NeoDarwinism, PostDarwinism, The Pope, and Other Dangerous Ideas
Dean
The Vatican has issued a strong condemnation of creationists. In the meantime, others contemplate a Vise Strategy.
Missing from it all is a series of voices who note that much of what passes for Darwinism today--what is known as "Neo-Darwinism" to its critics--has simply become dogmatic and reactionary. The late Stephen Jay Gould stated flatly, on more than one occasion, that mutation and natural selection alone are insufficient to explain life's diversity. He was a dedicated and passionate opponent of creationism, yet he never advocated much of what today's Neo-Darwinists insist must be so. Today, of the same concept (that natural selection and random mutation alone can explain all life's diversity), the noted biologist Lynn Margulis says, "It is totally wrong. It's wrong like infectious medicine was wrong before Pasteur. It's wrong like phrenology is wrong. Every major tenet of it is wrong." She has even recently called the Neo-Darwinists intellectual bullies.
I can certainly say I've seen plenty of that bullying. It's also hard not to notice how much of what is peddled as Darwinism has become nonfalsifiable: absolutely everything we see is given as proof that the theory is correct, with every new development automatically assigned to the theory, and everything we don't understand said to be supported by the theory anyway, just in ways we don't understand yet. How is that falsifiable? What are you testing against? What are you predicting, besides "everything we see will fit with the theory?" What possibility have you left open for any other force or explanation or hypothesis? King gene rules all, discussion over?
Professor Don Jewett has a good article which relates to this: What's Wrong With Single Hypotheses. He's not talking about Neo-Darwinism per se, but a growing tendency in multiple fields to accept one hypothesis and one only--and the pitfalls that necessarily arise from that.
After you're done with that, you can read more about the fascinating Postdarwinists from this piece by Kevin Kelly. You might also be interested in reading some about the fascinating James Lovelock's work.
All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:
- Vatican Science
- The Woodstock of Evolution
- Where it belongs...
- From the Mailbag: Dover School Board Out?
- NeoDarwinism, PostDarwinism, The Pope, and Other Dangerous Ideas
- Some Good Arguments, Some Missing the Point, and Much Flaming Abuse, Invective, and Ad Hominem Fun...
- Bring It? Okay, It's Been Brought
- More Discussion
- A Voice of Sanity on Intelligent Design
a) Bullies are bad. They should be called out on it.
b) Unfalsifiable claims are unscientific. When they are made in the context of evolutionary theory, the people making the claim should be called out on it. (I wish those who say that much of what's currently claimed is unfalsifiable would be more specific, though.)
c) There are things we don't understand about evolution. If another theory comes along that explains how evolution works better than natural selection in a testable fashion, it should be given everyone's utmost attention. It should be noted here that there is a difference between theories about how evolution happened and discussions of *whether* it happened. Scientists are primarily debating how it happened, ID'ers seem to be on the fence about whether they're debating 'how' or 'whether'.
One can agree with you on every single one of those points, and still think presenting _Of Pandas and People_ in the schools is ridiculous. (I feel even more strongly about this now that I've read the thing.) Until ID can show it performs better than natural selection at predicting the fossil and genetic evidence, it isn't a solution to any of the problems you mention. "Problems with natural selection as the only explanation for evolution" + "sometimes people are mean" != "support for intelligent design".
Ya'll really must be quakin' in your boots if you're that pissed, that easily, that ANY idea against the ones you believe the education police should shove down the throats of every schoolchild, reguardless of socity's choices in the matter. But I'm sure is has nothing to do with the fact you don't have the answers and won't dare be questioned by us lowely, 'IGNORANT' folk. We should just accept the 'knowledge' and 'education' of our superiors without question.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Science is about to face a very nasty fight...and it's brought it all on itself. I'm gonna go get some iced tea and popcorn, and settle in for the show, thanks!
Dang science anyway.
I suppose it depends on the meaning of "it". :-)
It seems to me that there are several claims made about evolution:
1. Evolution is the cause of at least some species diversity.
2. Evolution is the cause of all species diversity.
3. Evolution is the cause of no species diversity.
Apparently, [1] is not seriously debated any more, at least not on scientific grounds, putting [3] outside the realm of serious science. (Without getting into it, I'd suggest that [3] is not a serious religious position either, given the definition of evolution Elizabeth seems to be using.) The ID debate, from what I've seen of Dembski and other ID things I've read, is partially about the truth of [2], as well as theories about the source of non-evolutionary species diversity.
The question I have is: is [2] a scientific claim?
I'm not sure it is. It's not testable, except in a very weak form. It doesn't seem to have any predictive power that is not derivative from [1]. Nor can it be proven scientifically. In fact, "proving" it seems to amount to removing it from the realm of science from a Popperian point of view, since it become unfalsifiable once proven by virtue of its absolutism. (Of course, this may be as much Popper's fault as it is evolution's.)
The only reason to consider it science is to take Kuhn to extremes, and say that it's science by virtue of being the current reigning paradigm among scientists. That way lies irrationality, though, so I don't consider it persuasive.
I've floated the hypothesis before that ID and evolution are joined at the hip; either both must be science, or neither can be. Now, I'm thinking that's not quite right, largely because "evolution" means so many different things. The more accurate version would be to deny that [2] is scientific.
