strategy.

harold said: From the Bio-Essays article linked by John Kwok

In this issue Jacques Dubochet asserts that a major reason for the lack of public acceptance of evolution is a fundamental misunderstanding of its core concepts: many people think of evolution producing modifications with an aim, e.g. ‘eyes in order to see’, ‘legs for walking’, rather than in terms of directionless variation, and natural selection without motivation, design or strategy.

While I strongly agree with this, and with the overall suggestions in the article (in fact I have tried to use similar language to what they describe for years), this is the problem faced when people make good faith efforts to understand evolution. The concept that "an unbelievably huge number of randomly* genetically variant offspring are being born per unit time, and a small fraction of the variation results in phenotypic changes which are either, in a probablistic way, selected for or against, or increase in frequency for purely random reasons, within a local environment" is hard to grasp. (*Some types of mutations are more common than others, and for some, we can accurately forecast the long term frequency with which they will occur, but not exactly when they will occur. This is the characteristic of a "random variable" in mathematics, and individual mutations are random events relative to human observers. This does not imply that all mutations occur at equal frequency.)

What should be done is to emphasize that these “random” mutations are constrained by the prior genealogical history

And after that very next replication event, if there was mutation, then the "massively large" theoretical "possible offspring genomes" has changed for the next generation, and so on into the future...correct? And this "butterfly effect" of minor present changes constraining future possibilities would make long term evolutionary prediction impossible--except of course "moving in the direction of increased fitness for the environment at the time".

harold said:

What should be done is to emphasize that these “random” mutations are constrained by the prior genealogical history

This is absolutely true, and important to remember. In fact, random variables are sampled from distributions, which are usually constrained. The roll of a cubical die is a good example. The results can only be the integers one through six, but to a typical human observer, the results of future rolls still represent random variables. In no way, shape or form does the word "random" imply "totally unconstrained by reality" or "only applicable to a distribution in which every possible result occurs with equal frequency". When a given strand of DNA is replicating, for example, only those mutations which are physically possible within the contest of that sequence of DNA can occur, and among those, some have much, much, much greater probability of happening than others. The random part of mutation accumulation is somewhat like a Markov chain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain. Of course, screening by selection is also important. Note that you can correctly infer a great deal about the history of a genome, and its relationship to other genomes, from its sequence, and of course, in pure theory, you could also construct a set of possible offspring genomes. In fact, that set would be massively large, but much, much smaller than the 4^3,000,000,000 possible 3 billion base pair DNA sequences that could theoretically exist. However, what you can't do, for the foreseeable future, is predict which of the possible mutations will occur at the next replication event.

would make long term evolutionary prediction impossible

harold said: Because of phylogenetic history constraints, we can make many general predictions.

How about an analogy (FL, you won't understand this, so just skip it).

The "randomness" that creationists think must go on in genetics (if it weren't for "design" or other supernatural tinkering) is indeed like the rolling of that six-sided die: completely unpredictable, random, chaotic, with the previous roll(s) having no influence whatever on the next one. Thus predicting the exact sequence of, say, the next 100 numbers to come up becomes impossible, since any sequence is as likely as any other. (Yes, that means 100 6's in a row are exactly as likely as a seemingly "random" sequence.)

But the true "randomness" in genetics is more like that in predicting future chess positions. A player's next move is absolutely constrained to the legal moves possible, determined by the positions of other pieces on the board at the time. E.g., for the first move of the game there are only 20 possible actions; at some points there can be many more than that, and at some points only ONE legal move. But every possible "next position" in chess is completely constrained by the situation on the board at the moment.

Thus a chess computer could easily print out a list of every possible situation, say, five moves into the future. In midgame that might be a huge list, but it would be finite. We can be absolutely confident the board will be in one of those states. And for any one state, the computer could print out a list of the very few possible pathways that could have led to that situation. And knowing the skill level (and even the psychology) of an opponent, can narrow future positions down dramatically.

