And contrary to the common assertion otherwise, whales are fish.
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Intelligent agent are free to use different modalities to design things. So, under ID theory, it is not surprising that some organisms would be produced through some sort of gradualistic pathways whereas others would be produced through more abrupt ones. It seems to me that the history of technology illustrates this point.
As for unguided evolution, it has no other choice than to « design » new things through tiny, incremental steps.
So, under ID theory, we have no expectations. Whatever we see would be compatible with it, and therefore it’s impossible to falsify or test, and therefore it’s impossible to do science with it.
Anyway, where are the abrupt pathways you are not surprised to see? We seem to have established that whale evolution, your former poster child, isn’t one of them.
Ah, so God is limited in the same way that human designers are? He sometimes can’t see the end goal and is forced to tinker around until he comes upon it. Is your deity not omniscient, then?
Why? And how do you distinguish tiny from large?
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Here’s the problem: there is no ID theory that states any of this because there is nothing on which to base any of this.
In order to make claims about what an designer could or couldn’t do, you need to first address how a designer could actually do things. Except that not only does Intelligent Design not address this, ID proponents aren’t even interested in asking that question.
Case in point, there is an article(1) put out by the Discovery Institute which states this:
The issue for ID is not how it was done, when it was done, to what extent it was done, or even who did it. (The last question, as I said, must await illumination from other fields, such as philosophy.) It’s simply this: the origin and operation of the universe and living things display clear evidence or purposeful design.
To claim that ID posit different modalities suggests some idea of how and why a designer might do things. Especially when you start comparing to human technology invention and manufacture, you’re implying inherent constraints under which a designer might work.
But given that a lot of ID proponents also believe that said designer is an unbounded supernatural entity of some kind, it makes no sense whatsoever to invoke human-bound constraints.
In short, all this really tells us that ID doesn’t offer anything useful whatever. Much like creationism, it’s a blanket answer that covers anything and everything we can possibly observe.
(1) What We Mean by Intelligent Design | Evolution News and Science Today
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Where we charitably grant the cdesign proponentsists that there might be a meaningful distinction in the first place.
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A nested hierarchy, OTOH, would be very surprising under “ID theory”, since that does not entail common descent.
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Which has been nicely demonstrated in this thread: Common Ancestry and Nested Hierarchy
Nested hierarchies observed in biology would make no sense from a design perspective unless a designer was somehow operating under the same constraints as biological evolution or deliberately mimicking the output of evolutionary processes.
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What ID theory is that? Where is it published?
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Imagine the following scenario: we are in the Stone Age. A man from that era is walking on a beach and comes across an object that is completely unknown to his fellow human beings - an iPhone. Do you think that this man would need first to address how a designer could actually make an iPhone in order to infer that the object was designed?
Now suppose that this same person runs into a few other unknown objects: a kangaroo, a pyrite crystal, a coconut. What does he infer about those objects?
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In the context of an individual recognizing an object as designed that they have no prior knowledge of on which to base an inference, then yes, they would likely need some knowledge of human design and manufacture of said object to reasonably infer it is the product of design.
The problem with your hypothetical scenario is you’re sneaking in design by starting with an object that we (as contemporary humans) already know is the product of human design and manufacture.
What you’re really asking me is whether or not I would recognize an object as designed that is predetermined to be recognizable as a designed object. Which of course, I would, because you’ve pre-baked that into your hypothetical scenario.
This is why Intelligent Design hypothetical scenarios fail at producing any sort of reasonable means of actually determining whether something unknown is the product of artificial design and manufacture.
What you should ask yourself is how do humans recognize objects as being designed and manufactured in the first place?
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So, something that didn’t actually ever happen. Go on…
Yes. For one, if design was inherent, it could be measured, and wouldn’t need to be “inferred”. Secondly, in order to tell that something is designed, we need to have enough of an understanding of what sort of things come about naturally, and what sort of things do not, and because design is not inherent, there is frankly no reliable heuristic to tell that initially.
Since we are proposing iPhones in the stone age, how about this equally as absurd scenario: Suppose that your hypothetical cave man’s brother is walking along a second beach, but in place of sand, the shoreline is covered all in iPhones. Which one of the thousands would he pick up to marvel at the intricate design of? Which one of them has that special something that makes it look designed, while all the others look like non-designed beach covering? For that matter, what about the sand looks non-designed to your cave man, exactly?
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Oh, absolutely.
Intelligent design / creationism’s entire raison d’etre is to act as a gateway to conservative Christianity. And in the context of the United States, a gateway to conservative Christian nationalist politics.
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All the articles, books, and conferences churned out by ID, and this single line stands to devastate the entire enterprise.
Imagine the following scenario. An archeological dig reveals an iron plow head. Do you think that questions of how and when it was made, and who made it, are in scope? Was it forged or cast? What temperatures were required? What dating can be assigned to the technology? What does that tell us about agriculture and animal domestication? In the real world, these are all elements of the design of the artifact. Means of manufacture is itself designed; to this day, in most cases the process of production is the most challenging barrier to producing the object. I can personally design a computer, but not starting with a bucket of sand.
Now ID can just flat out refuse to deal with instantiation and mechanism, but critics are just as free to dismiss such advocacy. There is no obligation to accept your limitation of scope. If you choose to evade integral questions of identity and mechanisms, you forfeit credibility, and it is legitimate to simply wave off ID as vacuous posturing.
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Iphones are not a relevant analog because they are not alive and don’t reproduce, especially not with imperfections and in an environment where they face competition for resources. Don’t you think that this makes an enormous difference with what evolution claims to explain?
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Yes. You need some sort of model of the designer in order to have expectations of designed things. Otherwise what basis is there to infer design on?
If you have no idea what the designer can or wants to design, how can anything you find be inferred to be what it designed?
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When science fiction movies depict the technology of extraterrestrial beings, they are always done so in such a way that they resemble the designed objects with which we are familiar, only more advanced. In reality, they might be so different from the things we created that it would be difficult for us to determine if they were designed or the result of some natural process completely unknown to us. That is the situation I imagine @Giltil’s stone age man would find himself in. I really doubt he would be able to determine that a cellphone was more likely designed than a pyrite crystal.
In fact, when European explorers first found stone arrowheads in North America, a vigorous debate ensued over what natural process could have produced these strange structures. They did not conclude they were designed until much later.
I suspect the stone age guy would think that all sorts of things were designed, like the weather, the mountains, the rivers, anything that had a patron god or kami. And yet many modern IDers would disagree on that point. I wonder what @Giltil thinks about those features.
This would appear to be a major issue with an “intelligent agent” as an explanation. They are, as you explicitly admit, completely “free”, and so fails to explain the limitations we see.
It fails to explain why true flight in vertebrates is limited to two extant lineages (birds and bats), and why that is limited to sacrificing two of these quadrupeds four limbs (rather than creating new limbs especially for flight).
Yes, a pig flying is a bit fanciful, but a ‘flying squirrel’ capable of true flight is far less so, as is for example a flying cat. I would note that Argentavis reached an estimated weight of 70kg – several times the weight of a pygmy hog).
Taking invertibrates, true flight is limited to insects.
This is only one of countless limitations that are explained by descent-with-modification, and the nested hierarchies it produces – but for which postulating an “intelligent agent” offers no explanation, beyond a vacuous ‘maybe the agent wanted it that way’.
Ineffability is not an explanation – it is an admission of the belief that something defies explanation. As such, even leaving aside Methodological Naturalism, it has no place in science.
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If, instead of asking if some object is designed, we ask if it has been manufactured, the answer is often much more straightforward. Yes to an IPhone and no to a pig. Can we at least agree on this?
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