Intelligent Design - theory, examples, implications

[TeleMad]

There seems to be an interest in attacking his character, but what about the issues he brings up? Poor evidence, false evidence, people knowing the evidence was misleading, etc.

 

What do you think you and Wells were doing? Knowing someting is misleading but still putting in writing ... isn't that what I just caught Wells doing? Besides, if you've read Well's book he doesn't show that evolution doesn't occur, but that he feels textbooks are ... gasp!! ... misleading.

 

Why don't you pick ONE topic and discuss it.

[TeleMad]

I'll bite, tell me why you switched?

 

Okay, you asked for it :-) Here’s a compilation of some posts I’ve made at Infidels.org about this very question.

 

 

 

DNAunion: Well, I started off as a YEC (at that time, I found that view was in line with my church's, with the scientists my pastor had pointed me to and the scientists I saw on a few shows on religious channels, and with the majority of Americans, so I felt like I was holding to the correct position). But I very quickly found YEC untenable (once I started college) and so switched to being just a hardcore anti-evolutionist: didn't believe any of it. Then I found some evidence for evolution convincing, so switched more to an ID position, where one can fully accept a lot of evolution, but still consider evolution incapable of turning a bacterium into a human, so to speak. As time went on, I pretty much gave up on religion (but not totally), so my version of ID involved speculative aliens. But then I was faced with a conundrum, as I explained above: if the designers are aliens, then does it really make sense that they would continually intervene in Earth's history over billions of years? Would aliens create a blood clotting system here, a flagellum there, protein sorting machinery there? No. So when I jettisoned God as being the designer, I had to accept common descent and accept a one-time seeding of life on Earth by aliens; sort of directed panspermia style. But I could still do that and remain in line with ID "theory", and that is where I stayed for quite a while.

 

So at that point, I was (basically) an IDist.

 

1) As more time went by, I was continually defending ID and found that things I had not considered a big deal before starting being problems. One of them was the logic of Behe's argument for IC. The argument appears to be perfectly valid, if one considers only the type of evolution that Behe focused on, which was where a system retains its same function throughout. Of course, Behe did mention things like cooption and circuitous routes, but they weren't what he focused on. And during my attempts to defend Behe's IC, against the likes of Nic Tamzek, I found that to try to save Behe's concept I had to more and more narrow the scope of what type of evolution it covered. It got to the point that I considered the concept to be too narrow to be of any practical use. If it wasn't applicable to the majority of instances, then could it really be used to argue against evolution in general? I doubted that it could.

 

2) Furthermore, during this time, I had chosen a system that was very complex and almost seemed to have a goal in mind - mitosis (where chromosomes condense for no immediate function, but almost in anticipation of being evenly distributed to daughter cells in a much later stage) - and couldn't imagine how such a complex system could exist in a simpler form. If the mitotic spindle doesn't form, then the chromosomes won't separate; if the nuclear envelope doesn't disappear, then kinetochore microtubules can't attach to the chromosomes; if the MTOCs don't migrate to opposite poles, then .... and so on. So I asked here about it, and sure enough, Nic Tamzek was able to point out variations of mitosis simpler than the standard model presented in undergraduate biology texts. So mitosis wasn't a fixed, unmodifiable and irreducible system, even though one might get that impression when considering it. And if it wasn't, maybe other things I thought were irreducible weren't.

 

3) And then there were what I considered to be legitimate counters to some of Behe's IC systems. For example, the TTSS (type III secretory system) as a possible precursor to a bacterial flagellum. And it looked pretty good to me; and further, the system would have changed its function when jumping from the TTSS to the flagellum. Maybe this small whole in the notion of IC is actually pretty large.

 

4) Then there were problems defending Behe's IC systems against what appeared to be some illegitimate counters, such as one concerning the blood clotting system. I found I could quote Behe to show that the missing parts of a simpler functional system were not any of the parts Behe actually listed as being part of the IC system; but then my opponents could point out other statements by Behe that indicate they were. So Behe was not consistent on what the parts of his IC system were, and, at least in the broader cases, he had been refuted. So maybe his narrow case was wrong too?

