Many of Axe’s arguments are around how many sequences perform a function.
Axe vs Hunt
Behe’s arguments are about how many parts and how precisely arranged. Do you have a specific counter claim?
He’s wrong, and embarrassingly so. Rarity is unrelated to design. Evolutionary processes (e.g. random walks and such) can easily find rare things. For Axe to show that something other than garden-variety evolution occurred, he would have to show a discontinuity of some kind, an actual leap to a rare thing in a single step. No ID apologist has ever done this, and more importantly, none (AFAIK) has even looked. Years ago I explained how this would have to happen, and it’s just the process that you and I have been discussing: follow an evolutionary trajectory and show if/where it required magic or intervention.
Let me again emphasize that this has nothing to do with design, and shows that ID is not about design but about intervention and supernaturalism.
That’s fundamentally different from rarity. Perhaps you mean ‘improbable’ (referring to an outcome of a process with multiple possible outcomes) and not ‘rare’ (referring to thing or a state) and if so, it’s really important to understand how different that is. ‘Improbable’ is also neither sufficient nor necessary for design, and again, that’s basic design thought that I really shouldn’t have to rehash.
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I disagree. Rarity of an outcome (in the sense of the outcome having a small probability), although not sufficient, is necessary for inferring design.
Then you and I are probably talking about different things. Perhaps you mean the kind of “design” that entails intervention or other supernatural meddling, the kind of “design” that is to be contrasted with evolution or with things that can be naturally explained. If so, then an improbable event is indeed evidence of “design.” What it is not, and cannot be, is necessary, since then you are claiming that designers only do things that are improbable. Surely you don’t mean that.
But I think this is an impoverished view of “design,” and cynically I think it means that for the ID movement “design” is just a term for “let’s find reasons to think that an interventionist god is at work.” What design should be about is function, organization, direction, things like that. ATP synthase shows design whether or not it is “improbable,” and a pile of leaves doesn’t even though its organization is almost impossibly improbable.
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Do you agree with Behe’s criteria for design detection?
Here is one one of the issues you are not understanding:
According to ID creationism, things that perform a function only arise because someone wanted them to perform that function.
However, the theory of evolution is an explanation of how things that perform functions arise by chance and then persist and become more common because these functions make it more likely that copies of the entities that exhibit these functions will come into existence.
Because of the this theory exists, the existence of function can no longer be assumed to be the result of design.
And, note, this would be the case even if evolution was just a hypothesis that did not yet have any evidence to support it. The fact that it exists even as a hypothetical possibility is enough to invalidate the function = design equation.
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Where did you get this claim?
He has published specific criteria? You mean IC? I don’t disagree that there is design in things like molecular machines but I’ve never seen any useful “criteria” from an ID theorist. IC is pretty poor, actually as a design detector, but I don’t care about that. I don’t think that detecting design is actually very hard. Explaining design is the challenge.
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Behe made it with his “purposeful arrangement of parts” argument.
The following is the product of a human mind…
AACGTTGTGTGCGGAAACGGCTCTTCTATAGCCTGACCAATAACTTGCGAGGAGTTAACCCTATGACTAGCACTTAGCAGCGCGGTATCGCATAGCTGGCCATGTGGACGGCTAGCAACGTTACTGCGATAT
It is also gibberish. How would you detect design, or the lack thereof? In what way would it test the hypothesis?
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So you’re no longer taking something to be designed because you think you can basically just look at it and determine that it’s parts were intentionally arranged for a purpose?
Now you’re suddenly back to thinking something is designed when it’s conserved over a long period of time on some phylogeny. We had two or three whole threads devoted to the total collapse of that idea too.
How about this? Rather than waste everyone’s time by making them look for a needle you say is in the haystack, why don’t YOU find the sentence that you think proves my position wrong.
That would really speed things up. Otherwise, I’m fairly confident that you are misinterpreting Behe like you did back when we discussed the video discussion he made regarding the Billiard Ball Shot.
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Non designed improbable events happening all the times, they cannot be evidence of design.
Yes, not all design objects or events are improbable. But don’t forget that the design inference developed by IDers explicitly allows for false negatives.
Let’s try.
- One of the most salient characteristics of living things is that they contain a great amount of coded functional information.
- Purely blind, unguided natural processes are unable to produce coded functional information. To think otherwise is absurd (cf Lewontin).
- we know of only one cause that is able to produce coded functional information, ie., intelligence.
- therefore intelligent design is the best explanation for the origin of life.
Why? How do you know that?
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Thanks. One could quibble with #1, as the definition of “coded functional information” isn’t at all clear, but I think we have at least a vague idea. And of course #3 contains a trick, i.e. the substitution of the vague “intelligence” for what we do know, that human beings are the actual producers; the purpose of “intelligence” is to substitute in an unknown, God.
But the main problem seems to lie with #2. I think we do know of other causes. Genetic algorithms can certainly produce such information, and so can natural selection.
Finally, #4: is this in fact solely an argument about the origin of life, or is it also about subsequent events? I’m thinking it’s usually stretched to cover many quite recent things, such as the evolution of humans. No?
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I think Giltil is not just saying that unguided natural processes cannot produce functional information. As you note, they can. The word “coded” is going to be the issue, and this will turn out to be another version of the old “semantic” systems argument.
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I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask people to do some homework before they engage in a subject. Behe’s first presentation is less than 30 minutes. Here is the link for your review where he describes his design hypothesis. Start 4 minutes in and last until 25 minutes.
How did you get to this conclusion? Nucleotides can be arranged for a purpose. One purpose may be to build a specific animal.
Hi Ron
It becomes evidence when what we identify is no longer gibberish like the sentence you typed above. That sentence is a purposeful arrangement of parts which I was able to decode.