This doesn't mean the IDers are right; their denial of [2] is accompanied by a number of positive assertions, which are themselves open to scrutiny. Nor do I want to endorse any particular curriculum in science classes. But all the fulmination about ID in science classes seems to be patent nonsense if [2] is not scientific.
We all muddle these terms a lot, so here's how I was using them.
By 'whether evolution happened', I mean whether it's true that all living organisms today are of common descent. To say that evolution happened is to say that life on earth began as single-celled organisms and all of the creatures we see are descendants of those organisms. This is the part that most conventional scientists consider to be simply factual. It's quite falsifiable if one is limited to invoking natural mechanisms. (Nothing is strictly falsifiable if one of the available hypotheses involves entities with Godlike powers.)
'How evolution happened' touches on the mechanism of the diversification of species, and amongst conventional scientists this is where there's a lot more argument. I don't think anyone would phrase it as your (2), because even one example of a new species deliberately created by humans - through genetic engineering for example - would make it wrong. I think it would probably be phrased as 'natural selection (combined with gene flow etc.) is the primary source of species diversity and is adequate to explain all spontaneous instances of speciation'. It's hard to think of a single piece of evidence which would falsify it in one blow, but lots of things could reduce the goodness of fit between the theory and the evidence to the point that most scientists would consider it disproven. Indeed, some already think it's happened (Lynn Margulis for one). The primary problem with the theory is the assumed slow rate of change, versus the fast emergence of new species in the fossil record. SJG has tried to monkey with the theory so that natural selection can produce new species quickly, but many are unconvinced. The field is essentially waiting for a better idea right now.
The problem with ID is that even if one doesn't hew to a strict falsification standard, it doesn't seem to me that anything at all could be considered counterevidence to it. Fitting it into your list, the ID claim would be something like, "there is some species diversity unexplanable by natural mechanisms" (not just natural selection). Since they're not proposing a specific alternative mechanism (aside from saying it was 'intelligent'), how do we look for evidence for or against?
...Man, how can we explain him!?!
That would correspond with [2 prime] being a scientific claim. ([2 prime] being your adjustment of my [2].)
We agree that [2] is not scientific, but you think [2 prime] is not just science, but good science. I'll have to think about that, since part of your improvement is the removal of the dogmatic assertion. I think I can stipulate it for now.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem clear to me that ID people would disagree with [2 prime]. That design happens does not mean that there's more than one tree of descent in living things.
Fitting it into your list, the ID claim would be something like, "there is some species diversity unexplanable by natural mechanisms" (not just natural selection). Since they're not proposing a specific alternative mechanism (aside from saying it was 'intelligent'), how do we look for evidence for or against?
I thought the ID people had general criteria for detecting design. If they don't, I'd agree that they have a problem.
The ID claim (as you characterize it) is a direct contradiction to [2]. This would seem to imply that it cannot be scientific, since [2] cannot be.
I wonder, though, if you're making the ID claim more strongly than they would. It seems that there's no question that currently known natural mechanisms don't explain species diversity. If some form of intelligence can be detected (via the criteria they lay out) in the gaps natural selection can't fill, must that be unnatural intelligence?
The thesis that all life on earth has a common descent strikes me as implausible itself, and unsupportable from evidence. How do we not know that whatever happened to bring life to earth didn't happen more than once? How, indeed, could we know such a thing?
The relationship between humans and apes is a lot more plausible than the relationship between humans and, say, extremeophiles at volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.
Actually, they've proposed specific systems, such as the bacterial flagellum, that they contend are not susceptable to Darwinian mechanims. So one need only demonstrate that they are to falsify their claims.
Here's one: There is a dogmatic claim that's been made by many in recent back-and-forths here: natural selection and random mutation are enough to explain all of life's diversity. Numerous evolutionists admit this is almost certainly horsesh*t, because the fossil record alone renders it extremely unlikely: the changes we see over time involve what appear to be long periods of relative stability, then sudden explosions where all sorts of lifeforms disappear and all sorts of new ones reappear in what is practically the blink of an eye. Gould called this "punctuated equilibrium," and it used to be fairly uncontroversial. Indeed, I was certain it was uncontroversial until a group of rabid anti-ID opponents (such as PZ Myers and Ed over at the "Dispatches from the Culture Wars" and The Commissar and others) started acting like this was some sort of heresy and treating me like a dangerous lunatic and a drooling moron for pointing it out.
We've gone over and over the entire leap from pre-biotic to biotic, wherein some very pertinent and fair questions (to my mind) were treated as if they were offensive "have you stopped beating your wife" questions. The truth is that we have nothing but a bunch of wild-ass guesses on that, none of which are currently falsifiable by any tests we have available. That, therefore, is not a theory, it's a hypothesis at best until we have more evidence.
So it's unfalsifiable AND it's falsified? This claim seems inconsistent.
I don't remember PE all that clearly, but my memory of it wasn't that it was a separate mechanism distinct from natural selection, but rather proposed ways in which standard natural selection mechanisms could produce changes quickly, rather than in the slow, gradual way proposed by Darwin. PE isn't a challenge to the overall theory of evolution natural selection, just a challenge to the slow-gradual part of it. I'm not sure if it's true, but it's not a falsification of anything.
Abiogenesis isn't synonymous with evolution, so the second point isn't relevant.
