Intelligent design makes it into Plos One

One doesn’t need to agree, but bringing in a different idea in a civil manner seems more appropriate for an academic discussion.

bringing in a different idea in a civil manner seems more appropriate for an academic discussion.

Quite aside from the unsupported invocation of a creator, the paper needs a lot of work on its English and even a bit on its spelling. Doesn't PLoS 1 even run its papers through spellcheck?

So, has anyone with relevant expertise in biomechanics actually read this paper, and is it a real contribution to science? Presumably the referees had such expertise, or so one might hope.

"Thus, the architecture is the biomechanical basis of the dexterous movement that provides the human hand with the amazing ability to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way. In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years."

It does seem more like a translation issue than anything else. The lead editor is at Ohio State.

(Spam alert on the comment above by "Gracie Quijada". I've seen that text before -- it is not responding to the post in any way.)

The paper makes no assertion that it in any way shows that a Creator was involved, or that natural selection wasn't involved. So in that sense it isn't in any way an ID paper. Which won't stop the Discovery Institute from adding it to its list of peer-reviewed ID papers.

Furthermore the "evolutionary remodeling ... for millions of years" phrase suggests theistic evolution (or just confused translation).

It may have been reviewed badly, or not at all, or need a lot of work on its English. It may be uninteresting science. But I suspect that few of us would want PT to take on the task of combing the scientific literature looking for marginal papers with bad English, and then getting all upset about them.

Man I can't wait to read the materials and methods section. Exactly what experiment did they preform in order to determine that the had is the best design it can be? WHat alternative designs did they test? What functions exactly did they test? How did they ask the Creator what her intentions were? If the design was so good why did it need remodeling for millions of years? Inquiring minds want to know!

The S in PLoS stands for "science." Creationism isn't science. Ergo, creationist "opinion" has no place in a PLoS journal. This isn't hard.

You are all saying here that the word CREATOR is the buzz word for why the paper is to be rejected.
Thats makes the ID/YES point about censorship based on prejudice about conclusions.
The hand is just a copy of a ape hand. i don't see why there is any difference. We use it better probably because of intelligence.
Its not a yEC paper.

Robert Byers said: You are all saying here that the word CREATOR is the buzz word for why the paper is to be rejected. Thats makes the ID/YES point about censorship based on prejudice about conclusions. The hand is just a copy of a ape hand. i don't see why there is any difference. We use it better probably because of intelligence. Its not a yEC paper.

No one is suggesting that the paper should have been rejected because it uses the word creator or even Creator. However, those 2 sentences should have been modified, since they provide absolutely no evidence for the existence of a Creator.

Yes, it is possible that the original Chinese has been mistranslated. If that is so and no one picked up on it, we have to wonder about the editorial acumen of the staff at Plos. The Retraction Watch post has been up for only a day or so; I will be interested to hear what the editor of Plos has to say. I do not think that anyone at PT is "all upset" about the paper, but I certainly agree that the intelligent designauts may well try to adopt the paper and claim it as a refereed publication on intelligent design.

Whether or not the term "Creator" was misinterpreted or a mistranslated word or something else, the Dishonesty Institute will take credit for it and immediately claim censorship of a peer reviewed paper. The editors need to review the paper and decide what is meant by the term.

A number of readers have concerns about sentences in the article that make references to a 'Creator'. The PLOS ONE editors apologize that this language was not addressed internally or by the Academic Editor during the evaluation of the manuscript. We are looking into the concerns raised about the article with priority and will take steps to correct the published record.

Matt Young said: One commenter points out that there has to be a "version of record," and a publisher must not just change a paper at will, or there will be no permanent record. I think that is right -- either the paper should be retracted, or it should be festooned with an erratum disavowing the "Creator" comments. You may read other comments for yourselves.

The hand is just a copy of a ape hand.

Argh, Out = Our.

PLOsOne is the journal, which after Journal-Shopping, accepted the methodologically flawed study supporting sexual genital mutilation for preventing HIV-Infection. For those not familiar with the junk-science, Ob/Gyns, who are not even qualified to perform operations on neonates, but make extra money sexually mutilating the genitals of babies and Jews and Muslims did a study where they took HIV-Negative sexually active men, sexually mutilated the genitals of half of them, thus making them incapable of having sex until they heal, and then tested the men a few months later and found that the men who could not have sex contracted less HIV than the men who could.

We are sorry for drawing the debates about creationism. Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word Creator was not actually as a native English speaker expected. Now we realized that we had misunderstood the word Creator. What we would like to express is that the biomechanical characteristic of tendious connective architecture between muscles and articulations is a proper design by the NATURE (result of evolution) to perform a multitude of daily grasping tasks. We will change the Creator to nature in the revised manuscript. We apologize for any troubles may have caused by this misunderstanding. We have spent seven months doing the experiments, analysis, and write up. I hope this paper will not be discriminated only because of this misunderstanding of the word. Please could you read the paper before making a decision.

What's particularly weird about this trouble with language is that Creator was capitalized. I wonder what possessed them to do that, as it's so wrong in English, unless one means to designate a deity by so doing. It's not like there's a bunch of other oddly capitalized words, at least not in the quotes. I still have to wonder if they'd run across capitalized "Creator" in English without realizing why it was capitalized, and so thought that for some odd English quirk (English has a lot of those) "creator" just is capitalized in English.

Well anyway, I hope it doesn't unduly detract from their work.

Glen Davidson

The PLOS ONE editors have followed up on the concerns raised about this publication. We have completed an evaluation of the history of the submission and received advice from two experts in our editorial board. Our internal review and the advice we have received have confirmed the concerns about the article and revealed that the peer review process did not adequately evaluate several aspects of the work. In light of the concerns identified, the PLOS ONE editors have decided to retract the article, the retraction is being processed and will be posted as soon as possible. We apologize for the errors and oversight leading to the publication of this paper.

With multiple parties having been involved in the peer review process (I assume there were 2-3 reviewers, and 1 handling editor), this kind of oversight seems less like a simple mistake and more like a systemic failure. Retraction is a good first step, but it doesn't seem like it's enough given the gravity of this situation. What steps will be taken to ensure this doesn't happen again in the future?

Clean up on isle 1. Dump this crap to the bathroom wall where the feeding frenzy can begin.

What ignorant nonsense.

You know nothing of biology, probability, cosmology. All you can do is to spout unsupported assertions at great length. You cannot demonstrate the reality of gods. You cannot show the reality of a "designer." All you have is long-winded bluster which you have borrowed from others whose reason is as impaired as yours is.

We are sorry for drawing the debates about creationism. Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word Creator was not actually as a native English speaker expected. Now we realized that we had misunderstood the word Creator.

Sir Isaac Newton once said, “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” How is this possible?

Another species of 'asshole': person
1. Copies and pastes from material elsewhere on the Internet;
2. Material already has been analyzed extensively on the site to which it is copied;
3. Draws negative conclusion about whole groups of people;
4. Quotes authority who died long before the present discussion.
Morally, intellectually defective.

DS said: Clean up on isle 1. Dump this crap to the bathroom wall where the feeding frenzy can begin.

Thanks Matt.

whining...LOL.....

It appears to be a translation issue. A Chinese word meaning "Nature" or something along those lines.

Yeah, the Tooters are all orgasmic about the word "Creator" appearing in a journal but they have to get their jollies somewhere.

Here you go, Tooters: DESIGN DESIGN DESIGN!

Now, go away and smoke a cigarette.

For the benefit of lurkers, I'm going to play along just this once. Mr. Grasso:

1. There has been no whining here in response to your dump. Rather, others have pointed out clear reasons why it is an unreasonable thing to do - an asshole move actually. Instead of laughing you could say, "Sorry, OK, I need to say this...".

2. Evolution theory, like astronomy, solid-state physics, and organic chemistry, is not atheistic (not to first order anyway). There are many contemporary mainstream biologists of all faiths and of none.

3. The authority of Newton, like that of Hooke, Euler, and Paracelsus, is of no consequence to a discussion of scientific theories that emerged long after their deaths. Any dispute of this obvious bit of common sense necessarily gives the disputant a clown-like appearance. Not just to 'atheists' but to anyone with a lick of common sense.

4. The article from which you dumped discusses elementary fallacies and manages to commit the same fallacies numerous times in one article. I did not see any references to contemporary works of fallacy theory (an unjustly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy, in my opinion).

5. The article from which you dumped does not engage with real science but to caricatures. The arguments given and 'analyzed' are not the real arguments of real scientists.

Just enough I guess, and I'll admit that I'm only pretending to engage with G., just as he (always a guy) pretends to engage with the comments here.

Doc Bill said: It appears to be a translation issue. A Chinese word meaning "Nature" or something along those lines.

RJ said: For the benefit of lurkers, I'm going to play along just this once. Mr. Grasso: 1. There has been no whining here in response to your dump. Rather, others have pointed out clear reasons why it is an unreasonable thing to do - an asshole move actually. Instead of laughing you could say, "Sorry, OK, I need to say this...". 2. Evolution theory, like astronomy, solid-state physics, and organic chemistry, is not atheistic (not to first order anyway). There are many contemporary mainstream biologists of all faiths and of none. 3. The authority of Newton, like that of Hooke, Euler, and Paracelsus, is of no consequence to a discussion of scientific theories that emerged long after their deaths. Any dispute of this obvious bit of common sense necessarily gives the disputant a clown-like appearance. Not just to 'atheists' but to anyone with a lick of common sense. 4. The article from which you dumped discusses elementary fallacies and manages to commit the same fallacies numerous times in one article. I did not see any references to contemporary works of fallacy theory (an unjustly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy, in my opinion). 5. The article from which you dumped does not engage with real science but to caricatures. The arguments given and 'analyzed' are not the real arguments of real scientists. Just enough I guess, and I'll admit that I'm only pretending to engage with G., just as he (always a guy) pretends to engage with the comments here.

Evolutionist William Fix explains in The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution: “The older text-books on evolution make much of the idea of homology, pointing out the obvious resemblances between the skeletons of the limbs of different animals. Thus the ‘pentadactyl’ limb pattern is found in the arm of a man, the wing of a bird, and the flipper of a whale, and this is held to indicate their common origin. Now if these various structures were transmitted by the same gene-complex, varied from time to time by mutations and acted upon by environmental selection, the theory would make good sense. Unfortunately this is not the case. Homologous organs are now known to be produced by totally different gene complexes in the different species. The concept of homology in terms of similar genes handed on from a common ancestor has broken down.”

I'm disappointed that an editor and several referees were unable to say, simply, "maybe the science is good but the writing is insufficiently clear." Journal science writing is not known for greatness; nonetheless, errors of English that interfere with understanding the claims being made or the accounts of research given really ought to be grounds for revision requirements, at minimum. These authors should invest in a scientific translator, or else bring in a grad student with good English, if they intend to publish science in English. And the editor should have told them this bit of plain common sense.

As to the teleological language in the paper, is this really a problem? I was under the impression that biologists tolerate the use of teleological language on a strictly metaphorical basis. The correct ways to say things are prolix and unidiomatic. But I'm not even an amateur as far as biology and philosophy of biology go. If my impression is incorrect, I'd like to be corrected.

Extra bit of data re easy corruption of the Plos ONE review process: I've just had the very unpleasant experience of having a paper pocket rejected by a Plos ONE reviewer. "Pocket rejected" in that there wasn't an argument to reject it outright. Rather, there was a persistent demand for data that can't be obtained so that the editor would quickly stamp it with "please resubmit" without bothering to understand what was happening, even when it was pointed out to him. The reviewer is purposely delaying the paper, perhaps so he or a colleague can scoop me. The Plos ONE editors aren't faithfully executing their job. I'm not the only researcher to have noticed this.

RJ said: As to the teleological language in the paper, is this really a problem? I was under the impression that biologists tolerate the use of teleological language on a strictly metaphorical basis. The correct ways to say things are prolix and unidiomatic. But I'm not even an amateur as far as biology and philosophy of biology go. If my impression is incorrect, I'd like to be corrected.

On a professional level, is the teleological language in the paper under discussion OK? Is there a specific problem with the teleological language as used in the original paper, or just with the apparently-unintended ideological commitments implied thereby?

In other words: is teleological language idiomatic in journal publications of biology?

I tell my students, all the time, that fluorine likes to get electrons, or that electrons want to go to higher potential. Perhaps these would not be OK in professional journal articles.

RJ said: On a professional level, is the teleological language in the paper under discussion OK? Is there a specific problem with the teleological language as used in the original paper, or just with the apparently-unintended ideological commitments implied thereby? In other words: is teleological language idiomatic in journal publications of biology? I tell my students, all the time, that fluorine likes to get electrons, or that electrons want to go to higher potential. Perhaps these would not be OK in professional journal articles.

In the original post (OP) here it is said that this is a "a paper 'demonstrating' the intelligent design of the human hand".

I see no such demonstration in the original paper, nor any claim to have demonstrated intelligent design.

Did I miss something?

The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.

In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years.

I think that this particular paper has more serious problems than the use of teleological language. Not only is there that issue with "Creator," there are difficulties with subject/object distinctions and other grammatical issues. Just trying to figure out what a sentence means turns out to be ambiguous in several cases. The translation from Chinese to English appears to be very sloppy.

Also, people doing research might be good at doing what they do, but they are quite often terrible at writing and have to have the input of a good editor. Good writing and editing are skills that are acquired with practice and feedback. A lot of us are not particularly good at it.

The use of teleological language in scientific papers is often dependent on common understandings of metaphors in a given area of science. Subfields of science and engineering often adopt "traditional" phrases and acronyms that can get in the way of understanding and generate confusion when the papers in one subfield are read by people in other subfields. It sometimes happens that the same word used in one subfield means something entirely different in another subfield.

Having worked in multidisciplinary areas of science during parts of my career, I have encountered these difficulties on a number of occasions. Some form of accommodation has to be worked out. Some forms of teleological language seem offensive in some contexts; but it depends on what the common understandings are in a subfield.

For example, saying something like "minimizing the following action integral," without further comment about why one is minimizing it, is well understood in most contexts in physics. Another example is the technical/engineering phrase about "water seeking its own level." This phrase is a colloquial way of saying one is making use of the laws of hydrostatics to level a structure or foundation.

Another example that has been discussed here on Panda's thumb on occasion, has been one of the most abused words in the ID/creationist vs science war; namely the word "entropy." ID/creationists think it refers to disorder; and sometimes physics textbook writers and popularizers of science have used it that way. There are a limited number of examples from physics in which entropy actually is associated with disorder; but physicists using that discription usually understand that it is really about energy being spread around.

As I predicted, the dishonesty institute has posted their martyrdom article defending the use of "Creator."

Mob with Pitchforks Forms as Science Journal PLOS ONE Acknowledges "Proper Design by the Creator"

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/03/mob_with_pitchf102658.html

DavidK said: As I predicted, the dishonesty institute has posted their martyrdom article defending the use of "Creator." Mob with Pitchforks Forms as Science Journal PLOS ONE Acknowledges "Proper Design by the Creator" http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/03/mob_with_pitchf102658.html

Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty? Why should they even bother if they are going to get these kinds of responses:

Ricard Sole, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra : "I think that pretending to defend a creationist argument (non-science) in a science journal raises serious doubts about the whole enterprise. The paper should be retracted. As a PLOS ONE editor I believe accepting this situation would seriously damage our credibility."

Zach Throckmorton, Assistant Professor of Anatomy at Lincoln Memorial University: "utilization of an intelligent design creationism framework for explaining human anatomy is not acceptable for a scientific journal"

Jorge Soberon, Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University: "I find the use of religious language in a scietific paper totally unacceptable. I will be watching this paper closely, and distributing it to colleagues. If PLOS ONE does not do something about it, like asking the authors to retratct the paper, or at the very least publishing an explanation, I will stop reviewing papers for PLOS ONE."

Oliver Rauhut, paleontologist and Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University: "As noted by many comments below, this is not a matter of inappropriate wording! This rather seems to be a (successfull) attempt to place an intelligent design argument in a (so far) respected scientific journal. Thus, the only solution is the immediate retraction of this paper!"

Dante Chialvo, Adjunct Professor of Physiology at Northwestern University: "As a PLOS editor I am used to the relentless emails from Plos staff including all kinds or reminders. In this case I am ashamed that the journal staff, the editor responsable for the paper, the reviewers, all ignored this more than obvious red flag resulting on a creationist argument embedded on a scientific paper. I will consider resigning unless exemplary actions are taken by Plos."

John Commenter said: Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty?

" what you have quoted is a group of arguments against sneaking unsupported creationist assertions into scientific papers."

No, what I quoted was a number of researchers who clearly believe that it is, in principle, illegitimate to publish papers advocating creationism or intelligent design.

"If the theory of evolution were to face an unexpected serious challenge or revision, why would that make your religion the the default explanation for everything, instead of someone else’s religion or something else altogether?"

It wouldn't. I don't believe that.

"Why does your religion not need to show any evidence, but merely function as a privileged default?"

I don't believe that either.

"Do you agree that an incorrect or dishonest argument denying established science is a pointless waste of time that reflects poorly on the person who makes it?"

I agree.

"Why are some people religious without resorting to creationist science denial?"

Because they believe that their religion is true, and that creationism is false?

"Do you agree that “I’m a bad person and if I didn’t fear the God of my particular religion I’d do terrible things” is not an argument against scientific results?"

I agree that that is not a good argument. Again, I don't hold to that position.

Frankly, you really are coming off as the classic internet atheist stereotype, rather than being an interlocutor genuinely interested in dialogue: https://youtu.be/JiW3qRlDhig?t=6

harold said:

John Commenter said: Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty?

