I know I’m pretty much preaching to the choir here, I don’t recall any ID advocates here, but maybe I’m wrong.
My understanding of ID is that its central premise is that some biological features, such as the blood clotting process and bacterial flagellum, cannot be reduced (i.e. have parts taken away) and still function. The conclusion that the ID supporters draw is that they could not have come about by evolution, because the simpler forms that would have come first wouldn’t have worked, and hence not been naturally selected as an advantage.
When they claim that natural selection couldn’t have come up with that feature, don’t they really mean they don’t know how natural selection could have come up with it? Surely one must admit that millions of years on a planet-sized testbed might have come up with a natural selection sequence that humans wouldn’t think of?
Is this really any different, except in scale, from when people didn’t know what lightning was and thought it was Zeus chucking a lightning bolt at a Titan?
I don’t think it’s necessarily so. Logically speaking, it’s quite possible that there might be things that are so which evolution cannot account for; the question is, are there any such things, not whether it is possible for there to be those things. So i’d say it certainly could rely on those kinds of arguments, but it isn’t guranteed.
And broader than evolution too, more like science in general (being predicative, empirical, etc). Abiogenesis for example isn’t really within the realm of evolution (is it?) but is an area science can/should have hypotheses / theories around.
That nit-pick aside, yes, it becomes a question of determining between:
[ol]
[li]Things science cannot answer.[/li][li]Things that aren’t understood yet (by experts in the area).[/li][li]Things that this individual doesn’t understand.[/li][/ol] #1 is questions of philosophy that are outside of the realms of evidence and experiment - at least as we understand them at the moment.
#2 are areas where our technology may not be good enough yet, or where the mechanisms aren’t fully understood. This is the traditional “god of the gaps” area – new technologies and techniques, or just ideas can reveal something new and another piece of area #2 becomes understood, or at least testable and subject to evidence and experiment.
#3 is just arguing from ignorance.
The problem – as I understand it – with ID (in the US at least) is that in order to get away from it being religion (#1) it must use #2 (and #3 if it can get away with it) to advance its proponents’ agenda; forcing it into a god of the gaps area.
Specifically, Michael Behe’s “irreducible complexity” version of ID is a God of the Gaps argument. Any time he cannot come up with the imagination to consider an alternative explanation for the method by which a particular evolutionary event occurred, he throws it over to an “Intelligent Designer.” Unfortunately for Behe, several of his “gaps” have already been demonstrated to have been in error.
On the other hand, Phillip Johnson, who is sometimes credited with having begun the ID movement, has no scientific background and simply refuses to believe that evolution can take place because it conflicts with his desire to understand how the world works. His philosophical arguments, (he was a law professor), have more to do with attacking the supposed atheism of Evolution than any actual argument based on science.
William Denbski is another who feels the need to confuse his religious beliefs with science and generally makes silly errors in the proposal of mathematics in regards to statistical analysis for his odd claims against evolutionary theory.
Neither Johnson nor Dembski are actually engaged in a “god of the gaps” fallacy, finding different errors in which to engage in their proposals.
Dembski’s specified complexity argument reminds me a lot of Fred Hoyle’s conclusion that bio-materials showed the hallmarks of intelligent design because their inherent order and complexity was too great to have occurred by chance.
Although this perhaps isn’t quite a clear a “god of the gaps” argument as Behe’s “irreducible complexity” it does seem (IMO) to be an argument from personal incredulity, rather than one based on factual problems or philosophical issues – and thus just a variant of “I can’t imagine it, therefore ID”.
Miller–Urey showed that the fundamental building blocks of life arise pretty quickly (and repeatedly), and although there is a big step from there to, say, replicating RNA, it rather undermines Hoyle’s and Dembski’s argument.
(On the other hand if we give consider Hoyle’s objection to be more in the anthropic area – that the unlikelihood of the universe we observe being good for us points to a designer – then we are into an area of philosophy that is probably beyond measurable science).
Johnson’s objections – yeah, they’re not the same thing. He pretty much seems to want to redefine science to be whatever he needs it to be to approve his preconceived notions of the world, and is willing to reject anything that doesn’t fit.
It’s not a trait limited to ID. There are plenty of books about, for example, how it’s impossible for ancient Egyptians/Mayans/Incas to had built what they built, so of course it was aliens from outer space that used the traction beams and lasers from their flying saucers to build the piram… landing beacons or whatnot.
It really shows a complete lack of imagination and mental laziness from the people that advance such propositions (of course there are the relatively smart ones that do it for the money only)
I dunno. I always thought that intelligent design was a reasonable hypothesis. Where it fails is in finding something so irreducibly complex as to defy evolution. So, it’s not the hypothesis that is faulty, it’s the data used to support it, and the conclusion it used to imply.
