Detecting Design in the Natural Sciences

I used wikipedia because I thought it explained it best. But, the information isn't wikipedia information. It's available in many other places, just not as well said.

As for the distinction between book v. web data...

It's my opinion web info is more up to date. The fact it's in a book doesn't make it true. Everything should be questioned, even if it's in black and white on paper.

Homo Sapiens is simply the latest stage of humans, barely 100,000 years old. That's maybe five thousand generations at most - not long by evolutionary standards.

If you step back just a little further and include hominids, about five million years ago or perhaps a quarter million generations, now there's some timescale over which to see some evolutionary effects. At about this time human and chimpanzee ancestors diverged, according to fossils, DNA studies and so forth.



The thing with 'survival of the fittest' is that it really means 'survival of those who produce lots of offspring, who then live to produce more, &c.'

So if you have a feature that works *phenomenally well* (such as the male organ) - there's not a lot of selective pressure on its function. People are far more likely to die off because of immunity issues, for instance.

Liberally applied, even a not-so-magnificent male organ is quite capable of propagating quite a number of offspring.

Of course, there are other selection pressures on male and female traits - and a peculiarly human trait is to have sexual organs that are (by weight) a far larger proportion of the body mass than in other primates.

Male and female choice are fairly strong selectors - and in fact, here we may have some real evidence of a kind of intelligent design!

By pervy humans, of course.

When both sexes choose to mate with those having clearly defined, larger sexual organs over hundreds of thousands of years - *we* are essentially choosing the design of our offspring, both male and female. Using selective pressure as the means to do it.

So I have to agree, there was some 'design' in the evolutionary process, if only by the preferences (no matter how strange) of the creatures evolving, themselves.

Good god that was long. er... I mean, there is no god. Only dust, dust I tell you!

Anyway, I think I can reduce you're entire point to a few sentences.

Evolution is the Method applied to the materials in god'ss four part process. Evolution can't be a method you say? Not so, a method can be anything that gets you the results you desire. Computer scientists are starting to use basic forms of evolution to generate data. The buzzwords are Genetic Algorithms.

If you didn't want to rehash arguments already discussed, you might want to finish those previously started. It seems you just let them drop to page 2 and started a new thread.

Here, let me link them for you.

First we have the one discussing the various proofs of evolution and disproofs of ID:
/112/46/79206/2.html

And second we have the one discussing a legal decision based on a lot of precedent, evidence, and expert testimony. Did you read the judgement yet?
/112/1b/78525/13.html#post818476

Further you have quoted Dembski, who in the past has stated that ID is a "ground clearing operation" to allow Christianity to have serious consideration and "Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory but always a completion". So his credibility is right out the window as far as ID not being based on the christian religion. Behe, another major proponent of ID, is also quoted that the "plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God". So it is safe to say that the biggest people pushing this "theory" are just religious activists (or people fooled by them). But you'd known that already if you had read the judgement.

1.
Science doesn't deal in proof. There was no thread that proves macro-evolution. The evidence posted were equally supporting ID.

2.
I read it, and am further convinced the judge ignored the scientific points made because he associated those arguing for ID as religious, with an agenda.

3.
It's a logical fallacy to ignore an argument based on who makes it.

"Like the other ad hominem fallacies, the circumstantial ad hominem is a very weak way to make a case. As a consequence, it is reasonable to conclude that someone who offers it probably doesn't have a very strong position to begin with. Here are some examples of this sort of reasoning:

2. Evolutionary biology is something promoted by materialistic, atheistic, Secular Humanists in our schools in order to undermine Christianity.

3. The President is in favor of drilling for more oil - but since he has made lots of money from oil and has many friends in the oil industry, his reasons for more drilling must be personal rather than objective.

In both of these examples, some position or idea (evolution, drilling more oil) is criticized based upon the sorts of people who believe them (atheists, people who make money from oil). The ideas themselves aren't touched in any way - indeed, there might be very good reasons for any of those positions, regardless of who else believes them. "

Lastly, the other threads are open if you wish to continue them.

And a materialistic atheistic secular humanist would accuse said christian of being superstitious, weak, and on a power trip to undermine the spread of knowledge.

They're both wrong. Scientists promote biology because they think it's right. Likewise for the ID supporters. The people who make the above two statements are both closed minded and as such are both pots calling kettles black . As far as the judge's ruling, well, personally I think the goal of all legislation should be to allow both pionts of view to be freely and readily available to all parties along with preventing one individual's bias from being applied to what another individual can study. Idealistic I know, but setting your sights high might mean you fail, but achieve more than what you would have judged success had you lowered your sights.