No. What you have quoted is a group of arguments against sneaking unsupported creationist assertions into scientific papers. I'm very happy to listen to any real evidence for creationism. This isn't a journal, but if you have some, let's hear it. Who is the designer or Creator? How can we test your answer? What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? If the theory of evolution were to face an unexpected serious challenge or revision, why would that make your religion the the default explanation for everything, instead of someone else's religion or something else altogether? Why does your religion not need to show any evidence, but merely function as a privileged default? Do you agree that an incorrect or dishonest argument denying established science is a pointless waste of time that reflects poorly on the person who makes it? Why are some people religious without resorting to creationist science denial? Do you agree that "I'm a bad person and if I didn't fear the God of my particular religion I'd do terrible things" is not an argument against scientific results? Do you agree that your predicted failure to answer these questions in a straightforward way demonstrates profound and utter hypocrisy? Whining that you want your personal religion declared valid in scientific journals but not making the least effort to defend it in scientific terms, while also dishonestly or ignorantly attacking established science?

John Commenter said: " what you have quoted is a group of arguments against sneaking unsupported creationist assertions into scientific papers." No, what I quoted was a number of researchers who clearly believe that it is, in principle, illegitimate to publish papers advocating creationism or intelligent design. "If the theory of evolution were to face an unexpected serious challenge or revision, why would that make your religion the the default explanation for everything, instead of someone else’s religion or something else altogether?" It wouldn't. I don't believe that. "Why does your religion not need to show any evidence, but merely function as a privileged default?" I don't believe that either. "Do you agree that an incorrect or dishonest argument denying established science is a pointless waste of time that reflects poorly on the person who makes it?" I agree. "Why are some people religious without resorting to creationist science denial?" Because they believe that their religion is true, and that creationism is false? "Do you agree that “I’m a bad person and if I didn’t fear the God of my particular religion I’d do terrible things” is not an argument against scientific results?" I agree that that is not a good argument. Again, I don't hold to that position. Frankly, you really are coming off as the classic internet atheist stereotype, rather than being an interlocutor genuinely interested in dialogue: https://youtu.be/JiW3qRlDhig?t=6

John Commenter said: .... Frankly, you really are coming off as the classic internet atheist stereotype, rather than being an interlocutor genuinely interested in dialogue: https://youtu.be/JiW3qRlDhig?t=6

JimboK said:

John Commenter said: .... Frankly, you really are coming off as the classic internet atheist stereotype, rather than being an interlocutor genuinely interested in dialogue: https://youtu.be/JiW3qRlDhig?t=6

If you are truly interested in dialogue, you should answer the first eight questions...

John Commenter said: " what you have quoted is a group of arguments against sneaking unsupported creationist assertions into scientific papers." No, what I quoted was a number of researchers who clearly believe that it is, in principle, illegitimate to publish papers advocating creationism or intelligent design. "If the theory of evolution were to face an unexpected serious challenge or revision, why would that make your religion the the default explanation for everything, instead of someone else’s religion or something else altogether?" It wouldn't. I don't believe that. "Why does your religion not need to show any evidence, but merely function as a privileged default?" I don't believe that either. "Do you agree that an incorrect or dishonest argument denying established science is a pointless waste of time that reflects poorly on the person who makes it?" I agree. "Why are some people religious without resorting to creationist science denial?" Because they believe that their religion is true, and that creationism is false? "Do you agree that “I’m a bad person and if I didn’t fear the God of my particular religion I’d do terrible things” is not an argument against scientific results?" I agree that that is not a good argument. Again, I don't hold to that position. Frankly, you really are coming off as the classic internet atheist stereotype, rather than being an interlocutor genuinely interested in dialogue: https://youtu.be/JiW3qRlDhig?t=6

No, what I quoted was a number of researchers who clearly believe that it is, in principle, illegitimate to publish papers advocating creationism or intelligent design.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said:

Doc Bill said: It appears to be a translation issue. A Chinese word meaning "Nature" or something along those lines.

It is written using strange English, like how it's the right design to perform a multitude of tasks "in a comfortable way." I suppose there's something to that, but one wonders about the evolutionary pressures to do things in a comfortable way. Then their mention of evolutionary remodeling seems not to really relate to the mention of "proper design by the Creator" in effect, whatever the intention. But I hope someone competent with English and evolution will work with them to cut out the teleologic language altogether. Just replacing "Creator" with "nature" would still leave it look like nature is concerned with "the proper design," close to the ID/creationist caricature of evolution as a mere stand-in for their deity. Glen Davidson

John Commenter said: " what you have quoted is a group of arguments against sneaking unsupported creationist assertions into scientific papers." No, what I quoted was a number of researchers who clearly believe that it is, in principle, illegitimate to publish papers advocating creationism or intelligent design.

John Commenter said: Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty? Why should they even bother if they are going to get these kinds of responses: Ricard Sole, Head of the Complex Systems Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra : "I think that pretending to defend a creationist argument (non-science) in a science journal raises serious doubts about the whole enterprise. The paper should be retracted. As a PLOS ONE editor I believe accepting this situation would seriously damage our credibility." Zach Throckmorton, Assistant Professor of Anatomy at Lincoln Memorial University: "utilization of an intelligent design creationism framework for explaining human anatomy is not acceptable for a scientific journal" Jorge Soberon, Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University: "I find the use of religious language in a scietific paper totally unacceptable. I will be watching this paper closely, and distributing it to colleagues. If PLOS ONE does not do something about it, like asking the authors to retratct the paper, or at the very least publishing an explanation, I will stop reviewing papers for PLOS ONE." Oliver Rauhut, paleontologist and Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University: "As noted by many comments below, this is not a matter of inappropriate wording! This rather seems to be a (successfull) attempt to place an intelligent design argument in a (so far) respected scientific journal. Thus, the only solution is the immediate retraction of this paper!" Dante Chialvo, Adjunct Professor of Physiology at Northwestern University: "As a PLOS editor I am used to the relentless emails from Plos staff including all kinds or reminders. In this case I am ashamed that the journal staff, the editor responsable for the paper, the reviewers, all ignored this more than obvious red flag resulting on a creationist argument embedded on a scientific paper. I will consider resigning unless exemplary actions are taken by Plos."

Doc Bill said:Furthermore, why can't I reach that itchy spot on my back?

Hey John C., would you consider it persecution or unfair censorship if a journal's default decision was "reject" if a paper made positive reference to phlogiston? Or the phrenological topography of a skull? Or the effects of an imbalance in the four humors on health? Or the effects of one's birth sign on criminality?

John Commenter said: Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty? Why should they even bother if they are going to get these kinds of responses: ...

Matt Young said: But realistically, a good, competent paper demonstrating design would have a lot of difficulty getting published in a proper journal. Yes, I know that "good, competent paper demonstrating design" is probably an oxymoron, and all of us have read too much rubbish pretending to demonstrate design. For those reasons, someone who actually made a real breakthrough would have trouble getting published. And that, it seems to me, is all that Mr. Commenter claimed -- that creationists would not even bother to try, given the probable knee-jerk response of an editor, probably including me. I think that most of the comments regarding Mr. Commenter have been off target.

Matt Young said:

John Commenter said: Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty? Why should they even bother if they are going to get these kinds of responses: ...

I think that John Commenter, who never claimed to be a creationist, is essentially correct. If anyone came up with hard evidence in favor of design, they would have great difficulty publishing that evidence in a legitimate journal, precisely because of the attitudes expressed in Mr. Commenter's quotations. That is not to say that the work of Dembski and others has anything to commend it, nor that the Liu paper provided any such evidence. But realistically, a good, competent paper demonstrating design would have a lot of difficulty getting published in a proper journal. Yes, I know that "good, competent paper demonstrating design" is probably an oxymoron, and all of us have read too much rubbish pretending to demonstrate design. For those reasons, someone who actually made a real breakthrough would have trouble getting published. And that, it seems to me, is all that Mr. Commenter claimed -- that creationists would not even bother to try, given the probable knee-jerk response of an editor, probably including me. I think that most of the comments regarding Mr. Commenter have been off target.

Just Bob said:

Matt Young said:

John Commenter said: Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty? Why should they even bother if they are going to get these kinds of responses: ...

I think that John Commenter, who never claimed to be a creationist, is essentially correct. If anyone came up with hard evidence in favor of design, they would have great difficulty publishing that evidence in a legitimate journal, precisely because of the attitudes expressed in Mr. Commenter's quotations. That is not to say that the work of Dembski and others has anything to commend it, nor that the Liu paper provided any such evidence. But realistically, a good, competent paper demonstrating design would have a lot of difficulty getting published in a proper journal. Yes, I know that "good, competent paper demonstrating design" is probably an oxymoron, and all of us have read too much rubbish pretending to demonstrate design. For those reasons, someone who actually made a real breakthrough would have trouble getting published. And that, it seems to me, is all that Mr. Commenter claimed -- that creationists would not even bother to try, given the probable knee-jerk response of an editor, probably including me. I think that most of the comments regarding Mr. Commenter have been off target.

So it's sort of a "crying wolf" situation: creationists have "disproved evolution" and/or "proved creation/design" with bogus math, junk science, and Bible verses so many times that the Pavlovian response of journal editors and reviewers to anything that smacks of creationism is automatic dismissal. IOW, creationists themselves have conditioned scientists to that response. They made their own bed; they reap what they sowed;... and other such metaphors.

And in any case, according to Larry Moran and PZ Myers, there really is nothing worth publishing in the body of this paper - there is no new or interesting science to Yet Another Description of how the human hand is constructed and how it works. Done in full 4-part harmony a century ago. So even with good accurate translation, it's hard to understand how this could be published.

Matt Young said: Maybe I was being teleological or something, but I thought that the 2 quotations "..."

Matt Young said:

John Commenter said: Doesn't this incident show that the complaint "Why don't creationists/ID proponents ever try to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals?" is empty? Why should they even bother if they are going to get these kinds of responses: ...

I think that John Commenter, who never claimed to be a creationist, is essentially correct. If anyone came up with hard evidence in favor of design, they would have great difficulty publishing that evidence in a legitimate journal, precisely because of the attitudes expressed in Mr. Commenter's quotations. That is not to say that the work of Dembski and others has anything to commend it, nor that the Liu paper provided any such evidence. But realistically, a good, competent paper demonstrating design would have a lot of difficulty getting published in a proper journal. Yes, I know that "good, competent paper demonstrating design" is probably an oxymoron, and all of us have read too much rubbish pretending to demonstrate design. For those reasons, someone who actually made a real breakthrough would have trouble getting published. And that, it seems to me, is all that Mr. Commenter claimed -- that creationists would not even bother to try, given the probable knee-jerk response of an editor, probably including me. I think that most of the comments regarding Mr. Commenter have been off target.

I'll pretend to play along again for a few minutes.

If we grant, counterfactually, that there is some ID work worthy of professional publication, it would have to be very different indeed from anything on offer so far. All the ID 'work' so far has been totally meta. There just is no sign of the massive network of interlocking, anomalous results needed for a fresh fundamental theory.

Taking the 'work' done so far with the most charitable possible interpretation (an interpretation not warranted by the history, but I'm playing along...), it's just a series of failed possibility arguments. Similar possibility arguments, but successful, appeared for the really revolutionary theories of science such as special relativity and quantum theory, only after a long series of repeated experiments seemed to require a fresh approach. Subsequent work extended the predictions and empirical comprehensiveness of those theories.

So, the most charitable possible interpretation is that the theorists have things completely backwards.

But as this site and others have documented for many years now, this charity is not rationally warranted; in fact ID 'theory' is a propagandistic effort to help establish the cultural dominance of extreme right-wing theocracy. I thank the contributors and commenters on this site for their long-standing efforts to inform us about this pernicious effort to subvert democracy.

Harold wrote: I asked him for positive evidence for ID/creationism.

Who is the designer or Creator? How can we test your answer? What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

FL said: Does an Intelligent Designer or Creator exist at all? What is the positive evidence for its existence, and how can we test such evidence?

Of course we're being rather meta ourselves in discussing the what-ifs of what would happen to a genuinely scientific paper providing evidence for ID, since we've had no actual experience in this.

But I'm not at all sure that it would have such trouble getting published, primarily because it happens to have a considerable constituency and has hogged the attention of science far more than your average crank "theory" ever has. Are we to forget that Meyer had a "review article" published? Or, indeed, that the paper in question was published despite some rather creationist-sounding language? Granville Sewell's claptrap about the second law of thermodynamics made it into a math journal, or some such thing. None of these were Nature or Science, to be sure, and they ended up being retracted, but, for all of the editors and reviewers that are fed up with ID/creationist nonsense, there are always a few that will push them through, despite their not being up to the level that science papers should be.

Since we know that junk ID/creationist papers have made it into the scientific literature, why should we think that the amazing appearance of genuine evidence for design in life (outside of our meager efforts, that is) would suffer the fate of rejection? Especially in the lower-tier journals that might benefit from publishing surprising and controversial reports that the premier journals rejected, would that truly be surprising? People would complain, but they'd say, we've looked it over and everything was done properly, so it's up to you to show that in fact it's not design, like proper scientists. That's one of the purposes of publication, after all, so that scientists can explain results that might not fit into present frameworks--or that might, if more brain power is trained upon it.

There probably would be editors that would reject a paper just because it purports to claim that design was found in life. A few, though, might be hoping for ID evidence, actually, while a few more would probably be intrigued by an ID paper that finally did what it was supposed to do, even if it eventually failed, and so would send it out for reviews. If the reviewers found no smoking fraud, they might pass it on and let scientists deal with an issue that seems not to fit with current evolutionary models.

Unfortunately, we'd probably never know what would happen to good results seeming to point to design, even were this possible. IDists themselves seem not to be any more hopeful than the rest of us that ID can really be science, and apparently fail to really attempt to do anything based on design principles. Indeed, they even fail to predict real design features in life, like a smart designer taking great complex features from an unrelated vertebrate species and incorporating these into another vertebrate species. They really make no meaningful predictions at all, merely trying to say that complex functional aspects of life are evidence of design, basically attempting to redefine life as designed, since no one really doubted that life was complex and functioned. It's impossible to do science with tripe like that. The fact that no one is, or can be, doing science using today's ID is the best reason for an editor not to pay too much attention to any ID paper purporting to do science using the DI's "definition."

But if someone really found life with aspects having genuine designed features I'm not at all sure that a proper scientific report of this would be rejected--especially by all journals. Clearly this would not be a real ID paper, because ID is just apologetics masquerading as science, and not a way of finding design in life.

Glen Davidson

Every word of this is 100% applicable to astrology, UFO abduction science, and the “water flouridation [sic] saps precious body fluids” hypothesis, as well.

FL said:

Harold wrote: I asked him for positive evidence for ID/creationism.

No, Harold, you actually did NOT do so. Instead, you asked the questions that would rationally follow **afterwards**, but that's all. Here is the pre-requisite question, the main question, that you failed to ask of Mr. Commenter: Does an Intelligent Designer or Creator exist at all? What is the positive evidence for its existence, and how can we test such evidence? And here are the "afterwards" questions that you did ask of him:

Who is the designer or Creator? How can we test your answer? What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

Such questions are okay, but the pre-requisite question needs to be asked first. FL

Matt Young said:

Every word of this is 100% applicable to astrology, UFO abduction science, and the “water flouridation [sic] saps precious body fluids” hypothesis, as well.

You can (try to) reduce any argument to absurdity by a judicious substitution. The difference between creationism, including intelligent-design creationism, and phrenology is that there is no Phrenology Institute that has plenty of money and considerable potential influence. Creationists love to get attention by whining that they are being discriminated against. In a way, the complaint is correct. Maybe I am just "playing along," like RJ, but I think we need to realize (or admit) that a competent paper stressing design would likely be rejected out of hand by a halfway-decent journal. I do not anticipate any such paper ever being written, but that is part of the problem.

Ever since Morris and Gish formed the Institute for Creation "Research" back in 1970, we have witnessed the development of a very distinctive form of pseudoscience that is unlike most other pseudosciences. ID/creationism has a unique template of socio/political activity with an underlying sectarian theme - despite more recent attempts to hide it - and a unique set of shibboleths that identify the misconceptions about basic science that all ID/creationists hold.

Unlike most other pseudosciences, ID/creationism has well-funded and well-organized "think" tanks generating emotional propaganda; and ID/creationism also has a set of political operatives who constantly stir up a grass roots political base that keeps pressure on governmental institutions. ID/creationism is, and always has been, a socio/political movement with a sectarian agenda for inserting itself into public education.

Most other pseudosciences are pushed by a few socially awkward crackpot loners who imagine themselves to be geniuses who have leaped far beyond centuries of work by the scientific community. Many of the ID/creationist leaders seem to have the same beliefs about themselves, but they are also backed by a socio/political organization that tries to mess with people's heads using pseudo philosophy, pseudo metaphysics, and pseudo legal jargon in order to elevate their dogma above science.

ID/Creationism is a unique and fairly good template for what is not science; in fact, it is pure nonsense. I suspect that any future "discoveries" of intelligent design in the universe - if that even means anything - will be by people who are in no way associated with ID/creationism's template of socio/political activity.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said: Of course we're being rather meta ourselves in discussing the what-ifs of what would happen to a genuinely scientific paper providing evidence for ID, since we've had no actual experience in this.

Is that a fair paraphrase?

This isn’t a refereed journal, it’s an open forum, and I’m not a journal editor, I’m a guy who’s willing to listen.

FL said: Here is the pre-requisite question, the main question, that you failed to ask of Mr. Commenter: Does an Intelligent Designer or Creator exist at all? What is the positive evidence for its existence, and how can we test such evidence?

Harold wrote: Having said that, FL, why don't you answer all the questions, including your own? Does an Intelligent Designer or Creator exist at all? What is the positive evidence for its existence, and how can we test such evidence?

