“It might be possible to take human breeding experiments as the extreme limit of what can be achieved by natural selection on existing genetic variation in a species…
Could this be used as a control to define what natural selection can do even with guidance…”,
I would suggest that “human breeding experiments” cannot even come close to what is known to happen in the complete absence of humans. A long time ago (I can’t believe it’s been 15 years) in a galaxy far, far away I wrote an essay for another forum that discussed a most fascinating case study.
Like others in this discussion, I doubt that anyone can actually come up with an information test for artificial vs. natural selection. To the ID friendly participants here, I would further add that the expectation I think I am seeing (I may be wrong) that large changes imply intelligence is actually the opposite of what examples such as the Silversword Alliance show to be the case.
PS - this is my first post to this forum. I thank the organizers for allowing me to join. I found this place while looking for updates to other ID-related issues I have dabbled with over the years.
The point of the case is less about any placental parallels beyond Australia… and more about 3 closely related “kinds” of Marsupials (measured by genotype, not phenotype). It is believed that conditions in Australia were optimum because there were no rival placental occupants in the niches the placental sub-grouos increasingly exploited!
I have posted this thread already. Just go to my profile and search my posts for: marsupial Australia mole.
Doesnt this pose a problem for the definition of “natural”. If we cant differentiate natural from artificial, then every claim of evolution by “natural processes” is an untested assumption.
Let me suggest a thought experiment. Suppose evolution received help in Designing life from an unknown intelligent agency. If we continue explaining every observation with respect to evolution using natural processes… Then wouldn’t these “natural processes” themselves take on the qualities of the agency that designed life? If the agency is creative and intelligent, then these natural processes would also be creative and intelligent…
Is it legitimate to impose creativity on nature? Yet we see this very same tendency in all scientific explanations of Evolution. Nature is intelligent, creative, capable of feats that human designers cannot even dream of… while remaining purposeless and unintelligent.
In a certain sense, descriptions of what natural selection can do sounds divine… Its a strange irony.
This gets to a key point. It is an unsubstantiated assumption to think that intelligence is going to be scientifically detectable in all cases. That might be true sometimes. However, this is an example of a case we just do not expect to detect anything. Note, however, @EricMH’s instincts here:
It seems there is usually not going to be a way to tell from looking at DNA alone.
This gets to the fundamental conflict many scientists are going to have with ID. The opposition is not against the belief that God created everything. Rather, it is opposition to the notion that they have somehow demonstrated this scientifically. That, it seems, is the crux of the disagreement. It has nothing to do with divine design per se, but with the ability of science to detect divine design.
We actually know how this approach arose. There were a lot of people who entered science who, from the get go, already believed that science could detect divine design. This was before they even knew much about science that they even formed this presumption. The dispute remains merely to be about the limits of science, and the quality of their arguments. There has never been a legitimate threat from science to the theological claim that God created us, and designed us through an evolutionary process.
I would state the conflict as to the limits of what “nature” can and cannot do. Its not about God.Its about the ability of “natural processes” (in this specific context with respect to speciation/diversity).
I believe this is an important distinction to be made and a question worth asking. Can this be question be accessed by the scientific method? Perhaps you are right in saying that it cannot be… However it is note worthy that science assumes an answer as much as ID folks seem to.
Hence in my view investigations such as Eric’s are a laudable attempt just as Theobalds test for UCA is important. Even a wrong test teaches us things.
We should NOT be held hostage by pro-Creationists who insist we agree with them on their opposing view … before they will discuss the Dual Creation Scenario(s)!
Darwin may have given us some insight into how to approach this topic.
“Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young. In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community; if each in consequence profits by the selected change. What natural selection cannot do, is to modify the structure of one species, without giving it any advantage, for the good of another species; and though statements to this effect may be found in works of natural history, I cannot find one case which will bear investigation.” Origin of Species
The one thing that artificial selection can do that natural selection can not do is produce changes in another species that benefit only humans.
But even then, this gets a bit hairy. Are populations that are under artificial selection benefiting from human protection? Cattle are the product of artificial selection, and their wild ancestors have gone extinct. So are the cattle benefiting from artificial selection? It could be argued that they are benefiting since they find themselves in green pastures protected from predators. Neutral evolution also poses a problem since some changes that evolve are neutral or even slightly deleterious. We need to be careful of applying pan-adaptionism where every change is assumed to be the product of positive selection.
There are also examples of artificial selection on the part of other species. For example, there are ant species that farm fungus in underground chambers, and this relationship between ants and fungal species has undoubtedly shaped the evolutionary history of both species. We can also ask if the division between artificial and natural is even a real one to begin with. What humans do is entirely natural in that we don’t violate a single natural law, so why separate what we do from what the rest of nature does? Is it really meaningful in the end?