 

5) One of Behe's points about evolution not being able 'to do it all', so there needing to be a designer at some points, has to do with how large gaps are. He even uses an analogy of someone claiming to have hopped across a canyon. Behe says that if there are enough little buttes, close enough together, then one could accept the person's explanation for how he got across the canyon. But, if the buttes are too few and too far apart, then one shouldn't believe the person's account. Well, the more I learned about biology the more I saw everything being related and "connected", and the smaller the gaps between things became. Behe tries to address this somewhat by saying that, sure, the individual parts of a cilium are present in cells in things other than cilia, but how could they be coopted to form a cilium? If the cilium were the only example, the argument might make sense to me. But "everything" I looked in biology seemed to be like the cilium and its parts. Take any single complex biological system and it will share most of its "parts" with something else in the cell or organism. For example, the visual system of humans. What parts are unique to that system? Maybe 1 (?) What parts are found in other cells or systems? Nearly all. This indicates to me the reuse of preexisting structures that happened to be "lying around" in the cell, just as evolution is supposed to do.

 

6) Up until "the end", I still had my doubts about evolution's ability to "do it all". I was putting the finishing touches on 20-page explanation of why Dawkins’ idea of cumulative selection as mentioned in his "Climbing Mount Improbable" was bogus. One of the key points was that Dawkins’ says that smearing out the luck reduces the overall probability by breaking up the overall highly improbable event into a chain a many very likely events, whose probabilities would then be added together. Well, I knew he was wrong. Consider a series of 500 events that lead from species A to species B. Event 1 has to occur; and event 2 has to occur; and event 3 has to occur; and so on. When multiple events are joined with AND, you find the overall probability by multiplying the individual events' probabilities together. Then an overall probability of 1 in 2^500 remains the same if the overall event is broken down into 500 highly likely steps of 1 in 2 probability; because, 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 ... n times give 1 in 2^n, where n is 500. But it dawned on me that I was wrong. Take flipping 500 heads. In a single overall event, the probability of doing so is 1 in 2^500. Now, what happens if the overall event is broken up into a chain of 500 individual coin flips ... does the probability change? Yes. Take one coin at a time. For coin 1, you'd expect to get a heads within 2 flips. Then you move on to coin 2. You'd expect to get a heads within 2 flips. Then move on to coin 3. And so on. The probability here works out to be 1 in 2 * N. So while I had thought Dawkins’ method of cumulative selection would leave the probability at 1 in 2^n, it actually changes it to 1 in 2*n: a huge difference (consider the difference in 1 in 2^500 and 1 in 2*500). So at this point, one of my final arguments against evolution had been shown to be wrong (by myself, although others would have pointed it out had I ever posted my argument).

[Buffy]

There seems to be an interest in attacking his character, but what about the issues he brings up? Poor evidence, false evidence, people knowing the evidence was misleading, etc. ...

I said this above, but I'll repeat it in more detail why the "facts" are misleading or false:

1. Miller-Urey: There is nothing "faked" about the Miller-Urey experiment. There is some debate about whether the earth had the specific ingredients that were put into the experiment as we do not have specific evidence that that was the combination, but no one has shown that that combination of chemicals could not have existed and it did indeed produce amino acids. The fact that the experiment alone did not produce DNA is in no way a scientific "proof" that life did not evolve this way. In fact the author's own claim is unbelievably misleading: very much akin to saying that since Newton did not predict relativity, that relativity is false.
   
2. "Faked Embryos": The scientific community initially and to this day has agreed that these were misleading--not "faked". There is *no* conspiracy here: it is a wideopen and recognized fact. The only issue here is what has happened in text books which I will get to below, but the exposition very selective in portraying Gould's actual remarks.
   