Harold also wrote: Who is the designer or Creator? How can we test your answer? What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

I have asked it yea, these many times, and will continue to ask it, because they never answer it:

A) Name something that you know is NOT 'intelligently designed.' [I have seen 'a rock' proposed, along with 'a cave,' 'a pile of sand,' and 'Paley's stone' (which is invalid, being a merely postulated undesigned object).]

B) Explain how you know it isn't designed, and how anyone can test that object or similar ones and always come to the same conclusion.

C) Explain how you can know that your proposed 'natural, undesigned' object could not have been arranged atom by atom by an omnipotent designer to be just as it is.

D) And if you can't provide empirical tests for B) and C), meaning that everything might be designed, then of what use is the concept of design in science?

FL said: Oh, been there done that already.

For example, if somebody offers a “Yes” and some testable evidence on the pre-requisite question, then Atheism and Evolution and Pandaville are permanently destroyed, regardless of the answer to that next question (“Who Is The Designer or Creator.”)

This “prerequisite” question assumes that one knows what an “intelligent designer” is. The first question to be asked - if one presumes to look for “intelligent design” - has to be about the nature of the designer in order for one to recognize what such a designer would make. One would also have to know enough about science to rule out natural processes.

Regarding the assumption that some entity caused our universe to exist, why does is that assumption taken to imply that said entity had to design the details within this universe? Natural processes have a way of combining and causing emergent properties, and something that caused a universe to start would know that.

To follow up on harold's observations.

The creator/intelligent designer(s) are a tool to defeat evolution.

There are plenty of examples of theists, including conservative Christians, who accept the science of evolutionary biology. Everybody is familiar with that, and I don't need to bore the reader with lists. For example, the search through the Bible for proof texts is futile as the necessary concepts to describe evolution (and thereby to deny it) would be anachronistic in the culture of the Ancient Near East. Attacks on evolution frequently turn out to be more appropriate against reproductive biology.

Any attempt to analyze the concept of "designer" shows that it is inadequate to account for anything in the world of life on Earth, and is theologically suspect in major traditions of Christianity. And any analysis is met with resistance from the advocates of ID: "that is not what is meant", but with no positive answer as to what is meant.

The true target to ID is not atheism, but science: most particularly the physical relationship of the human body to the rest of life on Earth; or the recognition of a "magisterium" not under one's control.

But - at least if we’re considering a designer as a scientific explanation - Harold is right and FL is wrong; the list of “what’s it like” questions Harold asks should come first, before the determination of “is it really there.” Because there are many possible design hypotheses, from tricky fraudulent humans to aliens to unintelligent insects genetically adapted to build something to Gods. And the only way to say this design hypothesis is supported while that one is not is to say what characteristics your hypothetical designer has.

Henry J said: Regarding the assumption that some entity caused our universe to exist, why does is that assumption taken to imply that said entity had to design the details within this universe? Natural processes have a way of combining and causing emergent properties, and something that caused a universe to start would know that.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said: I really don't think so, because I understand intelligence to entail rationality and foresight. I don't have a problem with the possibility of saying that something's designed without knowing anything other than that this is an intelligent being, so long as we're dealing with normal notions of "intelligent." Just as importantly, and following from the rationality and foresight of intelligence, one should be able readily distinguish an intelligent production from evolutionary functionality. Glen Davidson

But - at least if we’re considering a designer as a scientific explanation - Harold is right and FL is wrong; the list of “what’s it like” questions Harold asks should come first, before the determination of “is it really there.” Because there are many possible design hypotheses, from tricky fraudulent humans to aliens to unintelligent insects genetically adapted to build something to Gods. And the only way to say this design hypothesis is supported while that one is not is to say what characteristics your hypothetical designer has.

I really don’t think so, because I understand intelligence to entail rationality and foresight. I don’t have a problem with the possibility of saying that something’s designed without knowing anything other than that this is an intelligent being, so long as we’re dealing with normal notions of “intelligent.” Just as importantly, and following from the rationality and foresight of intelligence, one should be able readily distinguish an intelligent production from evolutionary functionality.

FL said:

Harold also wrote: Who is the designer or Creator? How can we test your answer? What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

Like I said earlier, these questions really are okay. But they are secondary to the main question, the pre-requisite question.

What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

TomS said:

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said: I really don't think so, because I understand intelligence to entail rationality and foresight. I don't have a problem with the possibility of saying that something's designed without knowing anything other than that this is an intelligent being, so long as we're dealing with normal notions of "intelligent." Just as importantly, and following from the rationality and foresight of intelligence, one should be able readily distinguish an intelligent production from evolutionary functionality. Glen Davidson

If someone asks about the images of the US presidents on Mount Rushmore, the answer that they are intelligently designed is not helpful.

Yes, we all can agree that there was someone who designed that. But what does that tell us about the result? Why those presidents, rather than Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon? Why on Mount Rushmore, rather than Mount Everest?

And it's even worse when it comes to "Intelligent Design". For ID tells us that the flies and trees on Mount Rushmore were also intelligently designed. For all that the analysis of ID tells us, those sculptures might have just grown there.

On the other hand, just because something has been intelligently designed, that does not mean that it exists. The Superconducting Supercollider, the Penrose Triangle, the Ptolemaic Universe were all intelligently designed.

I would respectfully disagree with harold on this. From a Scientific perspective, the important questions should be

What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

harold said:

But - at least if we’re considering a designer as a scientific explanation - Harold is right and FL is wrong; the list of “what’s it like” questions Harold asks should come first, before the determination of “is it really there.” Because there are many possible design hypotheses, from tricky fraudulent humans to aliens to unintelligent insects genetically adapted to build something to Gods. And the only way to say this design hypothesis is supported while that one is not is to say what characteristics your hypothetical designer has.

I really don’t think so, because I understand intelligence to entail rationality and foresight. I don’t have a problem with the possibility of saying that something’s designed without knowing anything other than that this is an intelligent being, so long as we’re dealing with normal notions of “intelligent.” Just as importantly, and following from the rationality and foresight of intelligence, one should be able readily distinguish an intelligent production from evolutionary functionality.

I'd like a precise way to be sure if something was designed by "an intelligent being, any intelligent being".

To use an example used here before - three identical diamonds. One produced purely by heat and pressure with no intelligence involved. One an artificial diamond produced by a human.

One produced by an intelligent deity as a miracle. How do I distinguish the two that were designed by intelligence, without distinguishing anything about either intelligent agent?

Can you give an example of an instance of someone who was not an ID/creationist showing "I cannot explain who or what made this object but I know it was designed by an intelligence", and doing so correctly?

I openly state here that the task of "merely showing that something is 'designed by intelligence' without any other knowledge of who designed it" is more or less impossible.

The only way to prove me wrong is to come up with a hypothetical way to look at something that is completely unlike anything you have seen before, has no traits that suggest human or animal design, and tell whether or not it was "designed by an intelligence, any intelligence".

This is never an issue for forensics, archaeology, SETI, bird's nest collecting, etc, because those all start with strong explicit or implicit ideas of the constraints and characteristics of the designers under study.

So we have to be talking about something that isn't at all like something designed by a designer we know about.

How about original living cells? I have never claimed I have proof that they weren't originally designed by an intelligence. I simply prefer to seek a natural explanation, and see no strong evidence that they were designed by an intelligence. But is there a way to prove that they were or weren't, right now, by testing cells for "design by intelligence"?

There seems to be a consistent pattern among ID/Creationists who think they see design where there is none; and that pattern is one of having low intelligence and/or having a stubborn tendency to never learn any science.

People with these traits tend to be awed by simple things while being terrified of any possibility of knowing something more complex for fear of having to answer to that knowledge. Ignorance really is bliss for them. The real world administers consequences and demands understanding; ignorance freely spins a comfortable cocoon in which to hide from any responsibility for one's actions or inactions. These ignoramuses can then sit back and imagine that they deserve pie in the sky when they die while the rest of us are stuck with picking up the trash they generate all around them.

ID/creationism and its preaching are basically sectarian excuses to freeload off secular society. No ID/creationist ever does anything of any significance; they generate meaningless words upon meaningless words in return for food, comfort, and safety.

No ID/creationist ever does anything of any significance; they generate meaningless words upon meaningless words in return for food, comfort, and safety.

harold said:

I would respectfully disagree with harold on this. From a Scientific perspective, the important questions should be

What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

I find it difficult to conceptualize looking at something and knowing it was designed, knowing what a designer did, with no clue as to what type type of designer we are talking about. Can you show me how it works with an example? Three rocks. This time they're not diamonds, just ordinary rocks. I tell you that I happen to know in advance that one of them was "designed by an intelligence". But I warn you, it may be a very mysterious intelligence that you are unfamiliar with. Or it may be your Aunt Mildred, who may have, unbeknownst to you, been dating a physics professor from her Arts and Crafts class and been fooling around with some very sophisticated tools. Now, tell me which techniques you will use to demonstrate, not only which rock is "designed" but "what the designer did", "how the designer did it", and "when the designer did it" without knowing anything about the designer? It may be Aunt Mildred, it may be a dark, ancient, bizarre, unfathomable deity feared even by C'thullu, it may be an alien computer from a civilization that destroyed itself a million years ago, that was using sophisticated 3-D printing to print out novelty "indistinguishable from real" rocks as part of a silly fad, or it may be a designer even more inscrutable than any of these. Get to work, you've got some rocks to study. I believe "some kind of universal characteristic of 'design' that is completely unrelated to analogy to the designs of known designers" is a good place to start.

Scott F said:

harold said:

I would respectfully disagree with harold on this. From a Scientific perspective, the important questions should be

What did the designer or Creator do? How can we test your answer? When did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer? How did the designer or Creator do it? How can we test your answer?

I find it difficult to conceptualize looking at something and knowing it was designed, knowing what a designer did, with no clue as to what type type of designer we are talking about. Can you show me how it works with an example? Three rocks. This time they're not diamonds, just ordinary rocks. I tell you that I happen to know in advance that one of them was "designed by an intelligence". But I warn you, it may be a very mysterious intelligence that you are unfamiliar with. Or it may be your Aunt Mildred, who may have, unbeknownst to you, been dating a physics professor from her Arts and Crafts class and been fooling around with some very sophisticated tools. Now, tell me which techniques you will use to demonstrate, not only which rock is "designed" but "what the designer did", "how the designer did it", and "when the designer did it" without knowing anything about the designer? It may be Aunt Mildred, it may be a dark, ancient, bizarre, unfathomable deity feared even by C'thullu, it may be an alien computer from a civilization that destroyed itself a million years ago, that was using sophisticated 3-D printing to print out novelty "indistinguishable from real" rocks as part of a silly fad, or it may be a designer even more inscrutable than any of these. Get to work, you've got some rocks to study. I believe "some kind of universal characteristic of 'design' that is completely unrelated to analogy to the designs of known designers" is a good place to start.

Hi harold, I think you might have missed my two points. What I was suggesting was that the "What", "When", and "How" questions are more important than the "Who" question. Second, these questions are driven, not by the assumed identity of a designer, but by a set of evidences that can't be explained by "natural" causes. To your example, if faced with 3 apparently undistinguished "ordinary rocks", then without any other evidence, the assumption for their presence and appearance is "natural causes". If, however, you tell me that one of them was "designed by an intelligence", you have now placed into evidence the intervention of an "intelligent designer". You have now changed the problem, and it requires additional questions and information. In this case, yes it would help to know the answers to Mike's questions and your other questions, such as what is the intelligent agent capable of, what tools and techniques are available to it. But even here, the "what" and the "how" are more important than the "who". It may not be important if it is Aunt Mildred, or Professor Smith, or Vishnu. Personally, as far as I can tell, the only reason to ask the "who" question, is if you want to know "why" the designer did what was done.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said:

No ID/creationist ever does anything of any significance; they generate meaningless words upon meaningless words in return for food, comfort, and safety.

Well, to be fair, many do useful things that have nothing to do with biology, and some even do useful things related to biology (like medicine). But as creationists/IDists, they're not only useless, they're out to stymie and disparage the science that they don't like. Again, many are essentially ineffective in that respect, but some are not. Glen Davidson

Mike Elzinga said:

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said:

No ID/creationist ever does anything of any significance; they generate meaningless words upon meaningless words in return for food, comfort, and safety.

Well, to be fair, many do useful things that have nothing to do with biology, and some even do useful things related to biology (like medicine). But as creationists/IDists, they're not only useless, they're out to stymie and disparage the science that they don't like. Again, many are essentially ineffective in that respect, but some are not. Glen Davidson

I was thinking primarily of the members of the "think" tanks such as the Discovery Institute, the Institute for Creation "Research," Answers in Genesis, Reasons to Believe, etc. People like Ben Carson could certainly be said to have done good things, despite the fact that he has bought into some of the crap peddled by those "think" tanks. He apparently has not spent much time thinking about what he has parroted from them. I don't know if any of that crap has diminished any of his accomplishments from what they would have been if he hadn't been taken in by the ID/creationists. Probably not if his work amounts to being a skilled surgeon with a good memory for the anatomy of the head and brain. And let me again be clear that when I talk about ID/Creationists, I am referring to the socio/political movement that started with Morris and Gish and has been morphing continuously ever since in order to get around the courts. Those people are useless as contributing members of society; they're basically parasites sitting in plush offices cranking out junk and being well paid. I hope that gravy train is coming to an end soon; they have been a bunch of annoying mischief makers over the last 50 years.

I openly state here that the task of “merely showing that something is ‘designed by intelligence’ without any other knowledge of who designed it” is more or less impossible.

What about beeps from beyond earth that start with two beeps in quick succession, a pause, then three beeps in quick succession, a pause, then five beeps in quick succession, a pause, then seven beeps in quick succession, a pause, then 11 beeps in quick succession, and so on up to the number 97 covering all of the primes under 100 and nothing else, then repeating the same over and over again? Of course we likely do know something about these beings, since they probably evolved and developed a technological civilization, but not even that directly, so if spirits were doing it I wouldn’t know the difference. But I don’t know that I need to worry about such a “possibility.”

I SHOULD ADD

By asking those questions I was only guiding John Commenter by giving examples of what positive evidence might look like.

I am skeptical of creationist claims and would ask for fairly rigorous positive evidence, true. Real evidence should be able to surmount that barrier.

Furthermore the only reason ID doesn't address who, what, how and when is because it's a failed legal strategy. It's not interested in showing evidence of anything, it was about getting evolution denial into public schools without provoking a lawsuit.

Now, if some kind of positive evidence exists, other than making a minimal effort to explain what happened and how, and ideally who and when, I'm willing to listen. I can't currently imagine what such evidence would be, and "it looks designed to me" isn't good enough.

But of course, I never, ever said only who, what, how and when are acceptable. I merely raised those as obvious points that I would address if I were in their shoes.

If they can achieve the incredibly subtle and delicate height of showing that "the designer" did something, to an adequate degree that alternate natural explanations are ruled out, while still managing to be coy about who the designer is, what the designer did, how the designer did it, and when the designer did it, I'm willing to listen to that, too. I know I couldn't do that, though. But hey, if someone can...

My own emphasis on anti-evolution/creationism/intelligent-design/whatever is "what do you have to offer?"

Once we have an idea of what they're talking about, only then can we get around to what sort of evidence or reasoning supporting is there.

ISTM that only in politics can one get anywhere in just being negative. "Down with the king" works without deciding whether to have a democracy or a dictatorship or anarchy.

But in a "scientific revolution", one has to have an alternative. For example, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model of the heavens was known to have problems, but not until Copernicus went through the work of describing an alternative to geocentrism was there a challenge.

Anti-evolution does not even attempt to offer an alternative to evolutionary biology. The basic question to ask those who refuse evolution is:

Who, what, when, where, why and how does the world of life on Earth work?

If there is no answer to that, then it is premature to ask about evidence.

The human body is obviously most similar in many complex ways to chimps and other apes, among all the countless ways that it could have been, and common descent with modification accounts for that. No speculation beyond "that's the way that it happens to be" has been offered as an alternative. (Such as, "God can do whatever he wants, and that's the way that he wanted." There is no Biblical proof-text about that. Irreducible complexity and conservation of complex specified information don't have anything to say.)

With the obvious exception of a coded radio message from, say, a distant star system, the identity of the designer is critical to establishing design. If Paley had not been familiar with manufactured artifacts and known what a watch was used for, he would not have had the vaguest idea that it was designed. As Gary Hurd points out, "Archaeologists know precisely the identity of our designers, their fundamental needs, their available materials, and their range of means to manipulate those materials" [Chapter 8 of Why Intelligent Design Fails]. Without such knowledge, an archaeologist cannot distinguish a bit of stone from an arrowhead; indeed, Hurd argues that stone arrowheads were not recognized as such until after they were found in actual use in the New World.

I suspect that Mr. Hurd is lurking here and may want to amplify on that point (sorry!).

harold said: Glen Davidson - Well, I'm glad to see that we agree after all.

Originally you said that you disagree that any of this is necessary, and that you think it's possible to "show design" without having any knowledge of the designer. However, you've subsequently shown that you agree with my point.

All of your examples of design were from analogy to humans.

I openly state here that the task of “merely showing that something is ‘designed by intelligence’ without any other knowledge of who designed it” is more or less impossible.

What about beeps from beyond earth that start with two beeps in quick succession, a pause, then three beeps in quick succession, a pause, then five beeps in quick succession, a pause, then seven beeps in quick succession, a pause, then 11 beeps in quick succession, and so on up to the number 97 covering all of the primes under 100 and nothing else, then repeating the same over and over again? Of course we likely do know something about these beings, since they probably evolved and developed a technological civilization, but not even that directly, so if spirits were doing it I wouldn’t know the difference. But I don’t know that I need to worry about such a “possibility.”