Rolling a die repeatedly is like the creationist misconception of the "randomness" in evolution: any damn thing could be the result. But RM+NS is much more like possible future chess positions: each next position is limited to what is legal after the last one, AND there's "selection pressure" exerted by what the player thinks would be a GOOD move (and by what he perceives as likely from the opponent).

A chimpanzee isn't going to produce a human baby, just like your queen isn't going to cross the board on the first move. A horse descendant in the next million years developing wings is so unlikely as to be considered impossible with confidence, just as your winning the game with only a king, while your skilled opponent still has 16 pieces.

Hey, I like that analogy. Pieces that make good or indifferent moves stay on the board; those that make bad moves get taken off the board.

I like that analogy. However, there are absolutely no creationists I have ever encountered who even pretend to understand the concepts of historical contingency or cumulative selection. The words might as well be meaningless to them. That is the only thing that allows them to continue using meaningless crap such as tornado in a junkyard, so I don't expect it to change anytime soon.

Any argument is good enough when your goal is simply to deny reality. It doesn't matter if the argument makes any sense or not. It doesn't matter if the argument is contrary to the facts or not. All that matters is that someone is dumb enough or ignorant enough to fall for it, at least for a little while. Somehow they never seem able to consider long term consequences of using such stupid arguments either. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Just Bob said: Rolling a die repeatedly is like the creationist misconception of the "randomness" in evolution: any damn thing could be the result.

AND there's "selection pressure" exerted by what the player thinks would be a GOOD move (and by what he perceives as likely from the opponent).

Just Bob -

Yes, that's pretty accurate. Maybe backgammon would be a better example. (In fact, computers learned backgammon via neural net methods, which are a variant of random choices acted on by selection.)

There are many constraints in the biological process.

The first constraint is the fact that you're staring with what you start with. You have the DNA sequence that is the result of past evolution.

The second constraint is that mutations have to be chemically possible. Yes, I know, duh, but we are talking about chemical reactions not pure computer models. Important to remember that.

The constraints imposed by selection can kick in at any time. If a given offspring genome (of the DNA template genome) is not compatible with early development, for example, there you go right there.

As many of us have noted many times, the absence of croco-ducks and half-cat-half-dogs is evidence against creationism. Under creationism, omnipotent magic is a common cause of earthly events, and there is no reason why crcoducks, or rhinostriches, or anything else shouldn't magically appear at any time. The theory of evolution does include the element of mutations that occur in a random (not perfectly predictable even with good information about frequency) way with respect to human observers. However, it also explains why there are constraints on what can happen, something than ID/creationism most certainly does not do.

harold said: As many of us have noted many times, the absence of croco-ducks and half-cat-half-dogs is evidence against creationism.

eric said:

Just Bob said: Rolling a die repeatedly is like the creationist misconception of the "randomness" in evolution: any damn thing could be the result.

Actually, the result of a die roll is heavily constrained by its physical structure to be between 1 and 6. So they're still apt. Creationist misconceptions (crocoducks and dogs with wings) seem to run along the lines of thinking a roll of 5 and a roll of 12,356,980 is equally likely.

Actually (maybe I’m getting tangled up in the analogy),

a single die roll is far, far more likely to produce a change from the previous roll (5 out of 6) than a mutation in a base pair: IF it changes it could be 1 of 3 outcomes BUT any change at all is VERY RARE.

The chance of any particular base pair mutating in one copying event is very tiny, right?

Thus a single base pair is very strongly (but not absolutely) constrained to look exactly like its immediate “ancestor.”

And a whole genome is normally constrained to look very much (but not exactly) like its ancestor–just as a chessboard must look very much (but not exactly) like it did before the last move.

Thanks, as always, Harold.

It seems I had the gist, but you could put real numbers to it.

But I'm not sure I get this part (IANAS):

ME: Thus a single base pair is very strongly (but not absolutely) constrained to look exactly like its immediate “ancestor.”