3. "Tree of Life": This is again repeating the illogical argument that since Darwin did not portray a full theory because he did not have the evidence in front of him, that *all* of Evolution is proved false. The author does nothing to really argue against what Darwin theorized except to find fault with the theories behind the Cambrian Explosion. Again the author points to "disagreements" when the disagreements among biologists solely surround "gradualism" versus "punctuated equilibrium" not "there is or is not macro evolution." Under *either* approach, it is accepted that many "intermediate" forms--*especially* invertibrates--do not leave any kind of fossil evidence.
   
4. Homology: The *only* point made here of any kind was to take Berra's comments completely out of context to portray all Evolution arguments as absurd. This would get you thrown out of the debate team pretty quickly. While he makes an attempt to call this circular reasoning, there is now an explosion in the number of comparative DNA studies that show that there are very clearly defined relationships in homology, and while there are also examples of redevelopment of various structures in unrelated species, the argument that different species would *have* to evolve different structures rather than the same structure is patently false and ignores the fact that the primary cause of these structures is mutation of DNA which causes recessive genes to express themselves, and where no commonality was originally seen, a common trait can appear.
   
5. Peppered Moths: Again a flawed experiment, again the scientific community repudiates it first. Again, the only place it really shows up is in those textbooks. However it is *not* evidence that in *any* way argues against Evolution.
   
6. Darwin's Finches: What is shown in this article is just a small part of the "complaints" of Jonathon Wells on this topic that can be more completely be seen refuted here. The article ignores the fact that there is strong evidence backing up the Grant's work. The only claim from elsewhere on the topic (his book) boils down to "if evolution reverses itself [the beaks returned to original size], its not evolution" which is the creationists conclusion only. There is lots of evidence that changing conditions can easily bring back previous states, but this does not imply "only fluctuation that proves that there is no overarching evolutionary direction."
   
7. Apes to Humans: Only two arguments here: 1) not enough intermediate forms (there are never enough to convince creationists). 2) Piltdown Man hoax proves that all paleontological evidence is false. Neither of these can be considered reasonable and logical arguments.
   

I believe this shows that *all* of the claims are false and/or misleading, therefore not in the least bit convincing.

Has he made false claims? Is this really good evidence and the best evidence Macro Evolution has to offer and deserves to be in the text books?

It is only the author who makes the unbelievable and transparently self-serving claim that this is "the best evidence Macro Evolution has to offer." The much larger volumes of convincing evidence is conveniently ignored.

 

Now as to the sorry state of text books: I'm the first one to agree that they stink. I've got lots of friends like Fishteacher who teach science in junior and high schools, and the materials they have to work with are absolutely shocking. I have one friend who works in the inner city with textbooks that are 20 years old. Why is this? Because conservatives are going out of their way to dismantle the public school system through active prevention of school funding, railing against "commie" teacher's unions, complaints that Christian prayer is not allowed in school and the insistence that unscientific beliefs be taught in science classes. Moreover the process of creating these texts is the most thankless task imagineable, driven mostly by a small number of text book companies who care far more about the bottom line than in correctness. Very few are actually vetted significantly by the scientific community, to a great extent because any "suggestions" or "corrections" are trumped by the need to 1) get it out the door at the lowest cost, and 2) staying away from potentially "controversial" statements that would prevent the books being accepted by fearful or even conservative school boards. This is an utter and complete mess that will not be solved by "more testing," and putting the "pressure on the incompetent teachers," and making all questions about science "only theories."

 

To claim that this mess is proof that Evolution as false however has no logical basis whatsoever.

 

Sorry,

Buffy

[Lolic]

Okay, you asked for it :-) Here’s a compilation of some posts I’ve made at Infidels.org about this very question.