It seems to me that if you can find something that could not occur by unplanned processes than the only other possibility is a planned process. This would not prove God, per se, only an intelligent planning process, which is another flaw, as intelligent design would not imply a creator, only a device whereby an organism evolved intelligently.
I think Greg Bear wrote a sci-fi book positing such a process. Darwin’s Radio. His plot was: we have a lot of junk DNA that we don’t know what it does. Seems hasty to assume it does nothing. Maybe it works like a computer and designs the next step in evolution in a purpose built fashion.
Such a Lamarckian device could be evolved, as any entity that could direct its evolution by planning would have a significant advantage in terms of speed of adaptability (in terms of number of generations) over an entity that had to rely solely on random mutation for improvement. It seems to me that even a vanishingly small ability of an organism to direct its mutations would be such a significant advantage that I’m surprised we haven’t found one that does so.
I think we may end up finding onesuch, even though it seems implausible due to the setup of our genetics which seems to prevent the benefit of experience of an organism from being passed on to the next generation by any other method than reproductive success.
What really gets their panties in a wad (him and the Discovery Institute) is materialism. They hate hate hate the fact that science is explaining our world without the need for God. They don’t attack just evolution; they also go after brain science. Last year I heard on their podcast that they view neuroplasticity (that the brain and its thoughts can have physical effects on the structure of the brain) as proof that there’s more to consciousness than just a material brain. I heard two or three shows on that topic but never figured out how they made the jump from neuroplasticity to proof of a non-physical soul. They just asserted it.
It’s not a hypothesis, because you can’t test it in a way to falsify it. It seems to me that ID is an attempt to falsify evolution by mutation and natural selection. But its attempts have thus far all failed.
Well, discovering the fossils of a trilobite and a dinosaur in the same geological strata would be a good start.
“Evolution is both a fact and a theory. Biologists consider the existence of evolution to be a fact in much the same way that physicists do so for gravity”
-Talkorigins.
But how could one ever be sure that something is so irreducibly complex that it defies evolution? Doesn’t it always boil down to someone thinking “I personally can’t see how it can happen”? Or can there actually be a way to rigorously prove something is irreducibly complex, and not just difficult to understand how it could have happened by natural selection?
My gut feel is that even if ID were correct, one wouldn’t be able to be sure that some biological feature is actually irreducibly complex, and didn’t simply occur by some natural evolutionary sequence that we haven’t imagined yet.
Not that example precisely, but doesn’t that stuff happen from time to time? There’s even a name for it, OOPART (Out of Place Artifacts?) An anomaly doesn’t disprove a good theory.
Good example, since physicists really can’t define gravity. They can describe it but they really can’t say what it is, nor can it be distinguished from centrifugal force, hence the search for the Higgs bosun.
Anyhow, besides the point. I’m not a big proponent of ID. It just seems to me not such a total boner of an idea like the missing day, or Noah’s flood burying the bones, and I could accept a biologically based intelligent design mechanism hitherto undiscovered to science much more easily than I can God making the world “poof” 6000 years ago and deliberately hiding the evidence.
Most ID is wishful thinking and an emotional defensive mechanism in my view. Many people aren’t comfortable with accepting what evolution by natural selection actually means. It means there is no true purpose of life except to survive, and that the process of survival is totally amoral. Terror, horror, depression, pain, etc. are all tools invented by natural selection to control our behavior and make us avoid activities and events that threaten our social status and biological survival. Accepting that is pretty hard for a lot of people.
Its more comforting to believe there is some higher, more benign purpose in life (other than survival and reproduction), that evil emotions and situations are an aberration (and not fundamentally built into our existence as a way to make us avoid destructive situations) and that there is a protective force watching over you.
Of course, evolution can also be a good thing from a moral perspective. W/o the pain and misery in the world (and the desire to protect ourselves and those who are useful to our biological survival from it) we never would’ve evolved the capacity for love, compassion, forgiveness, empathy, etc.
If you create an environment where compassion and forgiveness provide an evolutionary advantage, then those are the traits that will be selected for.
Evolution isn’t a hypothesis; it’s a fact. It can and has been seen in action. Falsifying it at this point would be like falsifying gravity; you’d have to explain away a huge amount of evidence. You’d pretty much be forced into “we are all in the Matrix” territory; a complete denial of apparent reality.
Well, actually, you can make the distinction. A dropped object will behave differently in a gravity field than it would in a spinning spaceship that seeks to simulate gravity with centrifugal force.
Similarly, a person standing in an elevator car on Earth and one standing in an elevator car accelerating through space at 9.8 m/s[sup]2[/sup] might feel the same, but there’s a simple test (albeit requiring some exceptionally sensitive equipment) that the person can do to determine his exact situation.