No.

Evolution tinkers; it isn't intelligent. (It's not precisely random, either; it's about as random as the people who survived the sinking of the Titanic probably also being the ones closest to the lifeboats.)

So, while the human pain system is indeed a pain, it doesn't actually decrease the chances of an given human to reproduce. This may seem counterintuitive until you consider that, evolutionarily speaking, a mother cat who eats her kittens is a failure no matter how long that cat lives; a cat who dies saving her kittens is a success. Ditto with all those other little flaws - they make sense if we evolved from preceding species, because while they're all stupid little annoyances, none of them actually exert a significant survival pressure. Whereas if we were designed, unless the designer is an idiot or a sadist, it seems to be rather puzzling to me.

As a curious aside, what if ID were true?

The next question would be: why are things designed the way they are?

In that case, the evidence for the intelligent designer having a sick sense of humour is overwhelming.

Even if you buy into an Evil Presence lurking about... it just takes the argument one level higher.

I won't even start in again with the spiders and praying mantises.

That may be so, but it doesn't spare you from being a *edited* fundamentalist troll, alas.

If only this were true. Scientists use science because it works. ID proponents support ID because they imagine that science mucks up their superstitions. The agenda are anything but symmetric.

Spiders and praying mantises are very cool.

heh, personally I fall on the scientist side, but what do you mean by works? Explains the observed behavior? heh, so does ID technically since both evolution and ID are theories specifically developed to explain observation.

This is way too long to read and there is a glaring error in the first paragraph so I will limit my comments to that.



Being as I have been a designer pretty much all my life, I can state with great authority that this is not "uncontroversial" as a description of the design process.

This is indeed the way some designers design things, but by no means the only way. It is also not my way.

The very fact that this person takes this as the foundation of the following arguments, and (rather haughtily), asserts that this is just something that is a "given" that no one would in essence dissagree with, is an indication of their thought processes. (Hint: there is a bias involved).

I detect a Christian bias in this "four point method."

1) purpose (The purpose or meaning of life being of endless interest to Christians)
2) plan ("God's plan for us", being again a central topic in the Bible)
3) specifications (There is a right way and a wrong way for things/people to be)
4) assembly (God doesn't have to be there for this bit, which is a definite nod to ID)

If his idea of what constitutes design procedures are incorrect, please take the extra step and explain the correct procedure for design, instead of just saying his way is wrong.

hmm... I would define my Creative process as:

1.Idea
2.Brainstorm about details
3.Sticking appropriate pieces together until what I have matches the idea (maybe never ending).

So essentially, I exchanged purpose for idea, and lumped plan and specifications into brainstorm. His argument was for ID and therefore biased by definition . Nothing wrong with that, sort of the point.

Now that's not the only way to create. It's possible to leave out idea, or to not have it be the first step. It's also possible to move or leave out step 2. It's even possible to not ever actually construct your idea out of material. The irony here is when you argue the definition and layout of creative process you are actually making the foundations of ID more flexible and therefore strengthening it as a valid argument . At least, semantically.

You are blatently wrong on all points in this. You have been provided evidence and proof of evolution, macro and micro. ID does not provide evidence of ID, because evolutionary evidence contradicts ID in the position that a designer must have had a hand in continuing parts of the evolutionary processes.



You have obviously not read it. You fill find statements by the major researchers/supportors and the editors of the 'textbook' for ID. One of these also happens to be Dembski which you quote in this very thread. He states that he has a religious agenda. I'm not sure how obvious you can get that blatently stating you have a religious agenda, but there it is. Further, if you go into the details you will see the enormous amount of other evidence that supports the finding that ID is not science. It is not that the judge ignored scientific points of ID, it is that there are none.



I agree, I could attack you for having a religious agenda, of which I little to no proof, or I can do what I have been doing, providing real evidence and facts. Please provide some of your own evidence to support your own arguement. It is certainly not an ad hominem to point out someone has admitted to an agenda. I even quoted Dembski and Behe admitting they both have Christian agendas in promoting and research ID rather than scientific purposes in mind.

To the same tune, I believe you are implying I have some kind of secular humanist materialist atheistic agenda?

Admitting a belief in no way undermines the points a person makes. I don't assume your points are wrong based on your belief system. I assume they are wrong because they rely on a logical fallacy.

I quoted a website that used those examples, the site is not pro-ID. It used the example of evolution, that wasn't intended as a swipe at your beliefs.

Your procedure is identical to his. Except you leave out the "blueprint" stage. This is the only one you leave out...

"3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions."

heh, well the point I was trying to make is that even though I consider myself part of the scientist side, my creative process was very similar or identical to the one labeled biased in favor of the ID theory.