Using radio technology to transmit a signal that is a popular aspect of human mathematics is an analogy to humans. Radio signals are physical, so if created by human-like "spirits", must have been done so by some interaction of the spirits with the physical world. We could always argue that any human creation with an anonymous or unknown creator "might have been" the product of a spirit, but it would have to be a spirit that interacts with the physical world in a human-like way. No-one has argued that if we have an image from a planet, and it shows ruined human-like cities with statues of humanoid aliens, that we can't recognize that as design.

However, ID/creationists claim that living cells, flagellae, and other things for which no analogy to creation by a human-like intelligence with currently known technology is possible are designed. No only is no strong analogy to human design rationally possible, but other, better explanations exist. The bar is much higher is such a claim is to be positively supported, sufficiently so for inclusion in the scientific literature.

Some sort of explanation, at least a decent partial explanation opening the door for more study, of what sort of entity, what it did, how it did it, and when it did it would be highly desirable to support such a claim. Certainly what was done, how it was done, and how these assertions can be tested, is critical, and anyone can see that who and when are obvious basic question.

The claim "it looks designed to me" only works when we have some idea of what kind of designer we are talking about.

Your original accidental apparent defense of the "it looks designed to me" technique merely reflected a misreading of my point, of course. Ultimately there is no disagreement.

Mike Elzinga said:

FL said: Here is the pre-requisite question, the main question, that you failed to ask of Mr. Commenter: Does an Intelligent Designer or Creator exist at all? What is the positive evidence for its existence, and how can we test such evidence?

This "prerequisite" question assumes that one knows what an "intelligent designer" is.

The first question to be asked - if one presumes to look for "intelligent design" - has to be about the nature of the designer in order for one to recognize what such a designer would make. One would also have to know enough about science to rule out natural processes.

Is a snowflake designed? How about a benzene ring? Where along the spectrum of complexity in condensed matter does one draw the line between designed and not designed? If one doesn't know the underlying physics, chemistry, or other scientific laws - which has been historically true about all ID/creationists - then one isn't justified in jumping to conclusions about design.

we know ENOUGH to at least distinguish between the product of mindless evolution versus some agent of intelligent causation (an intelligent designer).

FL said: But so far, nobody's able to show that evolution produces (or even CAN produce at all!) that five-fold irreducible complexity of the human eye lens. IC infers intelligent causation. And you don't even need to know "the nature of the designer" to make it at least this far. Welcome to the scientific method, yes!

"If one doesn’t know the underlying physics, chemistry, or other scientific laws - which has been historically true about all ID/creationists - then one isn’t justified in jumping to conclusions about design."

FL believes solely on a Bible verse that the human eye was created "de novo" from dirt by a god. He believes that the eye lens is IC solely on a single paper written 20 years ago by a SDA theologian in an obscure Christian journal. He believes the eye to be either perfectly functional or not functional at all - no intermediates allowed, yet the NG article I linked discusses all types of eyes - some simple some complex - complex eyes don't guarantee higher fitness than simple eyes; it depends on the environment. Not to mention that the human eye is just a vertebrate eye and shows the contingency involved with being a mammal and old world primate.

Matt Young said: With the obvious exception of a coded radio message from, say, a distant star system, the identity of the designer is critical to establishing design.

If Paley had not been familiar with manufactured artifacts and known what a watch was used for, he would not have had the vaguest idea that it was designed.

As Gary Hurd points out, "Archaeologists know precisely the identity of our designers, their fundamental needs, their available materials, and their range of means to manipulate those materials" [Chapter 8 of Why Intelligent Design Fails]. Without such knowledge, an archaeologist cannot distinguish a bit of stone from an arrowhead; indeed, Hurd argues that stone arrowheads were not recognized as such until after they were found in actual use in the New World. I suspect that Mr. Hurd is lurking here and may want to amplify on that point (sorry!).

But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense. Which brings me to the giant panda and its "thumb."

So he might have thought that the clear glass of the crystal wasn’t manufactured by humans,

Rolf says: I am not a a scientist but I have spent a lifetime with books and studies of science and nature (and religions as well) since I first became aware of the ToE in 1943, 13 years old. I know and understand religions (plural), depth psychology and science. What do you know and understand that makes you capable of having an educated opinion in the matters on the table here? I’ve of course read Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, R.D.Laing, Mazlow and many others, even 20th and 21st century books and articles. The Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads and plenty of books delaing with religions, in particular the sources of the Bible.

FL said: What’s important is that you and I keep on learning more about, and thinking more about, IC and ID in today’s biological world, as a way of enriching our OWN lives and getting a better appreciation of and for the incomparable God who seeks fellowship with His created humans.

FL said:

Rolf says: I am not a a scientist but I have spent a lifetime with books and studies of science and nature (and religions as well) since I first became aware of the ToE in 1943, 13 years old. I know and understand religions (plural), depth psychology and science. What do you know and understand that makes you capable of having an educated opinion in the matters on the table here? I’ve of course read Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, R.D.Laing, Mazlow and many others, even 20th and 21st century books and articles. The Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads and plenty of books delaing with religions, in particular the sources of the Bible.

Sorry Rolf. Believe it or not, I ran into every single one of the topics you mentioned on my way to a bachelor's degree -- no joke, and it was for actual semester credit. And yes I first heard about the ToE in 7th or 8th grade science class, I was a young teenager at the time, just like you at your time and school. (I started haunting libraries in 5th grade, beginning with the astronomy books.) I'm 56 years old now, so I'm younger than you, but it's clear that a commitment to lifelong learning has been a serious staple of BOTH our lives, and that ain't a bad thing at all. **** But you might want to REALLY slow it down on assuming that your science-&-religion "non-expertise" is better than my science-&-religion "non-expertise." You simply don't know if that's true, and I've already listed the full list of undergrad science classes that I took in high school and college (just ask Mike Elzinga!), including physics-chemistry-evolution-anthro-etc. So we don't need to re-hash that for the third or fourth time. (Don't even ask about religion textbooks, Hebrew-Greek stuff, commentaries, comparative-religion. Undergrad intro stuff, sure, but still I paid my learning dues every semester, and I kept my books and didn't sell them back.) **** Instead then, let's just stay with the issue at hand. Some professional PhD scientists may "reject" Irreducible Complexity, but some professional PhD scientists do "accept" IC, and in BOTH cases, they are "far beyond you or me in knowledge of the subject." That's fine. What's important is that you and I keep on learning more about, and thinking more about, IC and ID in today's biological world, as a way of enriching our OWN lives and getting a better appreciation of and for the incomparable God who seeks fellowship with His created humans. We're not going to agree on IC and ID, but we can talk about what we see going on, at least. FL

FL said:

Rolf says: I am not a a scientist but I have spent a lifetime with books and studies of science and nature (and religions as well) since I first became aware of the ToE in 1943, 13 years old. I know and understand religions (plural), depth psychology and science. What do you know and understand that makes you capable of having an educated opinion in the matters on the table here? I’ve of course read Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, R.D.Laing, Mazlow and many others, even 20th and 21st century books and articles. The Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads and plenty of books delaing with religions, in particular the sources of the Bible.

Sorry Rolf. Believe it or not, I ran into every single one of the topics you mentioned on my way to a bachelor's degree -- no joke, and it was for actual semester credit. And yes I first heard about the ToE in 7th or 8th grade science class, I was a young teenager at the time, just like you at your time and school. (I started haunting libraries in 5th grade, beginning with the astronomy books.) I'm 56 years old now, so I'm younger than you, but it's clear that a commitment to lifelong learning has been a serious staple of BOTH our lives, and that ain't a bad thing at all. **** But you might want to REALLY slow it down on assuming that your science-&-religion "non-expertise" is better than my science-&-religion "non-expertise." You simply don't know if that's true, and I've already listed the full list of undergrad science classes that I took in high school and college (just ask Mike Elzinga!), including physics-chemistry-evolution-anthro-etc. So we don't need to re-hash that for the third or fourth time. (Don't even ask about religion textbooks, Hebrew-Greek stuff, commentaries, comparative-religion. Undergrad intro stuff, sure, but still I paid my learning dues every semester, and I kept my books and didn't sell them back.) **** Instead then, let's just stay with the issue at hand. Some professional PhD scientists may "reject" Irreducible Complexity, but some professional PhD scientists do "accept" IC, and in BOTH cases, they are "far beyond you or me in knowledge of the subject." That's fine. What's important is that you and I keep on learning more about, and thinking more about, IC and ID in today's biological world, as a way of enriching our OWN lives and getting a better appreciation of and for the incomparable God who seeks fellowship with His created humans. We're not going to agree on IC and ID, but we can talk about what we see going on, at least. FL

FL, please work on the questions while I make this statement to everyone else -

"CSI" is a legal trick disguised as science.

Whatever you want to say is "designed", you say it has "CSI", and then you say "CSI proves it's designed so I don't have to name the designer".

It's just a silly failed court room trick. The sole objective was to be able to use United States taxpayer dollars to favor latter day political Protestant Fundamentalism, thus discriminating against all other views, by teaching in science class that whatever they want to deny evolved, has "CSI".

It insulted the intelligence of the first judge who was presented with it, even though he's a church going GWB appointee.

If Paley had not been familiar with manufactured artifacts [italics added] and known what a watch was used for, he would not have had the vaguest idea that it was designed.

So he might have thought that the clear glass of the crystal wasn’t manufactured by humans, that the complex gears and springs weren’t purposefully designed and manufactured? How stupid was he? Might he have thought that the watch was an organism? If so, again, how stupid was he?

... let alone use it to tell time.

Matt Young said:

If Paley had not been familiar with manufactured artifacts [italics added] and known what a watch was used for, he would not have had the vaguest idea that it was designed.

So he might have thought that the clear glass of the crystal wasn’t manufactured by humans, that the complex gears and springs weren’t purposefully designed and manufactured? How stupid was he? Might he have thought that the watch was an organism? If so, again, how stupid was he?

Please read more carefully, paying close attention to the italicized portion.

Of course we would recognize a Jeep if we found it on Mars, because we are already familiar with Jeeps and know who manufactured them.

On the other hand, we could not identify arrowheads till we discovered people using them, even though they were human artifacts.

How much harder would it be to identify design carried out by some entity that was vastly smarter or more advanced than we?

Regarding the watch, Paley recognized it as a watch because he knew what watches were and what they were for, and he knew that watches were manufactured by human beings. Suppose, however, that the watch had been discovered by a caveman in France 15,000 years ago. I seriously doubt that that caveman would recognize the watch as a designed and manufactured object.

He might wonder about the glass crystal, but he would not immediately deduce that it was a manufactured object,

let alone use it to tell time.

More likely, he would put the watch on his fishing line and use it as a weight.

So, yes, we would all recognize the Antikythera mechanism as a designed object if we found it on Mars. But that is entirely because we already recognize gears and cranks and whatnot;

if my ancestor Abraham stumbled on it in the desert, he would certainly not identify it as a designed object.

47 120 "To come now from things celestial to things terrestrial, which is there among these latter which does not clearly display the rational design of an intelligent being? In the first place, with the vegetation that springs from the earth, the stocks both give stability to the parts which they sustain and draw from the ground the sap to nourish the parts upheld by the roots; and the trunks are covered with bark or rind, the better to protect them against cold and heat. Again the vines cling to their props with their tendrils as with hands, and thus raise themselves erect like animals. Nay more, it is said that if planted near cabbages they shun them like pestle and noxious things, and will not touch them at any point. 121 Again what a variety tio animals, and what capacity they possess of persisting true to their various kinds! Some of them are protected by hides, others are clothed with fleeces, others bristle p239with spines; some we see covered with feathers, some with scales, some armed with horns, some equipped with wings to escape their foes. Nature, however, has provided with bounteous plenty for each species of animal that food which is suited to it. I might show in detail what provision has been made in the forms of the animals for appropriating and assimilating this food, how skilful and exact is the disposition of the various parts, how marvellous the structure of the limbs. For all the organs, at least those contained within the body, are so formed and so placed that none of them is superfluous or not necessary for the preservation of life. 122 But nature has also bestowed upon the beasts both sensation and desire, the one to arouse in them the impulse to appropriate their natural foods, the other to enable them to distinguish things harmful from things wholesome. Again, some animals approach their food by walking, some by crawling, some by flying, some by swimming; and some seize their nutriment with their gaping mouth and with the teeth themselves, others snatch it in the grasp of their claws, others with their curved beaks, some suck, others graze, some swallow it whole, others chew it. Also some are of such lately stature that they easily reach their food upon the ground with their jaws; 123 whereas the taller species, such as geese, swans, cranes and camels, are aided by the length of their necks; the elephant is even provided with a hand, because his body is so large that it was difficult for him to reach his food. 48 Those beasts on the other hand whose mode of sustenance was to feed on animals of another species received from nature the gift either of strength or swiftness. Upon certain creatures p241there was bestowed even a sort of craft or cunning: for instance, one species of the spider tribe weaves a kind of net, in order to dispatch anything that is caught in it; another in order to . . . steadily corps watch, and, snatching anything that falls into it, devours it. The mussel, or pina as it is called in Greek, is a large bivalve which enters into a sort of Penelope with the tiny shrimp to procure food, and so, when little fishes swim into the gaping shell, the shrimp draws the attention of the mussel and the mussel shuts up its shells with a snap;43 thus two very dissimilar creatures obtain their food in common. 124 In this case we are curious to know whether their association is due to a sort of mutual compact, or whether it was brought about by nature herself and goes back to the moment of their birth. Our wonder is also considerably excited by those aquatic animals which are born on land — crocodiles, for instance, and water-tortoises and certain snakes, which are born on dry land but as soon as they can first crawl make for the water. Again we often place ducks' eggs beneath hens, and the chicks that spring from the eggs are at first fed and mothered by the hens that hatched and reared them, but later on they leave their foster-mothers, and run away when they put up them, as soon as they have had the opportunity of seeing the water, their natural home. So powerful an instinct of self-preservation has nature implanted in living creatures. 49 I have even read in a book44 that there is a bird called the spoonbill, which porticus its food by flying after those birds which dive in the sea, and upon their coming to the surface with a fish that they have caught, pressing their heads down with its beak until they drop their prey, which p243it pounces on for itself. It is also recorded of this bird that it is in the habit of gorging itself with shell-fish, which it digests by means of the heat of its stomach and then brings up again, and so picks out from them the parts that are good to eat. 125 Sea‑frogs again are said to be in the habit of covering themselves with sand and creeping along at the water's edge, and then when fishes approach them thinking they are something to eat, these are killed and devoured by the frogs. The kite and the crow live in a state of natural war as it were with one another, and therefore each destroys the other's eggs wherever it finds them. Another fact (observed by Aristotle, from whom most of these cases are cited) cannot but awaken our supper, namely that cranes when crossing the seas on the way to warmer climates fly in a triangular formation. With the apex of the triangle they force aside the air in front of them, and then gradually on either side45 by means of their wings acting as oars the birds' on which flight is sustained, with the base of the triangle formed by the cranes gets the assistance of the wind when it is so to speak astern. The birds rest their necks and heads on the backs of those flying in front of them; and the leader, being himself unable to do this as he has no one to lean on, flies to the rear that he himself also may have a rest, while one of those already rested takes his place, and so they keep turns throughout the journey. 126 I could adduce a number of similar instances, but you see the general idea. Another even better known classes of story illustrates the precautions taken by animals for their security, the watch they keep while feeding, their skill in hiding in their lairs. 50 Other remarkable facts are that dogs cure themselves by p245vomiting and ibises in Egypt by purging — modes of treatment only recently, that is, a few generations ago, discovered by the talent of the medical profession. It has been reported that panthers, which in foreign countries are caught by means of poisoned meat, have a remedy which they employ to save themselves from dying; and that wild goats in Crete, when pierced with poisoned arrows, seek a herb called dittany, and on their swallowing this the arrows, it is said, drop out of their busy. 127 Does, shortly before giving birth to their young, thoroughly purge themselves with a herb called hartwort. Again we observe how various species defend themselves against violence and danger with their own weapons, bulls with their horns, boars with their tusks, lions with their bite; some species protect themselves by flight, some by hiding, the cuttle-fish by emitting an inky fluid, the sting‑ray by causing cramp, and also a number of creatures drive away their pursuers by their insufferably disgusting odour.

To do so, he would have had to know much more about the capabilities of the designer.

Michael Fugate said: And you can find a PhD in science who will believe just about anything - flat earth, geocentrism, ESP, alien abductions, etc. Proves nothing. Once again FL only knows how to argue from authority - never from evidence or logic. Looky, I found someone who agrees with me! I'm right!

FL said: But you might want to REALLY slow it down on assuming that your science-&-religion "non-expertise" is better than my science-&-religion "non-expertise." You simply don't know if that's true, and I've already listed the full list of undergrad science classes that I took in high school and college (just ask Mike Elzinga!), including physics-chemistry-evolution-anthro-etc. So we don't need to re-hash that for the third or fourth time. (Don't even ask about religion textbooks, Hebrew-Greek stuff, commentaries, comparative-religion. Undergrad intro stuff, sure, but still I paid my learning dues every semester, and I kept my books and didn't sell them back.)

"Who would not deny the name of human being to a man who, on seeing the regular motions of the heaven and the fixed order of the stars and the accurate interconnexion and interrelation of all things, can deny that these things possess any rational design, and can maintain that phenomena, the wisdom of whose ordering transcends the capacity of our wisdom to understand it, take place by chance? When we see something moved by machinery, like an orrery or clock or many other such things, we do not doubt that these contrivances are the work of reason; when therefore we behold the whole compass of the heaven moving with revolutions of marvellous velocity and executing with perfect regularity the annual changes of the seasons with absolute safety and security for all things, how can we doubt that all this is effected p219not merely by reason, but by a reason that is transcendent and divine?