The thesis that all life on earth has a common descent strikes me as implausible itself, and unsupportable from evidence. How do we not know that whatever happened to bring life to earth didn't happen more than once? How, indeed, could we know such a thing?
I don't think anyone's making an absolute claim that life didn't happen more than once, just a claim that all the life we see now is the product of one single such occurrence. If you think this isn't true, then you sort of have to explain why every single organism we know of, from extremophiles to us, uses DNA in exactly the same way.
When Darwin first made the prediction of common descent, it was possible that it would have been falsified by the discovery that biochemically, life on Earth uses a wildly disparate grab-bag of mechanisms. The fact that everything uses DNA as its code is extremely strong evidence for evolution, assuming natural mechanisms.
http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html
I can't see how we could ever prove that a given structure did evolve, but we can give a convincing account of how it could. I can't imagine an account more exhaustive than Matzke's.
So it's unfalsifiable AND it's falsified? This claim seems inconsistent.
Good point. Let me clarify:
A goodly number of evolutionary biologists--including Gould--have made it clear that there's much reason to debate the idea that natural selection and random mutation by themselves are enough to explain what we see in the evolutionary record. There's reason there's debate on this point: it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you look at the fossil record. We see too many long periods of relatively static species, followed by sudden explosions of new species. No one's got a mechanism that would explain why mutation and natural selection by themselves can account for that.
This doesn't mean scientists buy into creationism or ID or any of that (Gould certainly did not). A lot of creationists leap on that argument in defense of their own ideas but that's not proof they're right. On the other hand, calmly admitting a problem in current evolutionary understanding seems entirely sensible.
Punctuated Equilibrium is not a predictive theory so far as I can see so much as descriptive of a problem. The explanations I'm aware of for it are basically just guesses, not falsifiable hypotheses. Note that I may be wrong on that, it's been a few years and it's entirely possible that someone's come up with a testable prediction that explains it. So far as I know, though, that's still one of the big gaps in our understanding.
He said nothing of the sort. Ever.
I'm left confused. So which is the unfalsifiable claim?
This is a good example of what I mean when I say that certain Neo-Darwinists are as bad as the worst of the creationists. I mean, Pixy, how many of Gould's books have you read? I've read enough to not only know he said it on more than one occasion, but that there's nothing particularly remarkable about the statement--and that it's not in any way a refutation of anything else he wrote.
Here, for example, we have Gould on the stand and sworn in as a witness in MacLean v. Arkansas (documentation here.)
A. But it has to be real evidence, it can't just someone's say so. Yes, that's a testable claim, and it's been tested and found false. If any new evidence came around, one would discuss it. But I am aware of none.
Q. If there is scientific evidence on the insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about I think you said something to the effect of all living kinds from a single organism, do you think that should be discussed in a public school science classroom?
A. That to me is one of the ways in which the bill is very poorly written, because to me it is not part of creation-science to claim the insufficiency of mutation and natural selection. I think most evolutionists think that mutation and natural selection are insufficient. I happen in my own personal views think they are a little more insufficient than other people. But even the most orthodox Darwinians, Mr. Ayala, would argue that genetic drift plays some role. To me that's an example of how the bill is badly written. For purposes of convenience, I think that we can refer to it as creation-science, and that's what the bill speaks of. I think it might be a bit clearer.
That's Gould.
He's made several similar statements in his writings. They are sometimes taken out of context by creationists as proof that the entire concept of Darwinian evolution is flawed, but that's horse manure. That would, as the court rightly noted, be an incomplete negative generalization about Darwinian Evolution: yes, it's generally acknowledged to be insufficient, but that doesn't mean the majority of the scientific evidence doesn't support natural selection or evolution of species.
Do you want me to dig through my library and find a book reference or two from Gould where he said the same things?
The fact that mutation and selection by themselves are generally seen as insufficient to explain everything we see is not new, is not a shocking revelation, or anything like that, so far as I know.
A. But you see it's an odd definition. One of the points it makes under definition I regard as inappropriate there. It says 2 kinds. That's a caricature of what evolutionists say. I don't believe the mutation and natural selection is sufficient, but that is surely not part of creation-science.
So If you confine the definition to this set of 6 points, then the answer is yes, but only because the definitions are so poor. Of course there's literature that says mutation and natural selection is insufficient. I forget what its called in logic, but to say that the acceptance of what anybody says is the definition of any one part of it commits one to the definition is false.
You can find such things in his books. Do I need more examples or is my point taken?
If there's something testable and falsifiable I'd like to know about it, as it would be very interesting. So far as I know it's the biggest open question (other than the leap from abiotic to biotic) in evolutionary biology.
Punctuated Equilibrium is an observation. It is neither a falsification nor a theory of its own. It doesn't even state that evolution is "saltational" (i.e. "characterized by leaping or jumping"), merely that it describes what we seem to see.
We have guesses to explain it. The Neo-Darwinists appear absolutely convinced that the only possible explanation is mutation and selection. Well all right, they can think that. Maybe they're right. Talk Origins has a pretty rigorous look at the issue, although like a lot of things on Talk Origins it seems more concerned with debunking creationists than examining the question itself. Still, it does a good job of dispelling false claims about PE, at least to my eye.
It seem to me that PE is descriptive all right, but not of a problem. It is descriptive of large scale behavior in general and of complex behavior in general.