You are of course welcome to debate my standing as far as the side I'm not. I assure you though I am not christian, and I consider the existance of a designer a remote possibility at best.

Onward Christian soldiers, eh? Careful, your bias is showing. Evolutionary biology is not atheistic, and to claim it is puts up a giant red flag and makes it crystal clear that your interest in promoting ID is religious and nothing else. Science isn't anti-god. It simply deals in the natural world, not the supernatural. Secularism is neutral with respect to religion. It promotes neither religion or atheism. You've been indoctrinated into believing that anything not specifically religious is anti-religious. That kind of black and white, us vs. them thinking isn't productive, unless you're trying to be a demagogue.

Brother Chip,

If you read that post, you will see I was quoting a website, it was an example the site used to make the point.

This is the link to the website..

http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/skepticism/blfaq_fall_circumstantial.htm

You will notice, it's not a Christian site.

I meant that science is the most productive means of explaining and exploiting nature for our benefit that has yet been discovered. Look at medicine, agriculture, electronics, ecology, epidemiology, weather forecasting for examples of hard won knowlege that have improved life for most humans and will continue to do so.

Science is as much an appoach as a corpus which has the very useful property that things learned here can generate reasonable predecticions about what is happening over there. Of course, those predictions need to be tested before they can be put to use, but they are either confirmed or rejected as the evidence warrants.

This is why ID scares me as it seeks to undermine evolution narrowly but has the potential to undermine science more broadly. Personallly, I prefer a world without childbed fever, cholera, surprise hurricanes, potato famines and so forth. Were it not for the scientific method, we'd still be subject to these and the graveyards would be as full of week-old remnants as they were a few hundred years ago.

From the proposition "god exists" you can derive absolutely no predictions about how the universe operates. From the pretty well confirmed "children raised under this sort of privation are significantly more likely to be injurious to others and here is why such adaptations to circumstance were likely selected for" you can derive quite a bit of preventative measures (e.g. public policy, social programs, interventions, etc.) which reduce aggregate suffering in the world.

That's part of what I mean by "works".

Is this like the eleventeenth time you've tried to establish that the ID proponents are remotely qualified to speak cogently on the subject of evolution? They aren't; they only wish to fool people into thinking they are.

I can title myself "Queen of England" if it so pleases me, but insofar as a few million Brits and the UN (among others) would disagree, it really is not an accurate description. I could claim that they are all mistaken, but in the end, they are correct and I'm not.

Science and its practitioners don't become so by declaring themselves such, they do so after demonstrating that they can understand the method and use it in accordance with centuries of well scrutinized practice. Those who do otherwise are known as "cranks".

And "Brother Chip"? Did you ordain him as a monk or sumptin or was that mere condescesion?

Okay show us some evidence that such a process has occurred in biological evolution. I'm not asking for the same old, "it's so complicated it has to be designed" silliness. Just some evidence, separate from the "designed" life-form, that indicates such a process was followed.




See, there should be some evidence that such a process happens in biological evolution. We have the oven that was used to bake the cake. We have the roads and the materials used to build the car. Show us evidence of such things in "intelligent" design.





Notice the first sentence of the second paragraph quoted above. In it the author makes a completely unsupported claim. He says that in biology a different type of causal story is required. Is it? Now, look back at the first paragraph quoted above, the idea that if something is similar to something else that we know was designed we can infer that it too was designed. An interesting claim, but in the field of biology, is it applicable? What objects designed by man (as the only known designer) are similar to biological life forms? Are there any? On the organism level are there any human created objects that are similar to biological organisms? No. How about on the organ level? Have humans created objects that are similar to kidneys or lungs, not just in shape, but function? Remember, the standard here is as similar as two pieces of paper with writing on them. So, the answer would also be no. The same goes for objects on the cellular level.





The second sentence in the second paragraph quoted above is significant. In it the author attempts to show that "biology" has failed to consider design as a possible explanation of biological diversity. After all, we use all three types of explanation in ordinary life right? So why doesn't the biological community? The simple answer is, they did. They looked at the evidence, formulated hypotheses, tested them, formulated theories and said, chance mutations are sufficient reason for biological evolution. To come along later and say they didn't consider design is untrue.




Actually, the answers to both questions is Yes. If the author feels he needn't support his statement, then I'm sure the supporters of ID won't require me to support mine either.