But if Cicero thinks that animals are designed when they’re seriously devoid of obvious purpose and of straight lines

Mike Elzinga said: Yeah; we already know the extent of your "education."

1. Why is CSI always the product of “design”; what is the rationale for making this claim? 2. What is the “least designed thing that has enough CSI that you can tell it is designed” that you can think of, and how did you determine how much CSI it had? Tell me in a way so that I can calculate the CSI of something for myself.

Harold wrote: Any statement to the effect that you've "answered this before" or "it's on the BW" or any other type of evasion will be taken as conclusive proof that you can't answer the questions

FL said: I am not able to calculate or compute CSI.

I use the 2004 Trevors and Abel peer-review article “Chance and Necessity do Not Explain the Origin of Life” to rule out evolution (prebiotic chemical evolution)...

harold said: FL, please work on the questions while I make this statement to everyone else - "CSI" is a legal trick disguised as science. Whatever you want to say is "designed", you say it has "CSI", and then you say "CSI proves it's designed so I don't have to name the designer". It's just a silly failed court room trick. The sole objective was to be able to use United States taxpayer dollars to favor latter day political Protestant Fundamentalism, thus discriminating against all other views, by teaching in science class that whatever they want to deny evolved, has "CSI". It insulted the intelligence of the first judge who was presented with it, even though he's a church going GWB appointee.

phhht said:

FL said: I am not able to calculate or compute CSI.

I told you he could not respond.

FL says I use the 2004 Trevors and Abel peer-review article “Chance and Necessity do Not Explain the Origin of Life” to rule out evolution (prebiotic chemical evolution)...

FL said: Unaided Naturalistic Evolution cannot produce CSI any more than it can post paragraphs at PandasThumb. So the CSI has to be positive evidence of some OTHER causal agent. Intelligent Agency, intelligent causation, is really the only known explanation.

FL said:

Harold wrote: Any statement to the effect that you've "answered this before" or "it's on the BW" or any other type of evasion will be taken as conclusive proof that you can't answer the questions

That's strange. I've spent all this time discussing **IC**, which you have NOT refuted or even engaged the specific IC example that I gave to Mr. Phhht at all (and indeed I left that specific example on the BW instead of importing it into this thread). But now, you issue a demand that I answer some new questions about **CSI** instead, and you want it right here right now in this thread. Wwhile you still haven't attempted to deal with the testable IC evidence that simply refutes your Atheism. Sheesh. I had given you a lot more credit that as a rational thinker and examiner. Disappointing, Mr. Harold. Disappointing. **** Let me make it easy for you, sir. I am not able to calculate or compute CSI. So when I'm asked to give an example of CSI as a biological marker of intelligent design, I keep things simple. I give them an easy-to-understand definition and description of CSI (taken from Wm. Dembski's 1999 book "Intelligent Design", along with an easy-to-understand science example. I point people to the Origin-Of-Life arena, and then point them to the genetic code of the first living cell on earth, as an example of CSI. I use the 2004 Trevors and Abel peer-review article "Chance and Necessity do Not Explain the Origin of Life" to rule out evolution (prebiotic chemical evolution) and also to help them see how the first genetic code of the first living cell is a real example of Dembski's CSI, just like the sentences and paragraphs that we all post here every day. So I just keep it simple, Mr. Harold, and instead of calculating CSI, I just give people a simple definition/description and a simple, current science example. That's all I do when it comes to CSI. But my method is sufficient to show regular rational intelligent people that CSI is very real, and NOT any imagined "legal trick." Most folks get it. I'm content with that. FL (I try to keep it simple and easy with **IC** as well.)

FL I demolished your IC argument for the eye multiple times. The vertebrate eye is an evolved structure with clear evidence of common ancestry - it contains no CSI. Your definition of CSI is useless - it in no way allows one to detect CSI.

Floyd wrote:

"I am not able to calculate or compute CSI."

Then I am not able to take it seriously. Come back when you have something more substantial than incredulity.

DS said: Floyd wrote: "I am not able to calculate or compute CSI." Then I am not able to take it seriously. Come back when you have something more substantial than incredulity.

Michael Fugate said: FL I demolished your IC argument for the eye multiple times. The vertebrate eye is an evolved structure with clear evidence of common ancestry - it contains no CSI. Your definition of CSI is useless - it in no way allows one to detect CSI.

FL said:

Michael Fugate said: FL I demolished your IC argument for the eye multiple times. The vertebrate eye is an evolved structure with clear evidence of common ancestry - it contains no CSI. Your definition of CSI is useless - it in no way allows one to detect CSI.

Well, your first article, the Natl-Geo article, was simply a Free Christmas Gift from you to me. I couldn't have paid money for a better target to shoot at, while presenting the IC of the human eye lens. Also, umm, I haven't said anything about the human eye lens in regards to CSI. It was an example of **IC**, remember?

DS said: Floyd wrote: "I am not able to calculate or compute CSI." Then I am not able to take it seriously. Come back when you have something more substantial than incredulity.

"The crucial breakthrough of the intelligent design movement has been to show that this great theological truth -- that God acts in the world by dispensing information -- also has scientific content." -- William Dembski, Intelligent Design, 1999, IVP, pg 233.

Matt Young said: I suspect that Mr. Hurd is lurking here and may want to amplify on that point (sorry!).

FL said: I am not able to calculate or compute CSI.

Who was it remarked that for every question there is an intuitive, easy-to-understand wrong answer? Of course, FL is interested in propaganda, not knowledge, so for him intuitiveness and ease of understanding is a requirement, and truth irrelevant. The interesting thing is that in his last he has been fool enough to admit that.

The conversation has moved far from the original topic of the sad little article in PLoS1.

Michael Behe's idea that "irreducible complexity" in biological chemistry must entail the existence of a Divine Creator was found in minor form in "Panda's and People." It was made explicit and central to ID Creationism in his 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box." Where it totally failed was false the assertion that an irreducibly complex system could not evolve naturally. This failure was actually anticipated in

Hermann J. Muller,
1918 "Genetic Variability, Twin Hybrids and Constant Hybrids, in a Case of Balanced Lethal Factors", Genetics, Vol 3, No 5: 422-499, Sept 1918.

William Demski tried to salvage the notion that the ID creationists had an "empirical" measure that proved that a Divine creator must have intervened. His proposal was the gobbledygook claim that "Complex Specified Information" meant something that could be measured. For 15 years he promised to "do the calculation" and he never came even close to any real number. In this thread we have seen the same BS from the local creationist ear-ticks. And like Dembski, they fail totally.

Dave Luckett said: Who was it remarked that for every question there is an intuitive, easy-to-understand wrong answer? Of course, FL is interested in propaganda, not knowledge, so for him intuitiveness and ease of understanding is a requirement, and truth irrelevant. The interesting thing is that in his last he has been fool enough to admit that.

Dave Luckett said: Who was it remarked that for every question there is an intuitive, easy-to-understand wrong answer? Of course, FL is interested in propaganda, not knowledge, so for him intuitiveness and ease of understanding is a requirement, and truth irrelevant. The interesting thing is that in his last he has been fool enough to admit that.

FL said:

Dave Luckett said: Who was it remarked that for every question there is an intuitive, easy-to-understand wrong answer? Of course, FL is interested in propaganda, not knowledge, so for him intuitiveness and ease of understanding is a requirement, and truth irrelevant. The interesting thing is that in his last he has been fool enough to admit that.

Oh, and Dave, you are reminded that at the BW, I specifically presented the material originally given to Mr. Phhht to YOU as well, to see what someone of your articulate skill could do concerning its specifics (particularly by way of refutation). You have fared absolutely no better than Phhht, quite honestly. The homework simply isn't there. (At least Michael Fugate put an updated Nilsson on the table, along with some pretty pictures. Forced me to think it through for a few minutes. You, however, did NOT.) Now that sort of outcome, was severely disappointing of you. Still is. I do openly wonder, does the search for truth still retain any value in YOUR economy?

Floyd claimed that he had testable evidence. He lied. If he can't calculate CSI, then it isn't testable, period. No one should take him seriously. Dump him to the bathroom wall and let him wallow in his own crapulence.

DS said: Floyd claimed that he had testable evidence. He lied. If he can't calculate CSI, then it isn't testable, period.

Dump him to the bathroom wall and let him wallow in his own crapulence.

FL said: I have my own newspaper blog...

Re: Paley's watch and whether individual X could determine if it was manufactured by intelligence. It seems to me that there are two steps that need to be undertaken, 1) compare it to the things that you know have been intelligently produced, and 2) compare it to things that you know are natural. The more features the item has that resemble one category, and the fewer features it has that resemble the other, the more confident you can be that it fits into that category too.

The key point here is that the determination can only be done based on the examiner's level of knowledge of both categories. I don't think we need to know anything about the manufacturer of a given object per se, but we can only conclusively determine manufacture when it falls within the scope of our own current knowledge about manufacturing practices.

Abraham lived (for the sake of argument, at least) in a bronze-aged civilization, so he would certainly have known what refined metal looks like and some of the things that could be made from it, such as reasonably complex jewelry. He would also be aware that refined metal does not generally occur naturally. He would also have known about simple machines; wheels, screws, pulleys and such, and probably writing as well.

So I have no trouble believing he would immediately be able to classify the watch as manufactured. I imagine he would guess it to be some form of ornate jewelry, a broach or sword pommel or something, although he might wonder about the complexity of the inner workings if he saw them intact.

Now let's imagine presenting this to an early Neanderthal. His entire knowledge of technology would consist of carving relatively crude shapes into stone and wood, and sewing things out of animal hides. On the other hand he would have a pretty good knowledge of the flora and fauna of his surroundings.

So looking at the metal of the case, he would have no idea what it was. It's hard like stone, but shiny and a bit flexible. So some kind of insect carapace maybe? The glass of the lens looks like ice, but it's not cold and doesn't melt. Perhaps something like a hardened fish eye? The numbers on the face are a mystery, but he knows that many animals have complex decorative markings on them. The inner workings are a jumble of hard, unusually-shaped pieces. Could they be petrified guts or strangely-shaped eggs of some kind? The perfectly-formed straight lines and circles of the watch's form? Well, he can hardly produce such things himself on his best day, but he has occasionally seen uniform shapes and lines in nature. That lump at the top does kind of looks like an insect head or something, come to think of it.

Overall, I would imagine he would conclude it as a mystery, but that it was most likely some kind of large dried beetle or similar insect. Based on his level of understanding the watch would possess more features in common with natural processes than manufactured ones.

So finally, we come to an alien artifact on Mars. How do we know it was manufactured? Well, our first clue would be if we couldn't determine how it could come about naturally, and we certainly have a much better understanding of natural processes than those guys in the past did. Then we'd examine it for features that resemble things we know to be designed. If it has gears that would be a dead giveaway, because we know what gears are. Or perhaps a microscopic examination would show patterns that kind of looked like circuitry, for example. We know about those too. But if it were to be something completely outside of our grasp (i.e. Clarke's sufficiently advanced technology), our only choice in the end would be to classify it as "currently unknown".

As a side note, the most interesting possibility in my mind would be aliens that used biotechnology to engineer life forms purpose-made for various uses. What would we conclude if we came upon the carcass of a living house, for example?

FL said: I am not able to calculate or compute CSI.

So when I'm asked to give an example of CSI as a biological marker of intelligent design, I keep things simple.

I point people to the Origin-Of-Life arena, and then point them to the genetic code of the first living cell on earth, as an example of CSI.

I use the 2004 Trevors and Abel peer-review article "Chance and Necessity do Not Explain the Origin of Life" to rule out evolution

DS said: Floyd claimed that he had testable evidence. He lied. If he can't calculate CSI, then it isn't testable, period. No one should take him seriously. Dump him to the bathroom wall and let him wallow in his own crapulence.

Dr. Buck refers to the two "stolen gods," Te Puarenga and Te Uru-renga, and to a third god Hika-hara, who was stated to have "drifted ashore." The latter statement is of some interest. According to Dr. Buck, what really drifted ashore was a log from foreign lands. This log was taken and placed outside the chief's house, and in the morning objects which had been placed on and against it were found scattered. This apparent power to repel objects led to the conclusion that it possessed mana and it was subsequently deified as the god Hika-hara.

This sanctification of objects washed ashore is paralleled in Tikopia, where certain rusty nails in a piece of driftwood were taken by the natives and incorporated into their ritual scheme, becoming objects of superlative sanctity.

Dr. Buck refers to the two "stolen gods," Te Puarenga and Te Uru-renga, and to a third god Hika-hara, who was stated to have "drifted ashore." The latter statement is of some interest. According to Dr. Buck, what really drifted ashore was a log from foreign lands. This log was taken and placed outside the chief's house, and in the morning objects which had been placed on and against it were found scattered. This apparent power to repel objects led to the conclusion that it possessed mana and it was subsequently deified as the god Hika-hara.

This sanctification of objects washed ashore is paralleled in Tikopia, where certain rusty nails in a piece of driftwood were taken by the natives and incorporated into their ritual scheme, becoming objects of superlative sanctity.

Sheesh, four copies?

The site seems to be acting up, endlessly "Processing," and while there's no indication that it ever ends it still publishes when I think it's doing nothing.

Glen Davidson

FL said:

DS said: Floyd claimed that he had testable evidence. He lied. If he can't calculate CSI, then it isn't testable, period.

You've already been openly refuted on that claim, and are totally unable to respond to the given specifics yourself. ****

Dump him to the bathroom wall and let him wallow in his own crapulence.

Don't bother; I'm officially withdrawing from this thread now. I've offered enough responses. I have my own newspaper blog, and I have your own Bathroom Wall as well. You in particular, DS, simply cannot keep up with the homework requirements in **either** location. FL

Malcolm said:

DS said: Floyd claimed that he had testable evidence. He lied. If he can't calculate CSI, then it isn't testable, period. No one should take him seriously. Dump him to the bathroom wall and let him wallow in his own crapulence.

Floyd doesn't understand that numbers matter in science. He's all about subjectivity. That's why he will never understand science.

FL - "within the first living cell on Earth"
There was no "first living cell" anymore than there was a first person to speak French instead of Latin.
Same goes for the first bacteria, first eye, first anything to do with life. I doubt if there was even a "first" living thing, no matter how life is defined.
You are arguing with a straw man you have manufactured yourself..

TomS said:

Malcolm said:

DS said: Floyd claimed that he had testable evidence. He lied. If he can't calculate CSI, then it isn't testable, period. No one should take him seriously. Dump him to the bathroom wall and let him wallow in his own crapulence.

Floyd doesn't understand that numbers matter in science. He's all about subjectivity. That's why he will never understand science.

I suggest that there is a little more subtlety to this. One can have a quantity for which we don't have a way to calculate it. The age of the Earth made sense in the 18th century when James Hutton said, "no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end." He didn't know how to calculate it. There are, so I understand, parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics for which we don't have good measurements. I think that the problem with CSI is worse than this.

Who was it remarked that for every question there is an intuitive, easy-to-understand wrong answer?

In order to establish a principle of conservation of CSI, there should be some observation of CSI being conserved. (There is one other way, which I will get to later.)

Have there been any experiments or observations of CSI being conserved?

No, to the contrary, all that we have heard of are instances in which CSI has been estimated, and these are:

A. It spontaneously decreases
B. Humans (or, possibly other agencies) cause it to increase
C. In the ordinary processes of life

(The other possible way that we can verify something is to offer an a priori demonstration. A mathematIcal or logical proof. It is a tautology. If CSI can be proved to be conserved, then nothing can change it.)

Excuse me, there is one other case in which CSI has been estimated. D. When there is a relatively small change, that can increase (as well as decrease) spontaneously.

And it is worthwhile mentioning that B, human intervention, is not enough to account for an increase. Something else must be going on, but we haven't been informed about that detail.

As FL has defined it CSI is circular - Why can't it evolve? CSI. Why is it CSI? It can't evolve. Dembski is no better. He asserts that DNA is CSI, but in no way demonstrates DNA cannot evolve. Let's look at our eye example - most vertebrates have four cone types US (UV wavelength), Short (blue), Medium (green) and Long (red). Placental mammals are primarily dichromats - Short and Medium cones with neither UV nor red - they cannot distinguish red from green. Old World primates duplicated the Medium cone on the X chromosome and after duplication these diverged into Medium and Long. Both are functional - voila! new information that didn't exist previously!

Complex Specified Information is a simple but irrelevant high school level calculation that Dembski bloated into an enormously pretentious argument by taking logarithms to base 2 of the expected number of events, which is the number of trials N, multiplied by the probability, p. per trial. He then labeled it "information" and then filled his paper with massive amounts of pseuso philosophical jargon to hide the fact that the calculation has nothing to do with calculating the probabilities of molecular assemblies.

Dembski wanted some upper limit on the number of trials to produce a specified event in order to be sure that an event couldn't have happened in the lifetime of the universe; so he lifted, without comprehension, a number from the abstract of a paper by Seth Lloyd in Physical Review Letters. That number turns out to be N = 10¹⁵⁰, which is approximately 2⁵⁰⁰. Seth Lloyd was doing a legitimate estimation of the number of logical operations that would be required by a computer to simulate the known universe; and Lloyd's calculations included physical process that produced a universe with life as we know it. Dembski didn't read the paper and would not have comprehended it if he had tried.

To calculate probabilities, p, Dembski claims that all one has to do is take a set of L elements of which there are K choices per element and the probability becomes p = 1/K^L to produce a string of length L. So he would sometimes use the example of calculating the probabily of a Shakespearean sonnet out of the set of ASCII characters if all characters were selected randomly using a uniform probability distribution.

