Bechly and Swamidass: For and Against ID

Public Square
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There are two instances of the word “confront” in Doug Axe’s entire book. Here they are:

“I am the one who accepted the risk of pursuing research I knew would lead to a confrontation with the scientific establishment.”

This occurs near the end of chapter 4 under the heading “Conscience and Courage.”

“However strong the desire is to portray selection in glowing terms, the reality confronting scientists who work with it in the laboratory is much more humble.”

This occurs in the middle of chapter 8 under the heading “Real Selection-Good, Bad and Ugly.”

In the Crossway “Theistic Evolution” book you mentioned, here is the section where Axe explains what he means by “confrontational”:

“In discussing this, then, I’ll call the view I aim to defend the confrontational view- the view that God’s creation of life clearly and obviously defies explanation in terms of accidental processes. The contrary view - that life can plausibly be attributed to accidental processes, even though divine intent may have actually been present - I will call the nonconfrontational view.”

This is nothing less than just a restatement of what Josh and Gunter already agreed were among their disagreements, and besides defining it here, Axe barely even mentions it again in the rest of the essay. Why bring this up here? It seems like you are trying to rhetorically trap Gunter into disagreeing with Axe by implying Axe meant an attitude of hostile confrontation rather than what he actually meant by “confrontational” and clearly defined. Can you explain what you mean @swamidass when you said Doug Axe talks about “the need to have a confrontational approach to evolutionary science”?

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How about putting the quote from WLC that Axe is specifically arguing against? I hold that WLCs approach is a better one.

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What does that have to do with the way you misrepresented what Axe was talking about?

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I did not misrepresent him. I think you misrepresented what I said.

I never used the word “hostile,” nor did I mean it. The context of Axe disagreeing with WLC is consistent with the meaning I conveyed.

The reason it came up was for the purpose of defining the points of disagreement. I disagree with Axe there, and he reflects the ID movement as a whole. I wasn’t asking Gunter to agree with him, and stated several times that he might be an exception to this any ways. So I wasn’t even putting him in the same category as Axe.

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You said pretty clearly that Axe meant “confrontational” as opposed to “conversational” as though it were about the attitude or method of engagement with other scientists. That is clearly not what Axe meant by the term. You did in fact completely misrepresent him, and the fact that you are not admitting it now after being shown the reference indicates this was not an honest mistake but rather an intentional misrepresentation.

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This is also how it came across to me.

I thought it was inappropriate to bring up a word without context and confront someone who didn’t write it as if every ID proponent should answer for everything in each other’s books. Even Justin tried to change the topic and said Axe should be there to describe what he meant.

My criticism above was meant to be constructive as especially that came off as having a “confrontational” agenda and if you think ID isn’t good science, my assumption is you’d want to know if you came across in a way that turned people off that don’t agree with you rather than persuaded.

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I note that you still haven’t put up the WLC quote from Axe.

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@swamidass Overall a fascinating discussion worthy of many followups. I love your style of engagement!

I understood your position “as a scientist.” I’m also curious what you think about Crime Scene Investigation or SETI or anthropology - are they science? These all seem to deal with questions around intelligence in a way similar to Bechly’s ID argument. What do you think?

Also a very minor point FWIW: like others here I heard you as if you were claiming Axe was advocating confrontation in a stronger sense. I’ve seen some ugly confrontational ID so your point has merit. But the quotes from Axe above indicate you may want to find a better example of your concern there.

Lastly Bechly’s statement about the lack of moderation on these forums is why I typically don’t spend much time here. Some of the posters here have no interest in conversation or understanding, but only in asserting and propounding their own clearly superior opinion. It quickly gets tedious and undermines your mission statement. If you want more involvement, you gotta figure out how to reign that in.

Thank you and God’s blessing on your many efforts!

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Hi @swamidass, @Rumraket, @thoughtful, @BenKissling and @Dan_Eastwood,

I’ll keep my remarks brief.

  1. My overall impression is that Dr. Günther Bechly is one helluva good debater. That doesn’t mean he’s right, of course, but I have to say he came across very well and communicated his points effectively. He was articulate (as an English teacher, I noticed that he spoke fluently in whole paragraphs and used very few ums and ahs) and he appeared relaxed throughout the debate. He also made generous concessions to his opponents and his presentation was entirely devoid of snark.

  2. That said, I noticed a few questionable scientific assertions in Bechly’s presentation. I’ll just focus on whales here, since I’ve written about them in the past. Regarding the transition from Pakicetus to Dorudon, Bechly asserted that it took place over 4.5 million years, but it seems to have taken place over 13 to 14 million years. When I heard Bechly make his point about the average lifetime of a species, in connection with whale evolution and the Cambrian explosion, I was initially impressed. But then I recalled an exchange I’d had a few years ago with Professor Larry Moran, while I was still writing for Uncommon Descent, in which Moran declared: “Evolutionary biologists who have spent their entire careers studying evolution, genetics, and developmental biology are comfortable with a few thousand mutations causing the transformation from land animals to whales.” In my article for Uncommon Descent, I also criticized Dr. Berlinski’s attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of whale evolution, based on the small number of fossil intermediates between land animals and whales:

…Dr. Berlinski’s contention that the number of fossil intermediates in whale evolution should roughly equal the number of changes required to make the transition is incorrect, because in the first place, if the changes are occurring in parallel, then the number of changes will exceed the number of fossil intermediates by at least a factor N, where N is the number of organs and/or biochemical systems in a whale’s body that are undergoing transformation; and in the second place, a single beneficial mutation occurring in a whale’s body would not be enough to transform it into a new fossil species ; and finally, most of the beneficial mutations that would have occurred involved internal organs rather than changes to whales’ skeletons, and hence wouldn’t show up in the fossil record anyway. Hence it would not be at all surprising if the number of changes required to transform a land mammal into a whale turned out to be several orders of magnitude larger than the number of steps observed in the fossil record.

So the question we should be asking is: is it implausible that 3,000 beneficial mutations became fixed in the line leading to whales, over a period of 13 or 14 million years? I would argue that it is not. That does not mean that whales evolved by an unguided process, but it does mean that ID advocates need to mount a more rigorous case for saying that they couldn’t have.

  1. I would have liked to hear Dr. Bechly’s response to a question that is often asked of ID advocates: where do you think the “edge of evolution” lies? In other words, at which taxonomic level does information need to be infused from an intelligent source, for a transformation at that level to occur? Professor Mike Behe seems to think the edge lies at the level of the family. I’d be interested to know what Dr. Bechly thinks.

My two cents.

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I agree.

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SETI and Anthropology infer design all the time. That is within the purview of science.

I don’t think they infer the same way as Bechly, or more broadly speaking, the ID movement as a whole. The logic of SETI and anthropology design arguments are very different than ID.

For example, SETI is very concerned with false positives, so much so that they have not actually put forward any examples of detection. This is because they don’t claim to have any unique signatures of design.

In contrast, ID claims that they do have unique signatures of design. As far as I know, there is no broadly accepted example of a false positive in ID.

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This bears repeating. Because SETI scientists have not cried wolf, and been clear about alternative non-design mechanisms, they have credibility. If they were to say they detected a signal, everyone would pay attention, because they have not burned through their credibility by touting false detections in the past.

They also have steered entirely clear of UFO conspiracy theories and a whole ton of bad arguments for aliens.

Some of this parallels ID, which steers clear of bad arguments for a young earth. However, ID also welcomes just about every creationist argument against evolution, good and bad. So they have not protected their reputation as has SETI.

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Hi @vjtorley. Thoughtful post. Couple of questions. First, how do you come up with 3000 as your plausibility requirement?

Second, it seems to me there is a lot to unpack with “plausibility.” Isn’t that a probability argument by another name? And aren’t Darwinists always saying probability arguments are out of bounds? But then they quote some large number of years, which is in the numerator of a probability but do not define the denominator. How do you decide whether such probabilities are “plausible” if they cannot be calculated?

I don’t tend to engage with the mammal to whale. For me, looking at Darwin’s finches, you get maybe 15 species in about 2 million years. That seems like a great example of what evolution can accomplish by itself. Then the Cambrian, you get an entire ecosystem with all those phyla in ~10 million.

I agree many ID advocates have used lousy arguments. My question is about your use of “good and bad”. Are you implying here that you think there are some “good” ID arguments?

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No. I think “Darwinists” are usually pointing out the bad assumptions ID-arguments are based on which undermine the meaningfulness and relevance of the conclusions of those arguments, to reality. GIGO - garbage in - garbage out. With the right assumptions you can support or refute anything.

Can you give a concrete example of when “they” do this?

I’m pretty sure the Cambrian had numerous distinct ecosystems, just like we do now, though they likely also meld into each other and have zones of overlap like they do now, and that they each have historically prior ecosystems from which they developed and evolved.

But I’m curious, why is the Cambrian not just another great example of what evolution can do?

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Not really. It’s at least 25 million years, likely much longer. I hope you didn’t get that from Darwin’s Doubt. Execrable book.

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Well, we aren’t “Darwinists,” and we do not think that probability arguments out bounds in principle. Rather we don’t think that ID arguments are built off plausible models of evolution, they embed incorrect assumptions about how biology works. For that reason they are just bad arguments.

Population genetics is a good counter point. It is full of probability based estimates and arguments, but using more sensible models of evolution, i.e. what biologists actually think corresponds to how evolution works, and what actually ends up matching the data.

The fine-tuning argument is a good argument for design. It is subject to philosophical debate, but it is based on essentially established science. The same is the true of the Cosmological argument based on the Big Bang. These are both “design” arguments that are sound (though still the subject of debate) that pre-exist the ID movement.

Several of the “ID” arguments about population genetics and Adam and Eve ended up begin vindicated too. These are part of the ID movement, but are not really about design per se.

I think that some of the objections made by ID against the “Bad Design” argument are entirely valid. I also think that they are right to argue that design is compatible with common descent, but sometimes it seems they forget their own argument on this one!

So those are several large classes of ID arguments that I’ve called “good” in important ways.