HAROLD: No, by “constrained”, I mean things that more or less literally cannot happen at any reasonable frequency, in a single 13-14 billion year old universe with an estimated mere 2.5 x 10^89 elementary particles.

Why wouldn't any particular base pair have the 1:50,000,000 chance of mutating in any particular replication?

eric said: Actually, the result of a die roll is heavily constrained by its physical structure to be between 1 and 6. So they're still apt. Creationist misconceptions (crocoducks and dogs with wings) seem to run along the lines of thinking a roll of 5 and a roll of 12,356,980 is equally likely.

Let's not forget that mutations come in many flavors, not just point mutations. We have indels, tandem repeats, gene duplication, whole-genome duplication, horizontal gene transfer, positional effects, nondisjunction, changes in regulatory DNA, etc. About 40% of the human genome is made up of repetitive sequences - I'd love to know what "information" is contained therein.

Exactly the point I’ve often made: it’s a fallacy to assume that random actions always have random outcomes, because the outcomes are often “constrained” by physical properties.

As far as I know, post-modern creationism, with its total reliance on verbal dishonesty and flawed logic,

is the first school of thought to ever outright deny the intuitive and easily demonstrated concept of an outcome that is both constrained, yet also not perfectly predictable

Harold wrote:

"The only people who have ever mis-defined “random” to mean “no constraints” are creationists, and when they do this, they are projecting the claims of creationism onto science."

What an great observation. This is why trying to argue with a creationist can be so frustrating. They are almost always arguing AGAINST their own position. They really don't understand evolution at all. They generally have no clue how evolution is supposed to work. All they have is a distorted characterization of their own position. That's all they can ever seem to understand. Then they argue vehemently that that can't happen! You can't agree with them because then they claim victory and you can't disagree with them without reinforcing their misconceptions.

Of course they could easily do a little research, learn a little biology and study the actual theory of evolution. But of course when they do that they realize that they have no genuine arguments left and that any reasonable person can see that there is absolutely no reason to reject the actual theory of evolution.

harold said: Just Bob - Here's what I mean by constrained - a modern cat giving birth to a modern dog.

DS -

Yes, this is exactly what you encounter when you deal with the semi-sincere education-deprived rank and file.

I say semi-sincere, since disdain for the intellectual achievements of others cannot really be justified at any education level. But in the case of the rank and file, the ignorance often has an involuntary character - for some combination of intense social pressure, economics, or academic ability, actually learning about the TOE may have been denied to them.

They're told by their leaders "God did magic".

Every other position is taken as "The same magic, but no God or a different God".

They instinctively use the same defense mechanism against science that they would against the teachings of a different creationist sect or faith (the latter being what they perceive as a greater threat). They immediately construct an absurd straw man magical version of the other person's claims (not noticing that in doing so they project their own beliefs), and then invoke the argument from incredulity against the straw man. "LOL, there are no crocoducks, 747's don't form in junkyards, LOL evilutionists are funny".

This is nearly always the style of the creationist comments that come the closest to being honest.

They assume that you assume the magic, but are denying that it was done by their particular god.

The message "No magic necessary, gods have nothing to do with this particular issue" is heavily blocked by defenses and assumptions.

In order to prevent that message from getting through, the leaders rush in with their various more "sophisticated" semantic games, false accusations/demonization, science-y sounding word salad, etc.

Cool. You were talking about a particular–dare I say it, specified–massive set of mutations all at once, while I was thinking about a single point mutation. I know I’m stretching this way too far, but I was thinking of the likelihood of a first move of E2 to E3, while you were pointing out the impossibility of castling queenside on the first move.

The cat-to-dog in one generation scenario would be called a saltation, correct? Perhaps we need a more powerful and “impossible” term than ‘saltation’ for the kind of leap that creationists think evolution would make possible (but which would be ‘normal’ for magic creation).