Good response TeleMad, I enjoyed reading that. I have a great deal of appreciation for what you read and the work you've done searching. As you asked, Ok, lets try to stick to one topic a bit. How about the flagellum. Let's assume all 40 or so parts already existed. How then do you postulate mutation and NS combined to form a flagellum? I don't need painstaking detail, but somewhat of a major step by major step version would be appreciated. :hyper:

[TeleMad]

As you asked, Ok, lets try to stick to one topic a bit. How about the flagellum. Let's assume all 40 or so parts already existed. How then do you postulate mutation and NS combined to form a flagellum? I don't need painstaking detail, but somewhat of a major step by major step version would be appreciated. :hyper:

 

Well, first we need to establish how many parts of the bacterial flagellum constitute the irreducibly complex core system. Is it 40? Or 3? Behe says:

 

"The bacterial flagellum uses a paddling mechanism. Therefore it must meet the same requirements as other such swimming systems. Because the bacterial flagellum is necessarily composed of at least three parts - a paddle, a rotor, and a motor - it is irreducibly complex."

(Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press, 1996, p72)

 

So Behe lists 3 conceptual parts as being the core of the IC bacterial flagellum.

 

Then Behe goes on to say at the bottom of that page that the bacterial flagellum "requires about forty other proteins for function". What are these other proteins and what do they do? Behe says, "... the exact roles of the proteins are not known ..." So are they part of an irreducibly complex system? Can they be?

[TeleMad]

What are these other proteins and what do they do? Behe says, "... the exact roles of the proteins are not known ..." So are they part of an irreducibly complex system? Can they be?

 

I decided to rewatch Behe's video "Irreducible Complexity: The Biochemical Challenge to Darwinian Theory", taped at Princeton University in 1997. After the hour-long lecture Behe spent 45 minutes answering questions from the audience. Someone made a statement that genetic knockout experiments showed some of Behe's irreducibly complex biochemical systems could have some of their parts removed and still function, without that person actually naming the systems or showing reason to believe that they might actually be irreducibly complex. Sure that these were in fact not actually irreducibly complex systems, Behe said:

 

"You have to be careful. You can't toss around this phrase [irreducible complexity] here and there. You have to be careful: you have to inspect the system. ... But for irreducible complexity, you can't just snap your fingers and say "Boy, look how complex that is, it needs all its parts". You have to go through and understand what the parts are doing, and only then can you say this might be a mixture of necessary parts plus extras. Only after an examination, only when you know what the structure of the system is, then can you say these are the components that are REALLY necessary for the irreducibly complex system, and there might be some extras on there as well." (Michael Behe, Irreducible Complexity: The Biochemical Challenge to Darwinian Theory, Access Resource Network, 1997)

 

So the question remains, can those other 40 proteins that we don't know the function of be considered part of the irreducibly complex core of a bacterial flagellum? Behe seems to have possibly contradicted himself because his response to the audience suggests that they cannot.

[Lolic]

So the question remains, can those other 40 proteins that we don't know the function of be considered part of the irreducibly complex core of a bacterial flagellum? Behe seems to have possibly contradicted himself because his response to the audience suggests that they cannot.

Maybe we can keep it really simple and not worry about those parts for now, but just look at the tail that turns at 10's of thousands of RPM's, the protein portion that acts as a bearing to hold it in place, and the drive mechanism that makes it capable of those RPM's and stopping w/i a 1/4 turn and reversing direction and back up to high RPM. Lets assume those parts already exist as part of some other structure, how does mutation and NS now create a functioning flagellum?

[Lolic]

Okay, you asked for it :-) Here’s a compilation of some posts I’ve made at Infidels.org about this very question.

I really do appreciate the time you have put into your search and the reading you have done. I’ve read and heard some information that leads me to a different conclusion, but I respect what you have found. I would value your input concerning this man and the points he makes. Have you read or listened to A. E. Wilder-Smith? He’s no longer with us, but he’s a rather impressive man with multiple PhD’s in this area. While you may be out of time for reading, perhaps you can listen to his MP3 on “evolution or creation”. He covers such points as:

How point mutations done at random effect a holistic program

 

Did Saul Spiegleman create life?

 

Does matter + energy + time = life

 

Impossibility of life happening by chance, and more.

 

Life requires concept

 

Theistic evolution

 

You can look here,

http://www.wildersmith.org/library.htm

or http://www.marshill.org/WebPages/audio.home.htm

or Google the following: "a. e. wilder-smith" mp3

 

I would like to know what you think and if you have seen evidence that refutes his points.