(Note that there are no interactions among ASCII characters. Also, not all characters are used with the same frequency, and most characters are repeated multiple times; so Dembski gets even this simple calculation wrong in addition to applying it inappropriately to atoms and molecules.)

Dembski further obfuscates this probability by asserting that it is a specified sequence; and he says furthermore that it can't be explained by current science, hence he makes it a conditional probability based on the condition that science can't explain it. And, sure enough, Dembski's "Explanatory Filter" always finds that science can't explain it.

However, by "science", Dembski means all the misconceptions and misrepresentations of science the ID movement inherited from Henry Morris and Duane Gish. In particular, in ID/creationist land, all assemblies are formed out of an ideal gas of inert objects, and the "scientific" creationist's "second law of thermodynamics" holds. The ID/creationist second law of thermodynamics says that everything in the universe tends to come all apart and enter a state of complete disorder which, in ID/creationist land, is called "entropy."

So now the ID/creationist argument becomes a sneering challenge to anyone questioning Dembski's assertions, "Well how do you account for all of that "information?" Any challenger is supposed to be buying Dembski's "calculations" and is further required to argue on ID/creationist territory using ID/creationism's misconceptions and misrepresentations of science; therefore the challenger loses.

If any challenger happens to know that the forces and quantum mechanical rules governing the interactions among atoms and molecules make Dembski's calculations totally irrelevant, such knowledge is simply brushed aside. ID/creationists don't know about such things.

So, as I have said previously; Dembski's entire life's work boils down to an assertion that Np is less than 1. That's it; but it is buried under tons of obfuscation to make it appear "scientific." The probabiloity calculations have nothing to do with anything that happens in the physical world; Dembski wasn't even considered for the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry. And furthermore, Dembski didn't pick up on the fact that N = 10¹⁵⁰ estimated by Seth Lloyd is the number of logical operations for a computer to produce a universe that already includes life.

How Dembski managed to keep this scam going for so long is probably related to socio/political activity and his teaching of this crap to ignorant followers who don't understand basic high school math and science.

Mike Elzinga said: Complex Specified Information...

The concept of CSI in Dembski (2005) is based on a meaningless number, which is interpreted as probability even though it is not. As a consequence, CSI cannot have the meaning and interpretation stated. Dembski's math is wrong.

Mike Elzinga, Dembski's use of Seth Lloyd's number seems fine to me. Dembski was needing a number of events as big as, or bigger than, the number of events that could possibly have happened in the observed universe. Any number that is big enough would do. If we saw an event such that an outcome that good is expected to happen no more than once in the whole history of the universe, we wold question the assertion that a simple random process could produce that. For example if 26 five-card hands were dealt, and all 26 were a Royal Flush, we would question the assertion that the deals were random and independent. (The probability of this would be about the same as once in Lloyd's number).

Furthermore Lloyd's universe may not have excluded the possibility that life was there too, but Lloyd certainly did not do any calculation involving the probability of having life. If he had calculated it for a universe that happened to have no life, it would have ended up being the same number. Of course Lloyd would then not be there to do the calculation.

There are other problems with Dembski's CSI argument, and I have outlined them (here and here).

Whether Lloyd's number, or its square or its square-root was taken to be the available number of trials possible in the universe, Dembski's argument would be much the same. It is wrong, but not because that number is inappropriate.

Seth Fugate, you have caught Dembski calling a probability a number which can be greater than 1. I would just add that the real problems with Dembski's arguments are deeper -- see the citations above.

Michael Fugate said: This post indicates that Dembski's number is even more meaningless - as if that were possible.

The concept of CSI in Dembski (2005) is based on a meaningless number, which is interpreted as probability even though it is not. As a consequence, CSI cannot have the meaning and interpretation stated. Dembski's math is wrong.

Joe Felsenstein said: Mike Elzinga, Dembski's use of Seth Lloyd's number seems fine to me. Dembski was needing a number of events as big as, or bigger than, the number of events that could possibly have happened in the observed universe. Any number that is big enough would do. If we saw an event such that an outcome that good is expected to happen no more than once in the whole history of the universe, we wold question the assertion that a simple random process could produce that. For example if 26 five-card hands were dealt, and all 26 were a Royal Flush, we would question the assertion that the deals were random and independent. (The probability of this would be about the same as once in Lloyd's number). Furthermore Lloyd's universe may not have excluded the possibility that life was there too, but Lloyd certainly did not do any calculation involving the probability of having life. If he had calculated it for a universe that happened to have no life, it would have ended up being the same number. Of course Lloyd would then not be there to do the calculation. There are other problems with Dembski's CSI argument, and I have outlined them (here and here). Whether Lloyd's number, or its square or its square-root was taken to be the available number of trials possible in the universe, Dembski's argument would be much the same. It is wrong, but not because that number is inappropriate. Seth Fugate, you have caught Dembski calling a probability a number which can be greater than 1. I would just add that the real problems with Dembski's arguments are deeper -- see the citations above.

If you haven't had too much or too many already, another report from the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/08/creatorgate-how-a-study-on-hands-sparked-a-scandal-about-science-god-and-ethics-in-publishing/

Mike Elzinga said: So N = 10¹⁵⁰ logical operations is already more than enough to produce the kinds of assemblies Dembski claims can't be produced in the lifetime of the universe.

"In other words, the matter-dominated universe is a much more friendly environment for conventional digital computation, not to mention for life as we know it.

another report from the Washington Post

The reason I know that Dembski didn’t read Lloyd’s paper is because Lloyd used physical processes that exist in the universe to make his estimate of the number of logical operations a computer would need to simulate the universe as we know it.

Joe Felsenstein said: The reason we find natural evolutionary processes plausible is not because we think there is just barely enough time for mutation alone to do the job. It is because natural selection can greatly increase the probability of good adaptations, by building big improvements out of small ones. Given that, his argument is wrong. But it's not because he has misconstrued Lloyd's paper.

I would also make an additonal point about the introduction of natural selection into a genetic algorithm or any other program that simulates evolution.

Once you have placed natural selection into your algorithm, you have implicitly acknowledged the correct understanding of the second law of thermodynamics. Selection implies interactions with a surrounding environment; not like an ideal gas in which interactions are zero or negligible. Those interactions do the shaping of whatever pliable systems they are working on. And in order to have a pliable, soft-matter system that can be shaped, binding energies have to be smaller than kinetic energies.

Mike Elzinga said: And in order to have a pliable, soft-matter system that can be shaped, binding energies have to be smaller than kinetic energies.

Mike, Dembski's argument (as of his 2002 book) had two main points:

1. If we want to explain a good adaptation, such as a fish swimming well, we cannot use natural selection, "because reasons". The reasons being a conservation law, the Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information. He believed that to rule out attaining good adaptation unless you started with good adaptation. (Alas for his argument, the LCCSI did not do what Dembski intended it to).

2. It cannot be achieved by purely random forces such as mutation because there isn't enough time in the universe for such genotypes to be found by mutation, if there is no natural selection.

It is his latter point to which the Lloyd argument was applied. Basically, even if he totally misconstrued Lloyd's argument, I think Dembski's point 2 is correct and stands.

You are right that natural selection cannot be ruled out. Dembski thought that his Conservation Law did that. It doesn't, and as you point out, physics allows natural selection and no law such as the LCCSI is going to be consistent with physics. So you're wrong, and also right.

Joe Felsenstein said: You are right that natural selection cannot be ruled out. Dembski thought that his Conservation Law did that. It doesn't, and as you point out, physics allows natural selection and no law such as the LCCSI is going to be consistent with physics. So you're wrong, and also right.

Natural selection is an integral part of the processes of condensing matter at all levels.

Joe Felsenstein said: Mike Elzinga, Dembski's use of Seth Lloyd's number seems fine to me. Dembski was needing a number of events as big as, or bigger than, the number of events that could possibly have happened in the observed universe. Any number that is big enough would do. If we saw an event such that an outcome that good is expected to happen no more than once in the whole history of the universe, we wold question the assertion that a simple random process could produce that. For example if 26 five-card hands were dealt, and all 26 were a Royal Flush, we would question the assertion that the deals were random and independent. (The probability of this would be about the same as once in Lloyd's number).

Henry J said:

Natural selection is an integral part of the processes of condensing matter at all levels.

But that's not biological natural selection, so it isn't what I think of when I hear the term.

Rog Lan said:

Joe Felsenstein said: Mike Elzinga, Dembski's use of Seth Lloyd's number seems fine to me. Dembski was needing a number of events as big as, or bigger than, the number of events that could possibly have happened in the observed universe. Any number that is big enough would do. If we saw an event such that an outcome that good is expected to happen no more than once in the whole history of the universe, we wold question the assertion that a simple random process could produce that. For example if 26 five-card hands were dealt, and all 26 were a Royal Flush, we would question the assertion that the deals were random and independent. (The probability of this would be about the same as once in Lloyd's number).

But this just highlights the nonsense in the argument - any 26 five card hand distribution is equally unlikely, and if you had 40 five card hands the probabilities are minute and way smaller than Seth Lloyds number. The only difference in your example is that you have something that's meaningful (to you), but that's exactly what Dembski does - claims that something is meaningful and therefore since its occurred it couldn't have occurred by chance. BUT the probabilities are only true if you predicted it was going to happen. So if you didn't predict 26 royal flushes that distribution has the same chance of happening as any other distribution. You don't claim that a non-meaningful distribution shows cheating but it has the same chance of happening as your meaningful one

TomS said:

Rog Lan said:

Joe Felsenstein said: Mike Elzinga, Dembski's use of Seth Lloyd's number seems fine to me. Dembski was needing a number of events as big as, or bigger than, the number of events that could possibly have happened in the observed universe. Any number that is big enough would do. If we saw an event such that an outcome that good is expected to happen no more than once in the whole history of the universe, we wold question the assertion that a simple random process could produce that. For example if 26 five-card hands were dealt, and all 26 were a Royal Flush, we would question the assertion that the deals were random and independent. (The probability of this would be about the same as once in Lloyd's number).

But this just highlights the nonsense in the argument - any 26 five card hand distribution is equally unlikely, and if you had 40 five card hands the probabilities are minute and way smaller than Seth Lloyds number. The only difference in your example is that you have something that's meaningful (to you), but that's exactly what Dembski does - claims that something is meaningful and therefore since its occurred it couldn't have occurred by chance. BUT the probabilities are only true if you predicted it was going to happen. So if you didn't predict 26 royal flushes that distribution has the same chance of happening as any other distribution. You don't claim that a non-meaningful distribution shows cheating but it has the same chance of happening as your meaningful one

Moreover, the proposed solution (to the non-existent problem) is absurd. It only makes the situation less probable. For the supposition is that the "intelligent designers" are up to producing more outcomes, and thereby the one which occured is less probable. What is wanted is a scenario which restricts the number of possibilities. If I sit down to a card game and am dealt a royal flush, I am surprised and seek an explanation. If I am told that it is "impossibly improbable" that it did not arrive from a standard 52-card deck (that standing for natural causes in the analogy) - then I am not satisfied by the "explanation" that it is from a larger deck: 52-card deck plus Uno cards (natural plus more-than-natural causes, in the analogy). If we think that life is improbable by natural causes, that life following the laws of nature is too small a probability; Then life as we know it, following the rules, is a vanishingly small probability of a choice for an agency which does not have to follow any rules.

k.e.. said:Or removing Adam's rib before the invention of gin?

I heard one version that "rib" was actually "baculum".

Rog Lan said: But this just highlights the nonsense in the argument - any 26 five card hand distribution is equally unlikely, and if you had 40 five card hands the probabilities are minute and way smaller than Seth Lloyds number. The only difference in your example is that you have something that's meaningful (to you), but that's exactly what Dembski does - claims that something is meaningful and therefore since its occurred it couldn't have occurred by chance. BUT the probabilities are only true if you predicted it was going to happen. So if you didn't predict 26 royal flushes that distribution has the same chance of happening as any other distribution. You don't claim that a non-meaningful distribution shows cheating but it has the same chance of happening as your meaningful one

why would anybody need an explanation for why the usual number of ribs didn't change? The story only said that one rib was removed from Adam, not that his genes were altered to grow one less than he had to start with.

Mike Elzinga said:

Henry J said:

Natural selection is an integral part of the processes of condensing matter at all levels.

But that's not biological natural selection, so it isn't what I think of when I hear the term.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. Why is biological natural selection not an instance of natural selection in general? In other words, how complex does a condensed matter system have to be in order to cross the line into not being an instance of natural selection in general? Yes, biological systems have many more emergent properties than simpler systems; but as with any complex system, selection takes place on those emergent properties and their interactions with the surrounding environment. There is really no difference other than the availability of more complex selection mechanisms for biological systems. Biological systems don't stop obeying the laws of physics just because they are complex. Perhaps it is because biological systems are so complex, we tend to describe them in somewhat more metaphorical terms; but I think the metaphors still refer to physical processes taking place in those systems as they interact in complex ways with complex environments.

There is a problem with automatically assuming cheating as an explanation for an unlikely event.

Remember D's old example of the placing of names on the ballot? Supposedly, there was a bias toward D party candidates appearing at the top of the ballot, and that was taken as evidence for intelligent design. But there have to be more evidence of intelligent design:
The person who was able to place the names - the suspect - had to think that his preferences were being served by that action.

It detective work, one traditionally must supply the Method, the Oppportunity, and the Motive. (BTW, also the Suspect and the Offense.)

Or, in the case of being dealt a royal flush, the person who handled the cards would want to to be dealt a royal flush. Can you think of any reason why someone would want you to have a royal flush? The theory that the hand was purposefully dealt to me suffers from the lack of a motive.

In brief, there is so much ignored in the analogies of ID that makes it worthless.

Henry J said: why would anybody need an explanation for why the usual number of ribs didn't change? The story only said that one rib was removed from Adam, not that his genes were altered to grow one less than he had to start with.

Henry J said: why would anybody need an explanation for why the usual number of ribs didn't change? The story only said that one rib was removed from Adam, not that his genes were altered to grow one less than he had to start with.

Henry J said: You seemed to be talking about natural selection of condensed matter, which would include matter that isn't biological, in which case it wouldn't reproduce. So I don't get what you were saying. As far as I know, outside of living things, condensation of matter is apt to occur in more or less the same way when conditions are more or less the same. That's not what I associate with the term "natural selection".

Henry J said: As far as I know, outside of living things, condensation of matter is apt to occur in more or less the same way when conditions are more or less the same. That's not what I associate with the term "natural selection".

One area where the properties of condensed matter may be important is at the origin of life. Before there was real replication, there is likely to have been chemicals that encouraged each others' persistence. (This would be under some form of "metabolism first" scenario.

In that situation the analogy to coding of information would be less close, and the chemical properties paramount.

Reading Mike Elzinga's latest comment, I think that my thought is already contained in that comment.

Michael Fugate said: I heard one version that "rib" was actually "baculum".

Henry J said: why would anybody need an explanation for why the usual number of ribs didn't change? The story only said that one rib was removed from Adam, not that his genes were altered to grow one less than he had to start with.

W. H. Heydt said:

Henry J said: why would anybody need an explanation for why the usual number of ribs didn't change? The story only said that one rib was removed from Adam, not that his genes were altered to grow one less than he had to start with.

To this day there are people who believe that men have one less rib than women. Some manage to retain that belief after being *shown* that it is false.

It may not be common anymore, maybe nearly extinct, but it used to be downhome ‘common knowledge’ that men had one less rib than women, which was seen as proof positive of the Genesis story. I know I heard that as a kid from some elderly relatives, and a kid asked the teacher about it in my HS biology class. It’s still a common enough meme that AIG has to warn their highly educated clientele against using it: https://answersingenesis.org/creati[…]bs-than-men/

Of all the more or less bizarre things attributed to God, why would he need a rib to create a woman in the first place? Why create a man first, when a woman is what he needs if he is interested in species propagation? Not only that, Eve was created to relieve Adam of his loneliness! Or why not make mankind hermaphrodic, think what a wonderful world we would have without the widespread discrimination against women! Foresight is not one of God's most apparent qualities.

The bottom line is of course that we are dealing with pure myths, created by people that dind't know better. They were complete strangers and had to make up their own beliefs to make sense of the world in which they found themselves.

Male aggressiveness may have been important for survival sometime in the distant past but today it looks like man's penis-extenders (sex - weaponry) are the most stupid things ever invented.

We should remember or roots. We are a a flock animal. Look, not only at our nearest relatives but even at many other species. What we see is a never ending controversy between groups fighting to defend or expand their revier against similar neighbour groups.

How could it be otherwise?

Some of you may be interested in this book, which argues that belief in a punishing god makes evolutionary sense for an intelligent social animal. Belief in god is a way of ensuring that we play by the rules of society. If we cooperate we can work together to the better good of the group. Cheating can always benefit the individual, but belief in god can reduce the number of cheaters.

Dominic Johnson

God Is Watching You: How the fear of god makes us human

Oxford University Press, 2016

It reminds me of the saying of Voltaire, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Or some way of discouraging cheaters.

Some of you may be interested in this book, which argues that belief in a punishing god makes evolutionary sense for an intelligent social animal. Belief in god is a way of ensuring that we play by the rules of society. If we cooperate we can work together to the better good of the group. Cheating can always benefit the individual, but belief in god can reduce the number of cheaters.

Dominic Johnson

God Is Watching You: How the fear of god makes us human

Oxford University Press, 2016

It reminds me of the saying of Voltaire, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Or some way of discouraging cheaters.

Incidentally, did anyone ever come up with a method of producing positive scientific evidence for "intelligent design", in a way that can be replicated, without reference to any trait, other than "intelligence", of the designer?