A ball of gas can exist for a long time then rather suddenly become a sun. The sun can exist for a long time than rather suddenly transform into a dwarf or nebula or some such. A tropcial beach can exist cozily for centuries, and then one day be carried away by a hurricane. A bowl of water as it cools can be liquid, liquid, liquid, then suddenly become rock solid. These are simple physical examples. Maybe not the best ones, but you get the idea.
Biological systems are much more complicated than those physical examples. Look what the laws of chemistry manage to accomplish after you fertilize an egg. Social systems are also complex. Look at the 20th century compared to the preceding 20 centuries. Punctuated equilibrium does not seem to be a problem at all. Instead it sounds like what you should expect after reading works such as "Godel, Echer, Bach" or "Order Out of Chaos".
Punctuated equilibrium provides clues, marking out extraordinary shifts in paradigm. You could argue that divine intervention is the only possible cause, but that would put you on very thin ice for no discernable reason (ID proponents have yet to provide a discernable reason). Instead, the system of organisms in balance with each other and their environment becomes so complex that, in a sense, "anything" becomes possible. A slight butterfly effect could produce anything ranging from complete destruction to de Chardin's Omega Point, but by and large produces intermediate results.
Instead of throwing up our hands and quitting at the dead end of divine intervention, scientists should focus on determining what the equilibrium was and how the equilibrium got punctuated. What complexity existed, what external (non-divine) events happened, what level of chance was needed, what "new way" of doing the old thing caught on and spread like wildfire?
To flat out assert (without proof) that it couldn't have happened naturally is hubris of the highest order. I can't flat out assert that it did happen naturally, because if God really did it, then God COULD do it, and God could make it look like God did it or like He did not. That circularity, or faith, or whatever you want to call it is why religion is not science. What I can do as a scientist, is to look for the natural explantions.
John
Here you've got the (apparent) phenomenon of repeat periods wherein thousands of new species appear. What would cause sudden development of (or loss of) whole chromosome sets, in new and fully functional genomes, in species by the thousands in periodic explosions? Some have tried to say it's major catastrophes or climate change but that isn't really satisfying is it? Wouldn't that just result in mass extinctions, with only a tiny handful of species surviving, and one or two mutant species maybe? Remember, just to get a mutant species it's got to have at least a male and a female component that provide viable offspring.
A sudden catastrophic change in temperatures, or light levels, or gas composition, can explain an explosive range of massive new functional mutations like that?
I also, as I think I've said elsewhere, really believe that "supernatural" is functionally meaningless word. What you're really looking for as a scientist is not "natural" explanations, you're looking for testable explanations. Those explanations could involve mundane physical forces currently understood, but they might involve forces only vaguely speculated upon. It's almost beside the point--what you'd really be looking for is something testable and reproducible and falsifiable.
"Mutation did it," I submit to you (and Elizabeth) isn't really falsifiable at the moment. Although I suppose if we keep records long enough it might become so. More likely we need to find new mechanisms we haven't thought of before.
And if I've gotten any of the above wrong, please tell me.
Punctuated Equilibrium states that random mutations are responsible for evolution, but that the situation is more complicated than that.
So in one sense, it says random mutations are not sufficient to explain evolution, but in another sense, it says that the actual changes are all results of random mutations. Whether this "agrees" with a simple model of evolution is a bit of a semantic issue.
ID is about whether non-random mutations are involved, which is an incomparably more significant debate.
There's a difference, though, between 'not really falsifiable at the moment' and 'not falsifiable in principle', as ID is.
I've refreshed my memory about the punk-eek idea, and confirmed that it doesn't suppose any mechanisms other than selection and isolation. It mostly consists of an attempt to describe how those mechanisms could result in the fossil record we see, as opposed to the one Darwin expected.
I think the most obvious way to falsify a selection-based mechanism in punctuated equilibrium would be to show that even with the increased selection pressure supposed by PE, there simply isn't time for selection to produce the changes between species seen in the record.
Obviously testing this is tricky; even the shortest speciation events supposed by the theory would take too long to study practically. Therefore, I suspect we could only seriously look at this if we can learn a great deal more about genetics and how genotype relates to phenotype. If we had a Star-Trek-like computer system, into which you could feed giraffe DNA and have it reconstruct a giraffe, we could then make alterations to its genotype and really, seriously look at what it takes to alter an okapi-like animal into a giraffe-like animal. Alternatively, again assuming a leap in technology, we could try to simulate how natural selection works in a speeded-up fashion by selecting *embryos* rather than full-grown adults, and then somehow 'mating' them to produce new embryos without having to wait for a bunch of modified okapis to grow to sexual maturity. All of this is beyond our reach right now, but it's not totally ridiculous, and it might reduce the time required to a point where we could effectively study the process.
If these experiments showed that in the number of generations allowable based on the fossil record, selection did not produce the big changes we see even when the selection algorithm was much stricter than could be supposed in nature, the hypothesis that natural selection accounts for the big changes would be falsified.
Dean wrote:
The late Stephen Jay Gould stated flatly, on more than one occasion, that mutation and natural selection alone are insufficient to explain life's diversity.
Pixy Misa wrote:
He said nothing of the sort. Ever.
Dean then decimated this assertion with specific quotes from Gould in some court case.
I don't mean to pick on Pixy Misa --but does she have a response or did she pick up her marbles and go home?
For some reason, I see much more of this categorical snark by critics of ID, than proponents of ID.
