I agree that what I asked about isn’t exactly like blood clotting. However, it does involve the mechanics of the eye, plus the optic nerves and the manner in which the optical information is processed to bring sight to whatever creature has the highly modified eye.
The issue is this: what we DON’T want from a scientific theory is for it to be able to explain absolutely everything: any condition, any circumstance. If evolution is to be useful, to be meaningful, it should have clear boundaries past which it doesn’t make sense to apply it.
Here is a challenge I often pose to Intelligent Design theorists who claim that they have a test to detect design. Would your mechanism register “design” in any complex and specifically functional object found in any possible universe? Could a God create a universe in which such objects exist, but there was no internal evidence of design in them? If the answer to the first question is yes, then we have to have serious doubts about whether their mechanism is really detecting anything other than its own biases: it doesn’t seem to be making any specific statements about the particular character of these special complex objects, but rather simply assuming that they are all designed, no matter what their particular character.
Likewise, I think that evolution, if it is to be useful as a descriptive theory to be applied to creatures we might encounter (whether on our planet, or new life elsewhere), has to imply a particular character that demonstrates that it came about via evolution and NOT some other process (whether ID or some other unknown process). We can’t fall into the habit of just using evolution as an explain-all.
I do, of course, think that biological life on this planet shows the particular character of things which have evolved rather than been designed. But that IS because of their particular character, and NOT out of an assumption that all such things must have evolved.
I just don’t see that there is any evidence here that all these things DID evolve purely in one step. Control genes aren’t necessarily like that, just because they happen to be fundamental or turn whole systems on and off.
I have to admit I haven’t paid much attention to ID, under the presumption that it is just creationism in disguise.
One question: is there *any *peer-reviewed, published research in support of ID? Seems to me the first step if ID proponents want to claim to be doing actual science is that they demonstrate a willingness to expose their theories to the actual scientific process. It would seem that some sort of testable hypothesis would be essential to that. Perhaps a significant, complex development that could be shown to have occurred in one step, and which required mulitple, concurrent, and separate mutations. Complex effects from a control gene clearly would not meet this standard, since they can be traced to a single cause.
Then there’s this problem:
I take this as a clear sign that they are working backwards from a preferred result, rather than inferring results from the data. Show me that an intelligent design has occurred, *then *we can talk about ferreting out information about the designer.
I have to add that I see no problem with religious believers choosing to see intelligent design in the world as a means of reconciling their beliefs with scientific knowledge. My problem is with those who insist that science somehow *proves *intelligent design, but rely on bogus science to do so.
There was a recent “debate” at UC Davis that claimed to be an honest discussion of ID. It was sponsored by a Christian group, and the ground rules included restricting the opponents to only asking questions of the proponents, and presenting no arguments of their own. Some “science”.
Did I say it wasn’t tunneling? I said it’s more pedestrian than something like diproton transfer, and is a manifestation of electron resonance.
Again, as all chemistry relies on the motion and configuration of electrons, it’s rather bleedingly obvious that quantum mechanics provides the most fundamental description of how the building blocks of life assemble and interact. It’s also essential to describing the assembly of rocks, which are not alive. So what is it that really distinguishes a rock from an amoeba? Could it be complexity? So do I need quantum mechanics for life, or complexity? And if I can model life by introducing stochastic elements which do not rely upon embedding realistic simulations of the behavior of sub-atomic particles, might that not be sufficient for the time being, until we can show some clear evidence that we need some “quantum magic” to breath life into matter? I tend to think so. Those who are working on the simulations must agree, or they would still be waiting for Deep Thought and the Pentium 10[sup]100[/sup].
I’m sure when someone encounters something alive, the existence of which defies any attempt at explanation by natural selection and/or genetic drift, other alternatives will be considered. Given the indisputable successes of neo-Darwinian evolution, it would take something quite remarkable to make a case for abandoning it. So remarkable, in fact, that apparently we can’t think of specific characteristics such an entity might have. A confoundingly high level of complexity is proof of nothing except that it confounds us. The defining quality of the “unevolved” is that it cannot have arisen from a process of random mutation and natural selection; that it is impossible to show its emergence via stochastic processes. I think the demonstrable power of evolution as a theory of life rather demands that we test it thoroughly before eliminating its applicability. Behe and his ilk give up far too early; but then, they’re not motivated to do otherwise.
For many people, unfortunately, I’m not sure how they would come to the conclusion that something defies evolutionary mechanisms at all. I’m having a hard enough proposing ANY basic description of something that would seem to imply a non-darwinian process. That’s not the way it should be.
True. But it shouldn’t take anything remarkable to explain what a counter-example to a good, well-defined process theory is. I sometimes think (and am arguing now) that too many defenders of evolution speak of the theory as too-all-powerful. What we need to be clear about is that it is not all-powerful, that it is a very specific process, and simply that the life we know on earth bears all the hallmarks of what we could expect from that particular process, as opposed to any other one of which we can think of.
Unfortunately, it’s creationism with a wide appeal to the otherwise well-educated, which was often creationism’s stumbling block when trying to get elites on its side.