To return to an earlier point about the random nature of mutations making long-term predictions impossible, I was thinking along these lines: If aliens investigated earthly life, say 350 million years ago, and found something that we might call the “first reptile,” given access to both the phenotype and genotype–the lizard and his DNA–they could not possibly have predicted that his descendants would include pteranodons, snapping turtles, albertosaurus, blindworms, triceratops, gavials, seismosaurus, macaws, plesiosaurus, horny toads, rattlesnakes, and hummingbirds.

They certainly could confidently predict that any descendants might evolve to survive changing conditions and exploit available niches.

But could they predict with confidence that the ‘first reptile’ would leave any descendants at all? Given the history of major extinctions up to that time, wasn’t there a fair chance that the ‘first reptile’ would be the last?

Thanks again, Harold. And again I was being a little too colloquial rather than precise. By 'first reptile' I meant that species (assuming one could be identified as separate from other not-quite-reptiles), much as one might refer to 'the gray wolf.'

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe saltations are *relatively* common (1 out of many thousands) among highly inbred domestic breeds, like purebred cats. And their survival and reproductive success is probably only because the new and maybe weird morphology (hairlessness, crinkly fur, extra toes, etc.) is an interesting novelty to us. So we protect them and breed for the new 'cool' trait. In the wild they would likely have frozen, starved, or become someone's lunch before ever leaving progeny.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe saltations are *relatively* common (1 out of many thousands) among highly inbred domestic breeds, like purebred cats. And their survival and reproductive success is probably only because the new and maybe weird morphology (hairlessness, crinkly fur, extra toes, etc.) is an interesting novelty to us. So we protect them and breed for the new ‘cool’ trait. In the wild they would likely have frozen, starved, or become someone’s lunch before ever leaving progeny

I wonder if whiteness in feral cats would persist long in a truly "wild" environment, you know, with wolves, mountain lions, and bobcats around. Then they would also have to hunt and catch truly wild prey, rather than subsisting on human garbage. Presumably effective camouflage would be useful for both purposes.

harold said: Just Bob - Here's what I mean by constrained - a modern cat giving birth to a modern dog. Could you start with a cat genome on paper and identify massive numbers of mutations that would make it a dog genome? Of course, there would be many ways on paper, but as we noted, each one of the mutations needed has only a one in tens of millions chance of happening in one replication event. The chances of them all happening sufficiently perfectly at once (in both sperm and ovum contributed by each of two cats who happen to mate) is so massively small as to be incomprehensible. Even though there are vast numbers of DNA sequences that make up viable dog genomes, this is still true. And then the dog would have to be able to develop to birth in a cat uterine environment, which is probably impossible (although maybe not, and that's more or less irrelevant). Under the theory of evolution, this type of thing is impossible, because of the constraints imposed by former events. Sounds trivial? Remember, under ID/creationism, there are no such constraints. Fully formed modern organisms can magically appear from thin air.

harold said: The entire “gradual versus saltatory” dialog is highly subjective but of value. What “saltationists” like Steven J. Gould were pointing out was that there is no reason to assume that past morphologic evolution, as observed by humans via the fossil record, should have the subjective appearance of being smoothly distributed across time.

And of course harold, the biggest constraint is prior phylogenetic history. In the hypothetical example you cite, that is impossible simply because the feline (cat) and canid (dog) lineages diverged from each other tens of millions of years ago

harold said: John Kwok - Thank you for the clarification with regard to PE/saltation. As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of Steven J. Gould's writings. I don't want to get side-tracked here, but my recollection is that there was a rather dogmatic school of "gradualists" circa the mid-twentieth century who were mildly hostile to Gould. Of course, all of this was a dialog within science, and no-one involved denied biological evolution or its basic mechanisms.

And of course harold, the biggest constraint is prior phylogenetic history. In the hypothetical example you cite, that is impossible simply because the feline (cat) and canid (dog) lineages diverged from each other tens of millions of years ago

There is certainly no disagreement between on this point; I phrased the explanation in terms of the molecular genetic differences, but those differences are there because of the divergence.