Why is that? Also, Why do non-snarky, thoughtful opponents of ID permit this to occur so frequently?
Myself, I tend to favor evolution as the better explanation than ID, as to what actually, verifiably happened.
But, I actually welcome ID to the debate and
really don't care about their motives or religious views. That's irrelevant. I only care if they are right.
Barnes, Hank
If a new species appears - today or tomorrow or within your lifetime with one or more radically different morphological features and/or DNA sequence from any existing species, that would pretty much nail that there are indeed evolutionary processes operating outside those we know about. That would falsify the hypothesis that mutation and natural selection must be the sole driving forces of evolution.
What would similarly falsify ID?
Dale
The questions the ID people ask are significant if only because at minimum they become a useful foil for Darwinists to ask questions. If the danger of ID is that "god in the gaps" thinking will pervade, some Darwinists are already guilty of the exact same thing. We can already see that in this thread: selection and mutation must explain everything, so, we can stop asking what the explanations are for things like PE. We just kind of vaguely generalize that the answers must be in there somewhere.
See, again, Don Jewett's piece on the problem inherent in single hypotheses. Or Lynn Margulis' statement in support of the ID'ers, not because she's one of them (she ain't) but because she recognizes that they ask hard questions that need to be asked, and recognizes how lazy so much of the field of evolutionary biology has become.
speculative as hell.
Of course, but so what? They are not speculations about hell or its opposite; they are speculations as to possible natural causes. New mechanisms? Fine. Evolution is a messy stew and none of the cooks really know what they are talking about? Fine. But now you've left the ID debate far behind. A hole in our knowledge of evolution or species genesis is no more evidence for ID than holes in our knowledge about anything else. ID does not rest its claim on our lack of understanding. ID claims to understand the nature of things so well that ID can tell which things could have evolved and which things could not exist without having been Intelligently Designed.
I also, as I think I've said elsewhere, really believe that "supernatural" is functionally meaningless word. What you're really looking for as a scientist is not "natural" explanations, you're looking for testable explanations.
I don't think my use of natural is so unatural, but I'll grant you that I did not specify what I meant by natural. However, I have two different problems with your analysis.
First point, "testable" is not a sufficient descriptor of what I meant. As I think Elizabeth pointed out, "testable in principle" is what counts. You can't let "The moon is made of green cheese" have equal time with "The moon is made of earth like rock" just because you haven't been able to go there and pick up a sample. Further, there is more to "natural" then just testable, but that is more or less the subject of the entire field of philosphy and won't fit into this thread.
Second point, replacing "supernatural" with "untestable" is sort of a cheap parlor trick. Although I used the word "divine", "supernatural" also fits the bill. Your substitution allows you to avoid the pathways already well established in most people's brains. Those established associations and connotations of "supernatural" should not be dismissed so easily; they are relevant to the ID argument.
Some ID proponents seem to wiggle especially vigourously when asked about the Designer, but actually I do not think they can escape very easily. I have not thought deeply about this, or looked at the arguments, but I am going to go out on a limb and make one of my own. Please follow these pieces and tell me where I am going wrong:
It is not enough for an Intelligent Design to simply exist for ID to have meaning. The flagellum wasn't only designed, it was CONSTRUCTED. Otherwise what the hell are we talking about? The human eyeball that was intelligenty designed to go farsighted at age 40 wasn't only designed, it was CONSTRUCTED. I can report with confidence that the Eyeball design is not still on a drawing board somewhere, because I've got two actual production models.
Now unless you are arguing for 6-day, 6000-yr type creationism, the Eyeball did not always exist. Which means that the Eyeball came into existance. Since ID proponents will not allow that this coming into existence happened by any of the scientific mechanisms that we have tested and come to rely on, they are now postulating not only Intelligent Design (ID), but a Design Implementor (DI) as well.
(You might attempt to escape this postulation of a DI by postulating Spontaneous Implementation (SI) instead, but in that case I hold the Intelligent Designer responsible as DI for thinking out loud).
Whether the DI was the Intelligent Designer or one of her cronies, a something-or-other apparently went ahead and implemented the design, i.e. CREATED (gasp!) a working model. This combination of intelligent design and creative action implies volition. An intelligent busbody, willfully prodding and poking the world to produce results that would not exist without intelligent intervention is close enough to the late-night-movie meaning of "supernatural" for me.
John
Did you read any of the articles I linked on Neodarwinism, postdarwinism, or the problem with single-hypothesis thinking?
Look at the casual dismissal of the problems that PE poses to our current understanding--even the angry denial that it presents a problem by some. Hell the angry denial that there even COULD be a problem with the idea that mutation and selection by themselves are enough.
What have we become?
And how do you propose to show there's no need for a designer? Beyond what evolutionary biologists have already done, I mean. Evolutionary biologists have already shown several posssible processes by which speciation might have occurred. They have also proposed several explanations for the apparent explosions of speciation in the fossil record. How do you show that one or more of those processes occurred? Apart from recreating conditions of 4.5 billion years ago and waiting 4.5 billion years? If a human scientist can speed the process up to create life or accelerate speciation in a laboratory setting, will that not just prove that intelligent design can create or modify life?
The question may not be interesting to you, but it is to me.
And when did Lynn Margulis support IDers?
Dale
With aplogies, I guess the point that you are trying to make is beside the point that interests me: ID.