So scientists are afraid to advocate design because Kepler, who died over two centuries before Darwin published "The Origin of Species" was wrong about the origins of the craters on the moon? That's ludicrous. The history of science is full of ideas that were later shown to be wrong. The idea that scientists are so afraid of failure that they won't research ideas isn't supported by the evidence. In fact, the changes in scientific theories show that scientists are not afraid to make mistakes. Remember the margarine is good for you, wait no, it's bad for you, campaigns?




If ID claims, as the author states, that these causes are empirically detectable, then why hasn't anyone detected them? Show us the data.




First off, we shouldn't base our understanding of the natural world on a science-fiction movie. Otherwise we'd all be wondering when we'd be able to beam up to the Enterprise. That said, what the author leaves out of the story is that the fictional scientists still had to prove their position. They had to follow the evidence to it's conclusion and make contact with the E.T.'s. And that is something the proponents of ID don't even attempt. They skillfully avoid all mention of contacting the Designer. Jodie Foster had to contact her fictional aliens to prove that the code was "intelligently" designed. Shouldn't the ID'ers be expected to do the same? Or are we just talking science-fiction here?





I'm not sure if Kevn left out something here, but, the summary presented above, doesn't at all summarize what the author has said. The only examples of specified complexity the author gave us were in human sciences. In archaeology and cryptology we know the objects studied were created by human beings. Random number generation is really an oxymoron, it isn't random, and it too is a creation of human beings. The search for ET's is a search for designers, therefore, of course, you would search for designed objects. In the material presented above, the author doesn't once show us an example of specified complexity in biology.





Actually we don't. We don't know if the archer fired many arrows in random directions and some hit the bull's eyes and most didn't. You can't just look at the arrows in the bulls eye, you have to look for arrows in other places too. That is the fundamental flaw with ID. ID'ers take the bulls eyes and connect them to their concept of a Designer, without checking the field for arrows that missed. They then conclude that this Designer chose to hit the targets. Did he/she? We don't really know. We do know that evolution is full of arrows that missed the target. Species that died out, individuals with fatal mutations.





Yes, the fictional astronomers believed the radio signals were from ET's. Why? Is there evidence of other intelligent life forms using radio signals for communication? Yes. We do it all the time. It's like the example the author gave about writing on scraps of paper. But what about the statement "Specified complexity is the characteristic trademark or signature of intelligence."? If Intelligent Beings create "specified" complexity, isn't it logical to claim that any example of "specified" complexity was created by one or more intelligent Beings? No. Not at all. It's a logical fallacy. Dell makes computers. This is a computer. Would it be logical to come to the conclusion that Dell made this computer? No. ID'ers would have to show that "specified" complexity cannot arise from random forces. Or, better yet, introduce us to the Designer. Of course, they would also have to give us an objective definition of "specified" complexity.





Again, the author has not shown that "only intelligent causation gives rise to specified complexity." He has only given us examples where it has, examples where we knew beforehand that intelligent beings were involved. He has offered no evidence that supports his claim that it cannot arise randomly.





The author states above, "...complex specified information (or specified complexity) becomes a reliable indicator of intelligent causation" but has offered no proof that this is so. For it to be a reliable indicator he would have to show that "specified" complexity could only arise due to the actions of a Designer. He hasn't shown this. He has only given us a few examples where it was the case, but, again, hasn't offered any evidence that it couldn't happen otherwise.





As for the flagellum, the biologist claims "that the Darwinian mechanism is in principle incapable of generating such irreducibly complex systems." But, again, doesn't say why this is the case. And, again, the author has not given us a single example of "empirical detectability" of intelligent design in objects that we didn't already know were designed.



The first sentence quoted above can be summarized simply as "Since we can't explain it, someone must have done it." That's absurd. A three year old can't explain thunder, but that doesn't mean "Angels are bowling" is an adequate theory.

The author has made two fundamental logical mistakes.

1)The idea that intelligent beings create "specified" complexity" and therefore all "specified" complexity must therefore be created by intelligent beings.

2)The idea that "specified" complexity found in objects known to have been created by intelligent beings is the same, or sufficiently similar to, the "specified" complexity found in biology.

The first mistake is the most obvious, but the second is the more important of the two, in my opinion. I would postulate that biological systems are much more complex than anything known to have been created by intelligent beings. Orders of magnitude more complex. Simply put, Biology is much more complex than Technology. So much more complex that the two cannot be usefully compared. A flagellum is much, much more complex that an oar. Just because the oar was designed and created, doesn't mean the flagellum was. The two are so completely dissimilar in form that, even though they have similar functions, they cannot be usefully compared.

Note to anyone who debates with me in the future. The key to winning said debate is writing or speaking a lot. My ADD will kick in and I'll be unable to follow the point to its conclusion and thereby preventing me from making my response.