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Now this is helpful for me. :+1:

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According to what ID proponents like Behe mean by that term, many of us are. He’s stated that basically anything you might want to include in modern evolutionary theory, such as neutral theory, CNE, HGT, endosymbiosis, and population phenomena, it’s all just “Darwinism” to him.

Honestly I think that’s how all the higher-ups in the ID movement think. Regardless of how much emphasis you put on selection, drift, or what have you, If God isn’t explicitly in the picture, it’s “Darwinism”.

You must mean valid, because they definitely haven’t been shown to be sound.

They’re trying to have it both ways. The Big Tent of ID is so big it contains mutually contradictory positions. Some are YEC, others are OEC. Some like Denton have argued that life’s evolutionary history was sort of an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, while others (Behe) argue evolution can only ever cause some ill-defined form of “degeneration” and therefor requires constant acts of guidance and poof interventions by God. Denton then writes warm abiding endorsements of Behe’s book, which flat out contradicts his own. Go figure…

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Listen to the first four minutes of this presentation by Günter Bechly on the fossil record:

This is extremely misleading nonsense. Günter references a paper that says mostly FAMILIES of organisms in the Cenozoic and Mesozoic are well represented in the fossil record, to argue that the fossil record is essentially complete, so he can dismiss all appeals to taphonomy.
Here’s the paper:

Gunter shows the abstract in his talk, with this sentence(in bold) highlighted:

Measuring the completeness of the fossil record is essential to understanding evolution over long timescales, particularly when comparing evolutionary patterns among biological groups with different preservational properties. Completeness measures have been presented for various groups based on gaps in the stratigraphic ranges of fossil taxa1,2 and on hypothetical lineages implied by estimated evolutionary trees3±5. Here we present and compare quantitative, widely applicable absolute measures of completeness at two taxonomic levels for a broader sample of higher taxa of marine animals than has previously been available. We provide an estimate of the probability of genus preservation per stratigraphic interval6,7, and determine the proportion of living families with some fossil record8±10. The two completeness measures use very different data and calculations. The probability of genus preservation depends almost entirely on the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic records, whereas the proportion of living families with a fossil record is influenced largely by Cenozoic data. These measurements are nonetheless highly correlated, with outliers quite explicable, and we find that completeness is rather high for many animal groups.

When we also go into the paper and read, we find this:

The proportion of living chondrichthyan families with a fossil record is high because many families can be extended back in time on the basis of fossil teeth. It is instructive to divide the fossil genera into those ®rst appearing during the Palaeozoic Era and those ®rst appearing during the Mesozoic (Fig. 2b). Many Palaeozoic forms are whole-body fossils from deposits with exceptional preservation12. These are thus single-interval taxa, contributing to low estimates of completeness (see Methods). Mesozoic forms, like the fossil representatives of their living counterparts, tend more to be described from teeth outside of exceptional fossil deposits13; they thus have longer ranges and higher completeness values.

So basically fossil record completeness even at the family level is low from the end Permian(~250 mya) and older, but gets better nearer to the present, though most families and genera are represented only by things like teeth. Which nevertheless counts towards completion. LOL.

I’m sorry for disturbing your sensitive nature with my sarcasm here, but that’s totally Not a misleading statement to draw from that reference at all. Nope.

Now what this shows is that it is a waste of time to debate these people in real time. You don’t have time to check the references as you’re sitting there for an hour of live debate and discussion, and yet it is from selective and superficial readings of the literature that Günter like to make his assertions. So you’re required to know them basically by heart if you’re going to rebut statements like he made in the discussion with Swamidass.

It’s the classic disproportionality of bullshit(Brandolini's law - Wikipedia). It takes ten seconds to throw out four misleading, confident-sounding assertions of seemingly huge significance, with a reference name-dropped. But then it takes 30 minutes to an hour to unpack and refute just one of them.

And that presentation just gets worse and worse. But hey, now we know what material Günter gets his crap from. Check one of his slides:

whales Bechly
whales Bechly832×594 530 KB

Waiting for target double mutations(evolution with targets, lol), and we see a paleontologist confuse cousin species for ancestor-descendant relationships.

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Hi @Rumraket,

Durrett and Schmidt again, eh? The ID movement has been flogging that dead horse for years. Curiously, many of the ID proponents who cite it appear blissfully unaware that it was written to refute ID claims. Contrary to their assertions, all the paper shows is that “a coordinated pair of mutations that first inactivates a binding site and then creates a new one is very unlikely to occur on a reasonable timescale.” Thus my response to any ID proponent appealing to Durrett and Schmidt to rule out whale evolution is: can you identify a single case in the line leading to whales, where two or more mutations had to act in combination in the manner described by the authors of the paper, in order to confer an increase in fitness?

And the 49-million-year-old Antarctic whale is another highly contentious claim that the ID movement continues to trot out. Now I see where Bechly gets his figure of 4.5 million years from. In reality, the Antarctic whale is only 40-46 million years old, as I explained here in an article for The Skeptical Zone exposing this ID myth.

Thanks for identifying the slide. Cheers.

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