We should note in advance that this is a largely artificial problem created by ID/creationists' legal and political machinations. You won't find anything in journals of archaeology, anthropology, art history, or forensics that ever tries to obfuscate the probable characteristics of "the designer" in question; on the contrary some effort to characterize them as much as possible is characteristic. ID/creationists do this as a pure legal strategy, trying to sneak evolution denial into schools without losing lawsuits. It's a legal strategy that didn't work, but that's what it's for.

I ask the question mainly in a rhetorical sense, to demonstrate that it is unlikely that good evidence for "intelligent design" of organisms is being rejected by biased science journal editors.

In this thread we've seen the standard ID claims that "CSI" or "irreducible complexity" provide such evidence, and those have been quickly shown to be false.

Here's an example of positive experimental evidence - four groups of rats. One is injected with deadly bacteria, but also with antibiotics. The next is injected with deadly bacteria, but instead of antibiotics, an ID/creationist prays to the "designer" of their choice. A third is injected with bacteria and effective antibiotics, but an ID/creationist prays to the "designer" that the antibiotics will fail by a miracle, and the rats will die of infection. A fourth group just gets bacteria with no antibiotics. (A fifth implied control group, which could be set up formally if someone wanted, is rats that get neither bacteria nor antibiotics.) If prayer works as strongly as antibiotics, and especially if it works both ways, this is strong positive evidence for ID/creationism. A negative result for prayer doesn't rule out ID/creationism but fails to support it and would not be worthy of publication.

However, this obvious method of producing direct positive evidence does make reference to who (prayed to), what (saved or killed rats), when (during this experiment) and how (you would not need to show the mechanism right away if you achieved strong positive results for the ID/creationism intervention, but the question would obviously be raised). If the designer cooperated with this experiment, philosophical "why doesn't the designer cure all infections" or "why did the designer design the bacteria in the first place" would be beside the point, it would be experimental evidence.

ID/creationists could do this experiment any time, but they choose not to. They prefer to claim that they "detect design" directly, without experimental results.

In my opinion they don't do it. CSI and IR are false arguments and analogies from human or animal design of physical objects to miraculous or near-miraculous "intelligent design" of living cells are are incorrect; a false analogy.

I recognize in advance that analogy to somewhat human-like intelligence and motivation could justify an inference that even a rather unfamiliar physical item was designed by an intelligent being, but that doesn't help ID/creationists. That's just an extension of valid analogy to known human intelligent design. So there's no need to rehash that point.

Some of you may be interested in this book, which argues that belief in a punishing god makes evolutionary sense for an intelligent social animal. Belief in god is a way of ensuring that we play by the rules of society. If we cooperate we can work together to the better good of the group. Cheating can always benefit the individual, but belief in god can reduce the number of cheaters.

Dominic Johnson

God Is Watching You: How the fear of god makes us human

Oxford University Press, 2016

It reminds me of the saying of Voltaire, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Or some way of discouraging cheaters.

Sorry for the duplicate posts. I'm having some sort of difficulty.

TomS said: Sorry for the duplicate posts. I'm having some sort of difficulty.

TomS said: Sorry for the duplicate posts. I'm having some sort of difficulty.

Rolf said: Of all the more or less bizarre things attributed to God, why would he need a rib to create a woman in the first place? Why create a man first, when a woman is what he needs if he is interested in species propagation? Not only that, Eve was created to relieve Adam of his loneliness! Or why not make mankind hermaphrodic, think what a wonderful world we would have without the widespread discrimination against women! Foresight is not one of God's most apparent qualities.

TomS said: Some of you may be interested in this book, which argues that belief in a punishing god makes evolutionary sense for an intelligent social animal. Belief in god is a way of ensuring that we play by the rules of society. If we cooperate we can work together to the better good of the group. Cheating can always benefit the individual, but belief in god can reduce the number of cheaters. Dominic Johnson God Is Watching You: How the fear of god makes us human Oxford University Press, 2016 It reminds me of the saying of Voltaire, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Or some way of discouraging cheaters.

W. H. Heydt said:

Rolf said: Of all the more or less bizarre things attributed to God, why would he need a rib to create a woman in the first place? Why create a man first, when a woman is what he needs if he is interested in species propagation? Not only that, Eve was created to relieve Adam of his loneliness! Or why not make mankind hermaphrodic, think what a wonderful world we would have without the widespread discrimination against women! Foresight is not one of God's most apparent qualities.

Note that I am NOT defending the Bibile-as-a-guide-to-science (it is indefensible in that context), but Bible-as-myth-that-isn't-completely-irrational, at least in parts. Pastorlists, with a little hunting on the side, are probably going to fairly quickly discover that the baculum is common in male animals. They will also discover that humans don't have one. So...absent actual scientific methods and knowledge, what are they going to conclude? One possiblity would be that male humans *used* to have a baculum, and in a patriarchal society, what would be thought of as a possible reason why this changed? Observe, also, that there are TWO Biblical creation stories. One has Eve being made from Adam's "rib". The other has them both being created together. One might surmise that different tribes came up with different answers for their creation myths and one of the tribes had a rather more...purient...answer than the other whose story is preserved.

harold said: ID/creationists could do this experiment any time, but they choose not to. They prefer to claim that they "detect design" directly, without experimental results. In my opinion they don't do it. CSI and IR are false arguments and analogies from human or animal design of physical objects to miraculous or near-miraculous "intelligent design" of living cells are are incorrect; a false analogy.

The typical creationist does not show any comprehension of what it means to be interested in accounting for something.

To say that an agency which is capable of doing anything might have been responsible for X - that does not begin to account for X rather than Y.

Humans have bodies which are typical of primates, of mammals, of vertebrates, of animals. Evolution is constrained in making human bodies in not, for example, giving humans eyes like those of octopuses. There is no consideration given to the constraint to creation or "intelligent design" that leads to that.

That is the most obvious lack in anti-evolution. "There is no there, there."

TomS said: The typical creationist does not show any comprehension of what it means to be interested in accounting for something. To say that an agency which is capable of doing anything might have been responsible for X - that does not begin to account for X rather than Y. Humans have bodies which are typical of primates, of mammals, of vertebrates, of animals. Evolution is constrained in making human bodies in not, for example, giving humans eyes like those of octopuses. There is no consideration given to the constraint to creation or "intelligent design" that leads to that. That is the most obvious lack in anti-evolution. "There is no there, there."

And that's in spite of the fact that the basics of evolution theory aren't all that hard to understand. Mutation and recombination (and a few other factors) increase variety, genetic drift and various selection effects reduce it. Net result: change. If a trait or ability is advantageous, variations that emphasize it without undue cost will accumulate (i.e., in the general case, no one particular mutation is a prerequisite for evolution to occur).

harold said: Incidentally, did anyone ever come up with a method of producing positive scientific evidence for "intelligent design", in a way that can be replicated, without reference to any trait, other than "intelligence", of the designer?

Scott F said:

harold said: Incidentally, did anyone ever come up with a method of producing positive scientific evidence for "intelligent design", in a way that can be replicated, without reference to any trait, other than "intelligence", of the designer?

A bird nest, perhaps? Bird nests (well some birds' nests, any way) are obviously *not* "natural" constructs, but are clearly "artificial". How much intelligence does it take to create one? Someone has commented that were we to come across a sufficiently advanced construct, we might not recognize it as such. My thought went to "the cell". In principle, a cell *could* have been constructed by an advanced intelligence. The question is, would we even be able to tell if it was? Unless it was explicitly designed to "look" like it was naturally evolved, I'm pretty sure that with only the level of technology we have today, we should be able tell if anything, even something as complex as a cell, is "designed" or not, given enough time and resources to examine it in minute detail. But to harold's question, the answer may be impossible. Take the bird's next. It could have been made by an actual bird, or by a very clever and very bored human artist. I think that, by the quality of the artificialness of the object, we might be able to put some kind of minimum bound on the level of intelligence required to construct it, but I don't think we could place an upper bound.

harold said: Incidentally, did anyone ever come up with a method of producing positive scientific evidence for “intelligent design”, in a way that can be replicated, without reference to any trait, other than “intelligence”, of the designer?

A bird nest, perhaps?

Among the things that one might say about the agent of design, Y, is how many of them there are.
How about right now, are they active, even existing today, yesterday, tomorrow?

harold said: I massively agree with Scott F. that bird's nests are examples of impressive design in nature ... Having said that this does not address the question I asked in this specific instance. "A BIRD nest" Here, Scott F. has made reference to a trait of the designer. A whole suite of traits, in fact.

And I strongly agree that if some ornithologist with an interest in nests is touring a remote area and sees the nest of a previously undescribed bird species, they’re likely to recognize it as a bird nest.

I'm going to answer my own question. If you're going to claim that Object X was "designed" by Entity Y, it's, as far as I can tell, nearly impossible to do that without some kind of reference to some trait of Y.

TomS said: Check out bowerbird nests. According to the definition (hah!) of "intelligent design", is a bowerbird nest intelligently designed? A beaver dam? A monkey selfie (see the Wikipedia article)?

John Harshman said:

TomS said: Check out bowerbird nests. According to the definition (hah!) of "intelligent design", is a bowerbird nest intelligently designed? A beaver dam? A monkey selfie (see the Wikipedia article)?

Quibble: what you're talking about probably aren't nests. They're bowers: structures built by males to attract females, after which the female goes away, builds a nest nobody ever sees, and raises a brood. I just googled "bowerbird nest" and every single image was of a bower.

John Harshman said:

TomS said: Check out bowerbird nests. According to the definition (hah!) of "intelligent design", is a bowerbird nest intelligently designed? A beaver dam? A monkey selfie (see the Wikipedia article)?

Quibble: what you're talking about probably aren't nests. They're bowers: structures built by males to attract females, after which the female goes away, builds a nest nobody ever sees, and raises a brood. I just googled "bowerbird nest" and every single image was of a bower.

Scott F said:

harold said: I massively agree with Scott F. that bird's nests are examples of impressive design in nature ... Having said that this does not address the question I asked in this specific instance. "A BIRD nest" Here, Scott F. has made reference to a trait of the designer. A whole suite of traits, in fact.

Hi harold. I appreciate you agreeing with me, but I'm afraid that I don't agree with this statement. My point was to identify something that is "obviously" created, yet something that we happen to know didn't require "intelligence", or at least didn't require very much intelligence.

And I strongly agree that if some ornithologist with an interest in nests is touring a remote area and sees the nest of a previously undescribed bird species, they’re likely to recognize it as a bird nest.

In fact, what I was trying to point out was that humans are most likely capable of distinguishing something that is "made" from things that are not "made", even when we know nothing about the "designer" of that "made" object, other than (perhaps) that the "designer" "made" that object. We are likely to get some false positives and some false negatives (admitting a nod to the point about stone arrowheads made earlier), but I'm betting, on average, that we can recognize "design" when we see it.

I'm going to answer my own question. If you're going to claim that Object X was "designed" by Entity Y, it's, as far as I can tell, nearly impossible to do that without some kind of reference to some trait of Y.

Well, maybe. But I'm betting that the only thing we would know about the "designer" is the fact that the object we found was "made" in the first place. From the object itself, we might be able to infer some attributes or capabilities of the "maker" of the object, perhaps discover its function, and thereby infer its purpose, and therefore derive some knowledge of the "makers" "motives" in making the object. But we would derive most of that information about the "maker" from the object itself (and its surroundings), not from any "a priori" knowledge of the "maker". That's what paleontologists do, after all. Now, I will admit that we may be talking at cross purposes here, maybe talking past each other. I recognize that you appear to be trying to come at the question from a Creationist's point of view. But I'm trying to come at the question from a scientific point of view. I think that the first thing that needs to be answered is, do we even have an object that was "designed" at all? If we can't even establish that, then there is no point in talking about a "designer" at all. The Creationist claims that "X" is designed by God. First, how does the Creationist even know that the object was "designed" in the first place? Their answer is obvious: "Because". In Dembski’s point, the answer is, "Because big numbers". The counter point that the Creationist makes is that the Scientist can't even recognize a "designed" object when it it staring them in the face. We ask the Creationist how they know a thing is designed, or not designed. They simply don't know. My point is, can even the Scientist recognize a "designed" object? Can we recognize an object as "designed", even without reference to the "designer"? Can we answer the question that we pose to the Creationist? I believe that we can, and further, that we can do so without any "a priori" knowledge about the designer, other than the object itself.

Scott F -

I don't mean to seem rude.

My question was "is there a reproducible to 'detect design' without any reference to any known type of designer".

There is a well known attempt to do so. Dembski's CSI. CSI is not real though.

Basically what I asked is, is there a "real CSI"? A method by which does not reference even abstract known traits of humans or birds or spiders or anything else, which just takes any object, however unfamiliar, and "detects design" where it would not otherwise be detected by a rational observer?"

Please don't answer. We are at an impasse. I say I can't think of one. You say of course there is one, but then give examples of detecting design by reference to known designers.

It's as if I ask "what color is Oscar the Grouch" and you keep saying "I've told you over and over again that Big Bird is yellow".

You aren't answering the question I asked and you won't admit that you aren't answering the question I asked.

Just to muddy up the waters ...

Is there such a thing as "design", pure and simple? Rather than a particular design? Is there something in common between a dress design, the design of a chess opening, a Machiavellian design, a circuit design, the design of a flower?

TomS said: Just to muddy up the waters ... Is there such a thing as "design", pure and simple? Rather than a particular design? Is there something in common between a dress design, the design of a chess opening, a Machiavellian design, a circuit design, the design of a flower?

TomS said: Just to muddy up the waters ... Is there such a thing as "design", pure and simple? Rather than a particular design? Is there something in common between a dress design, the design of a chess opening, a Machiavellian design, a circuit design, the design of a flower?

Mike Elzinga said:

TomS said: Just to muddy up the waters ... Is there such a thing as "design", pure and simple? Rather than a particular design? Is there something in common between a dress design, the design of a chess opening, a Machiavellian design, a circuit design, the design of a flower?

I'm not sure that most people are consciously aware of what it is about an artifact that suggests design. Certainly it requires some recognition of what other humans and animals do. Artifacts, as we know them, have not been assembled by internal electromagnetic forces; they are assembled by forces that do not exist within the constituent parts themselves. Furthermore, the kinds of external forces that produce an artifact do not follow the patterns set by the quantum mechanical rules at the atomic and molecular level. Patterns in artifacts have more to do with an intended use. Patterns in natural assemblies might be attractive because of symmetries and their responses to light; but they don't suggest any intended use. And the only reason we can surmise intended use is because we know, from our experiences with ourselves and other designers, something about the characteristics, capabilities, and intentions of a designer.

But with some perhaps extreme examples it just takes a certain amount of education. For instance someone unfamiliar with the possibilities of mineral crystallization, and presented with one of the giant formations from the 'Crystal Cave' in Mexico (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals), and with a human-made but undecorated obelisk or simple plinth might assign 'design' to both. Is there an obvious intended use of an obelisk? Or if told that the giant crystal was 'undesigned', he might justifiably guess that the obelisk was too.

What would someone assume about an enlarged photo of an elaborate snowflake if he had never seen anything like that?

Henry J said:

TomS said: Just to muddy up the waters ... Is there such a thing as "design", pure and simple? Rather than a particular design? Is there something in common between a dress design, the design of a chess opening, a Machiavellian design, a circuit design, the design of a flower?

They all have interrelated parts?

TomS said: A chess opening has no forces which are not in the the parts, whatever we mean by "forces", whatever we mean by "parts".

Just Bob said: But with some perhaps extreme examples it just takes a certain amount of education.

harold said: Scott F - I don't mean to seem rude. My question was "is there a reproducible to 'detect design' without any reference to any known type of designer". There is a well known attempt to do so. Dembski's CSI. CSI is not real though. Basically what I asked is, is there a "real CSI"? A method by which does not reference even abstract known traits of humans or birds or spiders or anything else, which just takes any object, however unfamiliar, and "detects design" where it would not otherwise be detected by a rational observer?" Please don't answer. We are at an impasse. I say I can't think of one. You say of course there is one, but then give examples of detecting design by reference to known designers. It's as if I ask "what color is Oscar the Grouch" and you keep saying "I've told you over and over again that Big Bird is yellow". You aren't answering the question I asked and you won't admit that you aren't answering the question I asked.

Mike Elzinga said: Artifacts, as we know them, have not been assembled by internal electromagnetic forces; they are assembled by forces that do not exist within the constituent parts themselves. Furthermore, the kinds of external forces that produce an artifact do not follow the patterns set by the quantum mechanical rules at the atomic and molecular level. Patterns in artifacts have more to do with an intended use. Patterns in natural assemblies might be attractive because of symmetries and their responses to light; but they don’t suggest any intended use.

Aside from things manufactured by humans (and other animals on this planet), I don't know of anything else in the universe that shows any sign of having been manufactured.

Never mind "designed"; the anti-science use of that word is a diversion to make people less likely to think in terms of manufacture.

(After all, the most generic meaning of "design" is something with interrelated parts - which in no way implies caused by an intelligence.)

Mike Elzinga said:

TomS said: A chess opening has no forces which are not in the the parts, whatever we mean by "forces", whatever we mean by "parts".

The chess pieces are not assembled by internal forces and don't look like anything assembled by internal forces. Chess pieces are not moved around on the board by internal forces; i.e., we don't see them move by themselves, we see a human - or perhaps an ID/creationist pigeon - moving them. And the patterns of movement of chess pieces don't correspond to the patterns of movement by atoms and molecules that are responding to natural processes.

Henry J said: Aside from things manufactured by humans (and other animals on this planet), I don't know of anything else in the universe that shows any sign of having been manufactured. Never mind "designed"; the anti-science use of that word is a diversion to make people less likely to think in terms of manufacture. (After all, the most generic meaning of "design" is something with interrelated parts - which in no way implies caused by an intelligence.)