Sort of. Stephen Meyer, I believe it was, got a literature review article about the ID take on the Cambrian explosion published. They are trying to publish, which is better than the creationists ever did (they made up ophony journals!), albiet this first article requiring a bit of subterfuge.
Agreed on all counts. As Finch says, ID as a science could have some legitimate applications. But almost every single one of the major ID people is some falvor of activist Christian trying to find work for God to do.
That is how they work: this system could not have been evolved, it must have ben designed. Who is the designer? How was it done? Oh, don’t ask us! We don’t know! (ITS GOD, GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD)
Hmmm. I’ve now heard of such debates on several colleges throughout the nation. Interesting.
Well, it isn’t a question of need, and quantum interactions aren’t magic. They just produce events that would be unexpected from the perspective of a stochastic model. Nor is it really a case of QM being central to life. It’s just part of the picture. But there is a lot of legitimate scientific debate over how QM could have influenced and continues to influence the course of evolution in ways that a “sticky” model just couldn’t fully capture.
Why not? If I look through a telescope and see a body revolving around a star in an eliptical orbit, I have to have a good and specific idea of what else might account for this phenomenon if GR is to be a good theory? Evolution doesn’t just describe, it explains, and when one comes to appreciate the ubiquity of emergent phenomena, it is indeed difficult to come up with a realistic example of something we might expect to stumble upon that shows clear evidence of design. It is precisely because there are vast amounts of time, and vast numbers of permutations invoved, that evolved systems can appear so fine-tuned as to be designed. The theory can’t help it if it is actually that powerful. It also can’t help it if it happens to do a brilliant job of describing almost everything its been applied to appropriately.
I’m sure as soon as somebody looks through a telescope and sees a planet tracing a square orbit around a star, they’ll wonder most confoundedly if GR might not be the best explanatory framework to account for the observation. If we ever find a living creature that has no antecedents that could possibly be accounted for by Earthly natural selection, then we can wonder mightily where the hell it came from. I suppose, as you say, a massively saltatory specimine should be enough to make one wonder about orifings; but only enough to say it didn’t evolve naturally on Earth. I can analyze the sequence of a lentivirus and see very quickly that a bacterial drug-resistance gene with a cytomegalovirus promoter has somehow found its way into a spot where a native gag-pol gene used to be. Now I can begin searching for an explanation. Was it some fantastically unlikely, but still natural, recombination? How could this thing have replicated, considering the fact it not lacks sequences critical for that function? Do I know that there are scientists out there who engineer viruses this way all the time? If I didn’t, could I arrive at that conclusion by induction? Quite probably, yes.
I think, basically, Evolution as it stands provides all the tools needed to evaluate whether something must have been designed, but the process would involve eliminating other possibilities before resorting to design as the explanation, which isn’t easy when things aren’t painfully obvious. What’s wrong with that? I think the reason we’re scratching our heads over examples is because we’re having a hard time imagine a living organism in the real world that would carry such obvious signs of manipulation, yet would have escaped notice up to now. If the signs are extremely subtle, like the ID folks claim, then it will indeed take a lot of effort to rule out the incredibly successful theoretical framework that has worked so well for all the other problems it’s been applied to. The reason Evolution is so successful is precisely because random mutation and natural selection is such a poweful “force” for generating change that is described as “adaptive” (even though I think that’s a poor way of putting it). I see no practical problem associated with having to grapple with that reality. Design is an extraodinary claim. It ought to require extraordinary evidence.
Whoot!
Dembski has honored us with another major paper!
Perhaps a separate thread might be in the offing, but it might be worth looking into.
I cannot see why, when considering the origins of life, one needs to assume that the space to be “searched” must contain the contingencies included when accounting for all the permutations afforded by polymers consisting of 100-or-more of 22 possible amino acids. There is simply no reason I can think of, a priori, to put that sort of requirement on primordial conditions. Many of the amino acids living creatures need occur in vanishingly small quantities in nature and must be synthesized. Is it not much more reasonable to conclude that the space orignially “searched” was much smaller, and contained set of components that were abundant and stable in the environment of the early Earth? Sucha space would most definitely does not include the biogenic amino acids we find in nature today, in number or abundance. Putting their number into the equation before the mechanisms and environment for their synthesis and stability, respectively, even exist is beyond absurd.
I wonder: I know that we have some suspects for sequences found in almost all life which we think might be deeply ancestral: that is, key information for chemical processes nearly as old as life itself. Has anyone checked to see if these suspects overwhelmingly employ a particular limited vocabulary of animo acids?
It’s an active area of research. There are whole journals devoted to the study of the origins of life chock full of articles that address just such concerns. I doubt Dembski reads them. Why would he? He’s not interested in what they contain.
Here’s an example I found in about thirty seconds:
And those particular ID proponents could be wrong about that position, and it would affect ID theory* not a whit. This is similar to the “Darwin was wrong about…” creationist argument. The claims of proponents are not the claims of ID theory.
*theory used for convenience, AFAIK ID hasn’t even met the requirment to be called a hypothesis yet.