I read the article summarizing the international conference on evolution that you linked elsewhere. That particular article reported on a conference just as it should be. I assumed that you meant the other articles to be read in order to highlight the problems. I do not need to read the articles to appreciate the problems. If on the other hand, you meant for me to read the articles so that I could experience wild-eyed antagonism to the mention of problems, then I have missed that boat. But I don't need to ride that boat either. I don't care about the existence of problems or the lack of problems with evolutionary theories or their antagonists or their protagonists. I care about ID. Why are you changing the subject?
I work in an environmental field. Uncertainty, conflict, new ideas, old ideas, hare-brained ideas, clever new ideas all pile up against each other as a matter of course. Mixed in are generous measures of reputation/pride, status quo, and funding versus poorhouse and other junk. Central is the three way antagonism between environmental activists, industry activists, and government regulators. Fueling the fire with top-fuel nitro is the billions of dollars at stake and the hundreds of millions of lives affected by each decision made. Any scientific controversy raging over the nature of species generation is pretty much a tempest in a teapot as far as I am concerned. It is business as usual for scientists. It is not new. It is how science works--including opposition to new paragdigms. What else do you expect? The issues might be interesting, but they don't get me all worked up.
What gets me all riled up is the attempt to teach ID in science class. Not because it may or may not be religion, but because it is absitively, posolutely not science. Children have already been absolved from learning to read, learning to write, learning to do arithmetic, and learning history if it is history of things accomplished by males of European descent. All of those absolutions are bad; all of that is stupid. But all of that is an error of omission. Our children are not being taught things that they should be taught.
ID in science class is a new and different type of error. It is not an omission. It is a substitution of wrong thought for right thought. Not wrong fact for right fact; or wrong theory for right theory; but wrong way of thinking for right way of thinking. The schools are moving beyond not teaching. They are now moving into actively teaching nonsense. They are now moving into actively teaching how to avoid real conclusions and pretend that imaginary ones are just as good as real ones. I'm used to that idiocy when it comes to politics, social studies, history etc. But in science? That is simply HORRIBLE.
The difference between science or math and social studies or history is that results matter in science and math. Debate ID all you want to in high school philosphy or in current events. But please do not present such metaphysics as science. If you want your sky-scapers to stand, it is better to teach mechanical engineering than Feng Shui. If you want your biologists to come up with some revolutionary breakthrough, it is better to teach evolution, warts and all, than to teach ID.
John
P.S.
Where is the issue of either the DI or SI implied by ID well answered? Those are philosphical questions, not scientific ones, and so generally involve wading into some very deep water. I am not too interested in getting in that deep. Are you aware of a nice summary showing why a supernatural designer/implementor is not required by ID? Are you personally satified that ID does not require a supernatural entity?
Just re-read thread, couldn't find this claim by anybody. Where was it?
Well, Dembski apparently can, as he elucidates here the problems with Matzke's claims in the article.
Biology in the Subjunctive Mood:
A Response to Nicholas Matzke
I think Matzke has made a good start on the problem. I think he overstates what he has accomplished. The issue hasn't been resolved as of yet, IMHO.
JFC says:
But ID doesn't postulate "divine intervention". It talks about "intelligence". If the later has an a priori implication of the former for you, then you could never explain the characteristics of intelligence and teleology, something most folks think that they see humans exhibit in their actions, via a materialistic (or natural) process such as NeoDarwinism.
That is a counterproductive dead end for you logically.
Whereas for me, you sound a lot like you are describing what humans do.
World is 'intelligent project' that reflects divine origin, pope says
Also note that Cardinal Schonborn, a confidante of Benedict, was in the audience.
I still believe that statement needs some justification, in two venues:
Why is is not science?
Can evolutionary theories of origin be science if ID is not?
To sum up lots of other posts, we have the fact of species diversity on Earth, and two explanations. One asserts that the process was entirely natural, and one posits a source for intelligent input into the process. I fail to see how one of those two hypotheses can be science a priori while the other is not.
First, I'll address part of what you quoted, the paragraph on testability. I'm not going to re-quote, this applies to the third paragraph above.
If the assumed homologs are found, the model has made a powerful prediction that has been found to be confirmed; if not, the model has not been supported by the evidence and should be discarded in favor of a better one. That's what testability is! There's a prediction, we can evaluate it, and there are specific results which would either be consistent or inconsistent with the theory. This is very like the example Dean has mentioned repeatedly, about how Hawking predicted black holes before one was ever discovered. Dembski accusing Matzke of 'deep confusion' on this point is sort of mind-boggling.
Much of the essay consists of irrelevant tangents, like this:
(Dembski)
For a bacterium with an ancestral type III secretion system that has sprouted a pilus, does motility for the pilus (and thus for the bacterium) constitute a selective advantage that overcomes the cost of evolving motility? Maybe. Maybe not. Who's to say? Given our minimal knowledge of the ancestral environment leading up to the bacterial flagellum (and we're talking an environment at least two billion years old when it comes to the evolutionary origin of the bacterial flagellum) and given only hypothesized rather than actual evolutionary intermediates leading up to it, there is no way to decide what does and does not constitute a selective advantage.