[Kevin Wirth]

 

This gets at the crux of why ID is not taken very seriously, its only basis is to try to say that because we don't understand how something happens, it must have been designed. Go back a couple hundred years, and birds flying had to have something to do with angels lifting them. Or for primitive societies, every earthquake and tornado is God shaking the ground. To justify something simply by saying "we don't know *now* how this could possibly be" does not in and of itself provide any sort of evidence that an outside force (or pre-existing intelligence as James Putnam likes to talk about here), caused anything. Violating the basic principles of well understood disciplines like statistics does not make claims of "astronomical probabilities" so.

I agree with that! It definitely takes "faith" and not logic!

 

Cheers,

Buffy

 

This is really pretty ludicruous. In a few short sentences you've dismissed information theory as the quackery of IDers.

 

Give me a friggin break !!!

 

Lolic has posted a VERY good point by mentioning the extreme improbability that hemoglobin evolved. You guys are on the hook to prove it, because you claim

evolution is true. Don't give us pap answers - give us some 'solid' evidence,

not your presumptous and pompous theorizations.

 

Saying that it HAD to happen is NOT evidence

Saying the it PROBABLY happened in NOT evidence.

 

Gimme the evidence.

 

Is there any reason, a priori, to assume that inanimate chemicals, unguided, will aggregate in manners which reflect neither statistical, thermodynamical nor mechanistic principles, and display behavior which we would otherwise clearly identify as the product of design?

 

Don't preach - show me.

[Queso]

life doesn't require concept. concept was developed by life, by us.

[Lolic]

life doesn't require concept. concept was developed by life, by us.

And your answer explains why there are billions of pieces of information in the DNA of a simple cell and where it comes from. :hyper:

Maybe you should listen to the man (A. E. Wilder-Smith) with 3 PhD's before you say he is wrong??

[Queso]

just because a man has credentials doesn't mean he's right.

just because millions of people believe in something to the death, doesn't make it right.

yeah, DNA and it's counterparts are extremely small compared to us. everything revolves around humans, doesn't it? hint my sarcasm.

so what if it's small?

yeah, it's complicated, and we have yet to fully understand it, but that doesn't mean some amazing "intelligent" beings from beyond our universe created us and everything that's created us. just thinking about that almost makes me want to laugh. infact i just giggled. and now i'm chuckling.

[Queso]

i fully apologize for my actions in the last post. i should have never laughed, that was silly of me.

[Queso]

i guess all i'm saying is i'm tired, and i don't believe in intelligent design. i think it should just be called [newname] design, because it doesn't seem too intelligent to me. but i know, i know...it's because of the intelligence we were created from. for all we know, we could be lying in a puddle of inter-universal snot shot out by a stoner in a giant universe. now THAT my friends is intelligence!

see what i mean by tired? goodnight lolic, i see you're still here.

[Kevin Wirth]

And how does one scientifically apply probability to biology? Look at what you did! You came up with a probability of something like 1 in 10^500 for the formation of hemoglobin, yet Behe says for hemoglobing that the case for design is weak and far from satisfying! The reason? Because the probability of getting hemoglobin when you start with myoglobin is quite good!

 

I say the same basic logic applies to eyes (and hearts, and other such complex biological structures). Yes, if one erroneously looks at the eye as it exists today and in isolation and consider its popping into existence fully formed - as you did with hemoglobin -then the probability is surely astronomically small. But nature got to start with an ocellus, and because of that, the probability of success increases astronomically.

 

That's the probability problem of applying Dembski's design detectors to biology. Then there's the problem of specification. What is the specification - the independent pattern that gets matched - for the eye?

 

The totally mad fallacy here is that by merely injecting the element of time into this fantasy we can subvert the mechanisms of probability, logic, and a whole universe of other'scientific' constraints which otherwise make the evolution of the eye highly unlikely.

It is at this point where you depart from talking from a scientific point of reference.