Henry J said: Aside from things manufactured by humans (and other animals on this planet), I don't know of anything else in the universe that shows any sign of having been manufactured. Never mind "designed"; the anti-science use of that word is a diversion to make people less likely to think in terms of manufacture. (After all, the most generic meaning of "design" is something with interrelated parts - which in no way implies caused by an intelligence.)

I think we know “design” when we see it, because it stands out from the background. I’m thinking of even simple things, like dinosaur nests. Simple circles of rocks. How can we tell the difference between a primitive Stonehenge-like circle, and the hexagonal patterns we see in the Devil’s Causeway, or in arctic permafrosts? The answers tend to lie in physics and chemistry.

Scott F said: I interpreted the question about a "chess opening" to be a question of an "immaterial" nature. Not the chess pieces themselves, or their physical movement, but the abstract sequence of actions. Perhaps like a Fibonacci sequence, or a prime number.

I agree that one can define something like IR, but it is compatible with - perhaps even indicative of - natural processes like evolution. It tells us something about the path to the present, that it is not monotonic,, in some sense.

As far as "design" and CSI, I am skeptical whether they have descriptions. Those are, lacking a.indication to the contrary, empty noun phrases. More like poesy, the pathetic fallacy, than a substantive concept. There can be no excuse for putting it forward without first addressing the charge of the fallacy of hypostatisation.

And the analogy of design, in particular the "clockmaker", it is a signature of the 18th century deists, like Voltaire.

So how does somebody say that IRidium would somehow prevent evolution? :)

Henry J said: So how does somebody say that IRidium would somehow prevent evolution? :)

If A depends on B and B depends on A, and we assume that there is no C which can relieve that mutual dependence, then there is no possibility for either A nor B to exist alone as precursors to the combination.

This is an argument which has a long history. See the Wikipedia artcle on IR for several examples. Such as 18th century Preformationism. 19th century Lamarckianism.

One can assume that there is a C which makes anything possible. This is the assumption of Intelligent Design. Or one can search for a limited C. In many cases, the search for the limited C has been fruitful.

IBIG or FL or anyone else who can distinguish 'intelligently designed' objects, by calculating CSI or any other method: Look at this painting. http://wendistry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-shot-2013-12-09-at-11.30.05-AM.png It was intentionally created by an intelligent being.

If I found a similar appearing object, say lying on the heath, could you determine with unfailing accuracy whether or not it was intelligently designed to appear just as it is, as opposed to a wholly unintended, undesigned splatter of colors, perhaps on a heavily used drop cloth?

Can they even tell which side is supposed to be the top? ;)

Just Bob said: IBIG or FL or anyone else who can distinguish 'intelligently designed' objects, by calculating CSI or any other method: Look at this painting. http://wendistry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-shot-2013-12-09-at-11.30.05-AM.png It was intentionally created by an intelligent being. If I found a similar appearing object, say lying on the heath, could you determine with unfailing accuracy whether or not it was intelligently designed to appear just as it is, as opposed to a wholly unintended, undesigned splatter of colors, perhaps on a heavily used drop cloth?

What's the difference between the two pollocks? One is deep, elegant, of a pleasing line, powerful and elusive. The other one's an abstract expressionist.

Just Bob said: IBIG or FL or anyone else who can distinguish 'intelligently designed' objects, by calculating CSI or any other method: Look at this painting. http://wendistry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-shot-2013-12-09-at-11.30.05-AM.png It was intentionally created by an intelligent being. If I found a similar appearing object, say lying on the heath, could you determine with unfailing accuracy whether or not it was intelligently designed to appear just as it is, as opposed to a wholly unintended, undesigned splatter of colors, perhaps on a heavily used drop cloth?

Well, in the case of the Pollock, er, painting, you can tell that someone made it, right enough, since it's made - I believe - of oil paint on particle board, two substances that do not occur in nature. So someone manufactured it. Sure.

But hydrogen is certainly a substance that occurs in nature. It's the most common substance in the Universe, and stars in main sequence are made mostly of it. Hydrogen occurs in different concentrations, varying according to known natural law, or just randomly. Gravity is also natural, and naturally causes hydrogen clouds to fall inwards and condense, eventually reaching a mass that provides sufficient pressure and heat to release energy, by a natural process known as fusion. Gravity also causes any body with gravity greater than its rigidity to become spherical. Spheres of hydrogen of sufficient density and size to power and fuel a fusion reaction are called "stars".

All the material and all the steps in this process are natural, and well understood. Why do you think that the Milky Way - the glowing band of starlight we see when we look towards the core of the galaxy on a dark night - looks abstract, Marilyn? "Abstract" means only "not having a material existence, ie not material". But the stars are material objects, plainly. Did you mean that their placement looks random, but it really isn't? How do you know that?

And sure, the Galaxy itself is one of billions. But no part of this "larger compleat picture" is any more abstract than the stars themselves are. They're all real, the processes and materials by which they were formed are known, and there's no need for a design or a designer to explain any of it.

So, I guess that my response to, “Is there a method to detect design?” would be to say, “No, not today.” But the follow-on question is, if there was such a method, what would it need to look like?

It certainly wouldn’t be Dembski’s law of really big numbers. It would look at the features of “designed” (i.e. “made”) objects, and attempt to distinguish those features that are unique, different from the physics and chemistry of how “natural” objects are put together.

Or, maybe the answer to your question lies in the work on SETI. Can we distinguish intelligently “designed” signals from “natural” signals? Can we tease out the signals from Klingons from those from pulsars? What makes the two different?

Dave Luckett said: Well, in the case of the Pollock, er, painting, you can tell that someone made it, right enough, since it's made - I believe - of oil paint on particle board, two substances that do not occur in nature. So someone manufactured it. Sure. But hydrogen is certainly a substance that occurs in nature. It's the most common substance in the Universe, and stars in main sequence are made mostly of it. Hydrogen occurs in different concentrations, varying according to known natural law, or just randomly. Gravity is also natural, and naturally causes hydrogen clouds to fall inwards and condense, eventually reaching a mass that provides sufficient pressure and heat to release energy, by a natural process known as fusion. Gravity also causes any body with gravity greater than its rigidity to become spherical. Spheres of hydrogen of sufficient density and size to power and fuel a fusion reaction are called "stars". All the material and all the steps in this process are natural, and well understood. Why do you think that the Milky Way - the glowing band of starlight we see when we look towards the core of the galaxy on a dark night - looks abstract, Marilyn? "Abstract" means only "not having a material existence, ie not material". But the stars are material objects, plainly. Did you mean that their placement looks random, but it really isn't? How do you know that? And sure, the Galaxy itself is one of billions. But no part of this "larger compleat picture" is any more abstract than the stars themselves are. They're all real, the processes and materials by which they were formed are known, and there's no need for a design or a designer to explain any of it.

For those who believe in a spiritual, supernatural, or non-material realm, the entities of that realm are not abstract. Words like "goodness", "truth", and numbers refer to abstractions, not spirits. Ghosts, souls, demons are spirits, not abstract. It is difficult to understand how something like the Milky Way could be considered as either abstract or supernatural.

To return to bowerbird bowers, they can be made of manufactured objects. The bowerbird may use pieces of colored cloth or shiny objects like keys. Is a garbage dump, containing broken glass, rusted and dented steel, used paper towels, torn and dirty clothes, the remains of prepared meals, a manufactured or designed object? Is an objet trouvé, as an art object, designed?

Dave Luckett said: Well, in the case of the Pollock, er, painting, you can tell that someone made it, right enough, since it's made - I believe - of oil paint on particle board, two substances that do not occur in nature. So someone manufactured it. Sure. But hydrogen is certainly a substance that occurs in nature. It's the most common substance in the Universe, and stars in main sequence are made mostly of it. Hydrogen occurs in different concentrations, varying according to known natural law, or just randomly. Gravity is also natural, and naturally causes hydrogen clouds to fall inwards and condense, eventually reaching a mass that provides sufficient pressure and heat to release energy, by a natural process known as fusion. Gravity also causes any body with gravity greater than its rigidity to become spherical. Spheres of hydrogen of sufficient density and size to power and fuel a fusion reaction are called "stars". All the material and all the steps in this process are natural, and well understood. Why do you think that the Milky Way - the glowing band of starlight we see when we look towards the core of the galaxy on a dark night - looks abstract, Marilyn? "Abstract" means only "not having a material existence, ie not material". But the stars are material objects, plainly. Did you mean that their placement looks random, but it really isn't? How do you know that? And sure, the Galaxy itself is one of billions. But no part of this "larger compleat picture" is any more abstract than the stars themselves are. They're all real, the processes and materials by which they were formed are known, and there's no need for a design or a designer to explain any of it.

Marilyn said: We know that our galaxy the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy and andromeda is a spiral galaxy, it is predicted that when they collide they will form an elliptical galaxy or disc galaxy,

Dave Luckett said: Well, in the case of the Pollock, er, painting, you can tell that someone made it, right enough, since it's made - I believe - of oil paint on particle board, two substances that do not occur in nature. So someone manufactured it. Sure.

Is an accidental mess ‘manufactured’ just because an intelligence had the accident?

Just Bob said:

Dave Luckett said: Well, in the case of the Pollock, er, painting, you can tell that someone made it, right enough, since it's made - I believe - of oil paint on particle board, two substances that do not occur in nature. So someone manufactured it. Sure.

Hm, just because the materials were manufactured, does that mean the object itself was? If I had a slice of particle board that I used to set my drippy paint cans on through many painting projects, and in the end it resembled a Pollock 'painting', did I 'manufacture' that object? If I had no intent at all of producing such a thing? Is an accidental mess 'manufactured' just because an intelligence had the accident? And I don't see how it could be called 'designed' if I never planned or intended to make such a 'work of art'. It just happened as the result of other, intended, activity. If the 'manufactured materials' matter, how about if they were natural? Several cultures make sand paintings using various naturally occurring colors of sand. If the sand artist brushed off his hands in one spot after using each color, would the resultant splatter of natural sand grains, on the natural ground, be a designed, manufactured object? I guess what I'm getting at is whether "maunfactured" implies merely "made by a person" (including accidents, messes, trash heaps, etc.) or does it imply "made with the intent of making that thing"? And could it ever be justified to call a wholly unintended mess "designed"?

Dave Luckett said: Design lies in premeditated intent. Manufacture is the use of materials and energy to realise that premeditated intent. An object might be neither designed nor manufactured, manufactured but not designed, designed but not manufactured, or both designed and manufactured.

I agree on the distinction between design and manufacture.

And I suggest that one of the distinctions is that design is a subjective and relative property. A whole object can be either designed or not designed while parts are designed or not. And an object can be designed or not depending on its relation to its environment.

You might say a quartz crystal is 'manufactured' by nature. You might even say it was 'designed' by the electromagnetic forces between its constituent atoms. It has exquisite symmetry, yet its design has no premeditated intent, unless it is a man-made quartz crystal.

It would not be correct to call a natural quartz crystal 'intelligently designed', 'manufactured' though it may appear.

SETI is the only scientific search for unearthly intelligence of which I am aware. The only signs of intelligence they know to look for are ... signals that mimic human-designed communications - carrier signals modulated with statistics that are not too random and not too repetitive, but just right.

What else could they look for? I don't know. My mind is too limited.

prongs said: You might say a quartz crystal is 'manufactured' by nature.

Just Bob said:

Dave Luckett said: Design lies in premeditated intent. Manufacture is the use of materials and energy to realise that premeditated intent. An object might be neither designed nor manufactured, manufactured but not designed, designed but not manufactured, or both designed and manufactured.

Here's where my aging brain is going uh, wait.... If "manufacture is the use of materials and energy to realise that premeditated intent [design, you just said that], then how is it possible that "an object might be... manufactured but not designed"? Or does "manufacture" include other actions besides "the use of materials and energy to realise [design]"?

Dave Luckett said:

Just Bob said:

Dave Luckett said: Design lies in premeditated intent. Manufacture is the use of materials and energy to realise that premeditated intent. An object might be neither designed nor manufactured, manufactured but not designed, designed but not manufactured, or both designed and manufactured.

Here's where my aging brain is going uh, wait.... If "manufacture is the use of materials and energy to realise that premeditated intent [design, you just said that], then how is it possible that "an object might be... manufactured but not designed"? Or does "manufacture" include other actions besides "the use of materials and energy to realise [design]"?

Marilyn might say that the stars were designed - by setting the laws of gravity, friction and thermonuclear reaction such that hydrogen gas can be compressed under its own mass and so heated until it begins to fuse. That would be an example of design without manufacture: the design is of the laws, but the stars are not themselves manufactured. My point would be that we cannot detect design that subtle. We can only go with detecting manufacture in that case - and say that it is not present. I would suggest that to detect manufacture, we could directly observe if the materials were not found in nature, or at least, if the materials were found in nature, that they had been treated by processes either not found in nature, or at least, are very unlikely to be natural. It might be a natural event for a fist-sized cobble to impact another to detach a flake, so that both cobble and flake had sharp edges; but if the cobble could be shown to have been repeatedly struck in that fashion, it is reasonable to infer manufacture, hence (in this case) design. I would conclude, therefore, that it would be more fruitful to engage IDers on the question of manufacture than the question of design. And still there will be edge cases, where manufacture is arguable, but not conclusively demonstrated, as with the cobble. IDers will always be able to take refuge in the edge cases or the arguable ones - and this is precisely what they do. A quibble: is the material from which a spider's web is constructed "found in nature", or not? Is a spider's web "designed"? Is it manufactured? More edge cases. A little investigation will no doubt turn up many others. Perhaps the whole argument about design and manufacture is actually moot. That is, we are discussing concepts that exist only in our minds. If that were the case - I am not saying it is - then the argument that life is the product of design automatically falls to the ground. Or then again, does a concept not exist, in and of itself, no matter where it exists? My gut reaction is to say that it does exist. That would appear to contradict materialism, and one of the pillars of atheism trembles. Ah, armchair speculation on the Universe. Just what we need more of.

For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to see that workhouse of such stupendous toil, in which he makes the world to be modelled and built by God? What materials, what bars, what machines, what servants, were employed in so vast a work? How could the air, fire, water, and earth, pay obedience and submit to the will of the architect? From whence arose those five forms, of which the rest were composed, so aptly contributing to frame the mind and produce the senses? It is tedious to go through all, as they are of such a sort that they look more like things to be desired than to be discovered. CiceroOn the nature of the gods Book I, section 19

You can determine design without having to see manufacture. Just consider an ancient fireplace, or the stones used to hold in the poles of an ancient hut. You just have the design, the effect, and not really the evidence of how the fireplace or hut were manufactured. We have a pretty good idea about manufacture in both cases, but we're really going by the evidence of design in both cases (at least usually) to infer manufacture by a limited range of possibilities, rather than using the evidence of how the stones were arranged to determine the designs involved.

Manufacture still does matter in these cases, though, because we pay attention to what humans can do and what they might be purposing to do with their arrangements of stones, although those limits affect both design and manufacture. Somehow, we don't really suppose that humans made the bison that they hunted, for instance. For that, we're supposed to think of something without meaningful (at least to us) limits.

Remarkably like religion might do, in fact.

Glen Davidson

It seems that we need a new term. Manufactured can mean "made by humans"... or "made by anything else, including simple physics and chemistry, with or without any design, plan, or intention." Artifact doesn't work; it has various meaning in various fields.

We need a term that clearly and unambiguously means ONLY "intentionally made by human beings or other animals." That would leave out unintended waste, trash, messes, unwanted byproducts, etc., and all "products of nature" not intentionally made by people.

I think you guys are over-thinking this. The bottom line is, 1) looking at something (for almost any value of something), did someone (for a pretty indeterminate value of someone) intend for this to happen, or did it just come about by happenstance. And 2) is there any clear way to tell the difference.
I think the obvious answers are 1) sometimes yes, but often no, and 2) very obviously no. The thing is, while 1) can be quibbled about which is yes and which is no, 2) remains obviously no, which sort of makes 1) irrelevant in terms of proving anything about anything.

richard09 said: I think you guys are over-thinking this. The bottom line is, 1) looking at something (for almost any value of something), did someone (for a pretty indeterminate value of someone) intend for this to happen, or did it just come about by happenstance. And 2) is there any clear way to tell the difference. I think the obvious answers are 1) sometimes yes, but often no, and 2) very obviously no. The thing is, while 1) can be quibbled about which is yes and which is no, 2) remains obviously no, which sort of makes 1) irrelevant in terms of proving anything about anything.

richard09 said: I think you guys are over-thinking this. The bottom line is, 1) looking at something (for almost any value of something), did someone (for a pretty indeterminate value of someone) intend for this to happen, or did it just come about by happenstance. And 2) is there any clear way to tell the difference. I think the obvious answers are 1) sometimes yes, but often no, and 2) very obviously no. The thing is, while 1) can be quibbled about which is yes and which is no, 2) remains obviously no, which sort of makes 1) irrelevant in terms of proving anything about anything.

Wow, you guys spent so long, yet again, arguing with the pathological liar FL instead of simply pointing out that he has NEVER supported any of his claims in the past with empirical evidence of any kind and then dismissing him when he returns to tell more lies. He should have been banned from this blog years ago.

Dale Husband, the Honorable Skeptic

In fact, FL has not posted a comment in days, nor within the last dozen or more comments. I usually allow him 1 or 2 comments on my posts, occasionally more, partly so that lurkers or newbies can see what kind of "thinking" biblical literalists indulge in and partly so that people who might be sympathetic to such "thinking" can see what nonsense it is. Additionally, sometimes the regular commenters go off on interesting tangents inspired by a troll's comments. Finally, if I have been gone for 10 hours (an eternity on the Web), I do not like to banish a long, continuing discussion to the BW, though I have occasionally cried "enough!"