This passage is the equivalent of an ink cloud produced by a squid; it's an blob intended to distract. It's true that the posited selective advantage for a pilus is hypothetical and will probably remain until there's a scientific field of time-traveling ecology. The ID assertion is that flagella can't evolve because they're irreducibly complex; Matzke is describing how it could have happened assuming a particular selection pressure. If selection favoring a pilus can lead to bacteria with flagella, then flagella aren't IC, no matter what the historical situation was.
Basically, Dembski's essay boils down to the complaint that Matzke's attempt, though containing more elaboration than any previous account, doesn't amount to a '"detailed, testable, step-by-step" engineering approach to the construction of the bacterial flagellum' thousands of pages long. Without an complete account of how all the homologs evolved, an example of the original ancestor and each transitional form, a proven account of ancestral selection pressures, and a description of which gene is being mutated at every point along the way - basically, a build-your-own-flagellum kit - it's not good enough.
I know you're not Dembski, Roger, but is the above what it would take to make you consider this issue resolved? In most cases of asserted IC, it's going to be simply impossible to provide a provably true account of the historical development of those characteristics. The best we can hope to do is provide biologically plausible accounts that, unlike just-so stories, make predictions about traces that the process should have left on the makeup of living organisms. Demanding otherwise is akin to insisting Hawkins prove his point by re-enacting the Big Bang in the lab.
Finally, both early and concluding paragraphs devote time to trying to discredit Matzke personally. He's a geography student, he's too prolific, he posts too much, he cites too much, and most importantly, he used to have an open mind on intelligent design but has since concluded it's bunk. Clearly a suspicious character.
I have to say, I'm fairly well convinced now that Dembski, unlike Behe, is engaging in an intellectual shell game. Some of his criticisms of Matzke's model are reasonable, but some are so off the mark that they're either evidence of stupidity or deliberate evasion, and I don't think Demski's stupid.
To sum up lots of other posts, we have the fact of species diversity on Earth, and two explanations. One asserts that the process was entirely natural, and one posits a source for intelligent input into the process. I fail to see how one of those two hypotheses can be science a priori while the other is not.
IMHO, although I'm not JFC, I think you're half-right.
Science doesn't assert that species diversity on Earth has a natural cause; science assumes it, and proceeds from there, because science is useless to explain anything which doesn't obey normal, physical laws like cause and effect. An assertion that aliens were meddling with Earthly DNA ("intelligent input into the process") could potentially be studied scientifically. If ID'ers restricted their claims to natural intelligences, it wouldn't be inherently unscientific to look for evidence any more than it would be unscientific to try to figure out if a type of dog found on a remote island was a natural variation on wild dogs or the result of deliberate human breeding. Coming up with a theory which would generate some concrete predictions would almost certainly require making some positive assertions about the attributes, abilities, and motives of the aliens in question, which would be quite challenging, but I won't say it couldn't be done.
However, if God is asserted to be one of the possible designers, the attempt to posit intelligent input is clearly outside the bailiwick of science. Since God is all-powerful, no possible result can be inconsistent with Divine intervention. Does gravity really exist, or does God merely will that everything in the observable universe behaves as if it does? Scientific methods can't help us there. Attempts to teach 'creation science' have fallen by the wayside because it's obvious even to laypeople that it's not science.
What ID is claiming is that we can identify design in a scientific manner without assuming or knowing anything at all about the designer, thus blurring the distinction. Personally, I think that if this were possible, ID would be enormously useful. Sadly, the theoretical underpinnings of the claim don't make any sense to anyone but them, and they've never shown it to work. To the extent that this claim can be said to apply to natural intelligences, they have never so far as I know made an attempt to use their methods to distinguish between natural events and events 'designed' by humans where the answer was previously unknown. To the extent that it's a claim about supernatural intelligence, it becomes untestable. If they used their methods to determine whether a hurricane or a snowflake is intelligently designed and got a 'yes', who's to say they're wrong? What verified examples of natural and supernatural effects do we test it against?
So we're left with:
Intelligent Design Sub 1: Designer is subject to physical laws (not necessarily known laws) and some conceivable limits which would provide a basis for testing for its presence. This hypothesis is inferior to the current hypotheses, but not inherently unscientific.
Intelligent Design Sub 2: Desiger is not subject to physical laws and is unlimited (i.e. God). This is not a scientific claim as no possible outcome can be ruled out, and it's impossible for us to distinguish between things we can't explain and things which are inexplicable.
ID(1) is clearly not a religious claim or nonscience, and since there's no barrier to teaching blather in public schools, just religion, I don't see why it couldn't be taught. ID(2) is not science and is a religious claim, although I don't personally think that just mentioning that some people believe it in class can be construed as an attempt to establish a religion.
Jeff, that is a simple, honest, direct question. You have nailed it. That is THE essential question of this debate. Unfortunately, the answer is not as easy as the question. It is a philosphical question, not a scientific one, which makes it much harder. I thank Elizabeth for responding so well with a good technical explanation. I'll try to provide an explanation by example.
The nature of science, the nature of nature, the philosphy of science, however you want to put it, has been the subject of scholarly papers, books, mulitple semester courses in college philosphy departments, and lots of debate long before ID arrived. It is not resolved all neat and tidy, but it is well enough defined that Dembski, as an accomplished philosopher, should be ashamed of himself. (I suspect he has turned to the Dark Side in order to carve out a nice academic niche for himself). Like pornography, science is hard to nail down, but I know it when I see it. I think you do too:
Given two inquiries or assertions, why would you say one is scientific and one is not? Here are two alternatives:
A) Lightening is caused by a discharge of electric potential between clouds and the ground.