 

Adding time to the equation doesn't suddenly make it ever so likely that an eye could evolve. No amount of time can 'create' an eye like the one in your head if you simply allow nature to take its course. Nature offers us NO compelling reason to believe that inanimate objects could or would somehow miraculously form such a complex structure simply by giving us eaons of time.

 

And besides, saying it is 'highly likely' is a far cry from evidence, especially given the fact that it's NOT AT ALL 'likely'.

 

Is there any reason, a priori, to assume that inanimate chemicals, unguided, will aggregate in manners which reflect neither statistical, thermodynamical nor mechanistic principles, and display behavior which we would otherwise clearly identify as the product of design?

 

No - there are none. At least, no 'scientific' reasons.

 

This is a fantasy that is NO DIFFERENT than what many accuse the IDers of promoting.

 

You can't have it both ways. Sorry.

[Tormod]

The totally mad fallacy here is that by merely injecting the element of time into this fantasy we can subvert the mechanisms of probability, logic, and a whole universe of other'scientific' constraints which otherwise make the evolution of the eye highly unlikely.

 

Injecting time is not a fallacy at all - all modern science, since before Darwin, has accepted that the Earth is ancient. We now know that it is almost 5 billion years old. No reason to call that a fallacy - it is backed up by so much evidence that we can safely call it a fact.

 

Adding time to the equation doesn't suddenly make it ever so likely that an eye could evolve. No amount of time can 'create' an eye like the one in your head if you simply allow nature to take its course.

 

The ID argument that the eye *must* be developed by intelligence is in itself the most glaring fallacy here. The eye is far from perfect. The construction of the retina and muscles etc in the human eye are not optimal. Actually, squids have better eyes that human beings. The Swedish scientist Dan-Erik Nilson has shown how natural selection can come up with the vertebrate eye in less than 400,000 years.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html

 

Is there any reason, a priori, to assume that inanimate chemicals, unguided, will aggregate in manners which reflect neither statistical, thermodynamical nor mechanistic principles, and display behavior which we would otherwise clearly identify as the product of design?

 

This is stuffing words into people's mouths. We hear the same arguments from all the ID-ers here. Why doesn't a single one of you manage to come up with something new? The eye can be evolved. Every single piece of living being can be explained by the theory of evolution.

 

What evolution cannot explain is how life came about in the first place. That is something which is a mystery. For those with a religious bent, looking for an intelligence behind it is fine. For science, the laws of physics and chemistry apply.

 

This is a fantasy that is NO DIFFERENT than what many accuse the IDers of promoting.

 

And which fantasy do we accuse the IDers of promoting?

[Lolic]

The Swedish scientist Dan-Erik Nilson has shown how natural selection can come up with the vertebrate eye in less than 400,000 years.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html

Thanks for the link. (seriously) interesting reading. The logic behind it though is almost as complete as the old joke, "I know how you can be a millionaire"....."first you get a million dollars, then...."

There is no discussion of the complexity, the information to integrate the various parts, the number of mutations required to acquire all these parts, the thousands of mutations that would be negative that would harm the evolving family of critters. Interesting to read but hardly proof. If it were true, then we should have millions of intermediary fossils from other "hard" body structures forming in this manner. Where's the beef? So then we say things don't fossilize easily, but there is proof of soft tissue critters fossilizing just fine. So then we postulate punctuated equilibrium with critters that play hide and seek and don't leave fossils, but then you loose your billions of years for mutations to do their "intelligent" work and violate the second law of thermo.

One thing this proves, "theory savers" will go to no end to keep an intelligent foot out of their evolutionary sandbox. They almost act as though they have something to lose:

-being the scientific elite,

-research funding

-access to the press

-the ability to teach a metaphysical concept (one time non-intelligent formation of life that propagated all life and can't be scientifically tested) in the public school system with tax money. (that almost sounded like religion!)

 

No, they certainly have nothing to lose by letting an intelligent foot in the door. No motive here. Carry on, more funding to find the missing link.