B) Lightening is caused when Vulcan (I can't spell the Greek version) gets pissed off and throws bolts down at us.
Now if you just broke out of an egg shell, they are equal propositions. If you are an aborigine in ancient Greece, B makes a helluva lot more sense than A. They are equal as propositions, but not as scientific ones.
If you fast forward to Gallileo, he'll say: "A, B, enough talk! SHOW me what you mean." There are two features of the dichotomy between A and B that I think contribute a great deal to why A is science and why B is not.
The first feature is the connection between A and a whole host of observable, testable, repeatable, causes and effects. Every time you explain something to Gallileo he will ask "what do you mean?," "Why is that?", "How does that happen?", "Prove it.", etc. In almost every case you can show him how and why. In the end he will be convinced by the sheer weight of evidence that he experienced with his eyes and his hands: "Holy Mother! Who would have guessed God made such a wonderful world!" I am not talking about the falsifiability of any claims, I am talking about the weight of an enormous amount of positive inductive physical evidence. In contrast, Vulcan will depend entirely on the explanations of your priest and will have very little to offer your eyes and hands.
The next feature is what happens when you attempt to disagree or offer alternatives. You know what happens in science: the staus quo drags its feet, but eventually evidence overwhelms resistance, especially the negative kind of eveidence. One legitimate example of "Your wrong. Watch this." and the current scientific theory must be revised or abandoned. That is falsifiabiity! In contrast what happens when you challenge the priest?:
"It couldn't have beeen Vulcan, because I don't see his footprints." Vulcan flies in the air. He doesn't leave footprints.
"It couldn't have beeen Vulcan, because I don't see him flying though the air." Vulcan is powerful, but he is so small that you can't see him.
"It couldn't have beeen Vulcan, because I saw lightening here last Ides of March and so did my friend in Britainy." Vulcan flies so fast he can seem to be anywhere at once.
"How do you know Zeus didn't throw those bolts?"
Hera told me Vulcan stole all of the bolts and Zeus dosn't have any.
Jeff, I think you see where that is going. So to me, the two key features of science are inductive weight and falsifiability (in principle!, Dean).
I think you already knew that. So I guess what you really want to know is not why ID assertions aren't as good as any other assertions, but why ID assertions fall into the Vulcan category instead of the the Gallileo category. I think some in this thread have been trying to explain that, but apparently it is not getting through. This post is long enough, so it will have to be later. Pose the question in that fashion next time, and perhaps you will get a less windy and more to the point response.
Congratualtions again on asking the only important question in this thread.
John
Whereas for me, you sound a lot like you are describing what humans do.
Yikes! You flabbergast me! Isn't that the point I was making?
In order for ID to be more than a cute idea IMNSHO, it has to explain how and why the intelligently designed flagellum actually got constructed and attached to my bacterium. The only thing I have come up with so far is that an intelligent entity made it so. ID implies it couldn't have happened otherwise, because if it could have happened otherwise there is no need to for ID to explain it.
Finally, "intelligent" + "made it so" implies anthropomorphic to me, as you observed. So ID requires the antrhopomorphic supernatural being. What exactly is your disagreement with me? If you have a non-numan-like explantion for how the intelligently designed flagellum got implmented, please share it.
I'm not ruling out an explantion, I'm just not seeing it so far. An explantion is your job, not my job. I shouldn't need to prove a negative; you need to prove your positive assertion.
Roger B again:
But ID doesn't postulate "divine intervention". It talks about "intelligence".
You're right, it skips over implementation entirely. Which is why I had to fill it in as best I could. If you don't like my loaded choice of "divine intervention", tell me what mechanism you prefer.
If the later has an a priori implication of the former for you,
It does not. Intelligence does not imply divine intervention. (Read Godel, Echer, Bach. If you don't trust me, ask Dean. He apparently enjoyed it.)
What implies divine intervention is the assertion by ID that the flagelum could not have happened with out intelligence being applied, combined with the fact that the flagellum exists.
That is a counterproductive dead end for you logically.
Yo'r Mama!
John
You and JFC appear to be totally confused over the demarcation issue. And you wouldn't be the first. You first say that IDers must limit themselves to "natural intelligences" as causes, whatever that means, and then you claim that science can't distinguish between the two. So which is it?
Ditto with JFC, claiming one proposition is science and one isn't. The problem with that as a demarcation test is the very issue of science you bring up, gravity.
Newton had no clue as to a "natural" mechanism for gravity. Indeed, he personally mused that it might be "spirit action". Under your demarcation test, Newton's investigations fall outside of science. Now this is clearly a result that the science community will reject. Your demarcation test will fail to persuade even most ID critics.
JFC is right that the question of what is science is a philosophical question, and not a scientific one, and that it is a difficult one. He is incorrect when he claims that "it is well enough defined that Dembski, as an accomplished philosopher, should be ashamed of himself". Various formulations have various adherents, but most lead to condundrums, such as those yours exhibits. And recognizing that, they are worthless as a tool to exclude ID or any other approach a priori. You are free to embrace those rules if you wish. It is clear that the general science community doesn't. I think we still teach about Newton in science classes, and the ACLU appears not to see a problem therein.