DI's response to Art Hunt

That is why i am like you more and more.

What are some of your ideas for Salvo Magazine articles? What is the size of your readership?

When the time comes, would you review a copy of my book there?

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Hi Terrell,

One of the things I puzzle over when I listen to ID proponents is the shifting concept of design. When many idea proponents talk about the wondrous cellular machineries that are (supposedly) irreducibly complex, and how their interactions are so delicate and finely crafted, then that’s supposed to point to divine authorship.

Then when a highly complex interaction is poorly functional and would receive a failing grade in any 100-level engineering course, the opposite argument is made: Why should we finite creatures claim to be able to understand the designs of an infinitely wise creator?

There is no way to falsify the ID argument here. The ID stance has reached epistemic closure, as @swamidass points out. If the design looks slick, it’s proof of God’s wisdom. If the design looks terrible, who are we to question the wisdom that surpasses ours?

Given this manner of arguing the question, how does “the design inference” help me understand anything about biology? The design inference seems to be useful for propping up someone’s beliefs, but it does not seem to have any value for exploring the natural world.

The seeming intractability of this inherent contradiction points to a need to root our faith in a non-scientific soil,I contend.

I know this is not a “softball” question, but I am hoping you might open a door of understanding in what seems to me to be an unbreachable wall. At the moment it doesn’t make sense to me, but that does not necessarily imply that it doesn’t make sense. It could also be that I am foolish.

Thanks!

Chris Falter

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There may be clear “intentions” discernable when “design” is subverted or suboptimized.

I can think of any number of reasons for diminishing the current yields of corn, for example.

And humanity’s soft and exposed vital organs from walking upright both confer a running and sighting advantage, while simultaneously rendering us vulnerable.

Again, there can be many reasons why God did not want to make us into invulnerable apex predators!!

As it is, we too easily wreak havoc on large land mammal species habitat and survivability.

There are plenty of other Biblical examples of “why would God do it that way?” that send us searching rather than permanently stymie us.

May I recommend Paul Copan’s “Is God a Moral Monster?” on that topic?

Cheers!

I would be interested in reading your book. Two possible problems come to mind:

  1. I am not a geneticist, so depending on the level of reader you’re writing to, I don’t know if I’ll be able to follow you.
  2. The unstated but no less operative presupposition that only natural causes are allowable as “science,” which you have clearly espoused (thank you for being clear) conflict with Salvo’s and my worldview presupposition that the design inference is allowable, even if the inferred designer is not explainable within the constraints of MN. That doesn’t mean a review is not allowable, but assuming that presupposition carries through in your book, I would make a point of that in a review.

I believe that second reservation is the foundational point of disagreement between you and me.

I don’t know the size of the readership. It’s not huge, at least the print version isn’t. The web visibility probably isn’t either. I think that’s unfortunate, because I think there’s good stuff there.

About ideas, I have lots more ideas than time to work them out into well-written articles, And actually, a lot more of my articles are on sexuality than science, and the toll that the breakdown of Judeo-Christian morals and ethics regarding sexuality have exacted on all people, especially the younger generation. My interactions here have given me more insight into the thinking behind TE/EC. I know you don’t identify yourself that way, but I still don’t know what the distinguishing difference is.

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Totally agree with you here.

As for your other question, I’m not a working scientist or an ID theorist. As a very short answer, I would point you to some of the information theorists such as William Dembski.

I’m not sure that it does. It’s an alternative inference to the assumption that natural causes are sufficient to explain the effect in question. To understand how anything works biologically, MN is sufficient. To understand its origin or the origin of the information necessary to cause it to come into existence in the first place, intelligence is allowed as a possible inferred cause.

There are also competing perspectives between those who would hold that all the necessary ordered genetic information was front-loaded into the first life, to be degraded or eventually re-accessed after environmental stessors come to bear, rather than supplied incrementally in an unfolding directive process… neither perspective necessarily even rules the other out.

As for the utility of such ways of thinking? I think there may be a motivational or perspectival advantage in deliberately applying engineering thinking, then puzzling over what’s discovered which seems to confound that, all the while remaining stauch in the conviction that it’s not all an accident, played out over vast amounts of time.

But practitioners of MN are just as capable of studying what’s actually there, and puzzling over it, too.

This. When all of the time the truly amazing “design” is the nearly infinite iterative process that gives rise to both types.

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He quit ID more than 2 years ago:

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I would call it a methodological necessity. Science works, more or less, by predicting and explaining phenomena based on consistent patterns in previously observed phenomena. In this context, all ‘naturalism’ means is ‘follows a pattern’. Anything that follows no pattern – that violates all patterns – cannot be addressed with the tools of science.

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Yes. For instance, if I see the hoof prints of a horse in the ground, I would interpret that as demonstrating that a horse had recently walked there.

You, OTOH, might interpret it as meaning that the square root of nine is 1000. If so, that’d be your interpretation, and no one could truthfully say it wasn’t.

Your point is trivially true. But if you’re claiming that all interpretations have equal claims to being correct, you’re just wrong.

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I would say that the scientific enterprise would not make sense without MN. Without MN, science mutates into a type of post-modernism where the only evidence you need for a theory is the belief that it is true.

The additional fact that ID supporters claim ID is science is what provokes the strong reaction from scientists. Scientists are not saying that ID has to follow MN in order to be valid. What scientists are saying is that ID has to follow MN if it is going to be considered scientific.

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They seem to be grasping at straws since @Agauger used plated bacteria as a model for unguided evolution in her own experiments.

Another interesting interaction I have had with ID supporters is on the subject of the de novo origin of human orphan genes. There are examples of possibly functional human orphan genes that arose through a handful of simple mutations. Obviously, these mutations didn’t happen in the lab or, presumably, under the guidance of breeders. The reaction I got was similar to that seen with T-urf13. They seem to think that those seemingly random sequences of intergenic sequence were somehow guided to produce a functional gene. So even when we have a historical map of the mutations within a stretch of DNA, it doesn’t seem to matter. No matter what, if function emerges then it is design.

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I would agree with your summation. They start with the conclusion that functional proteins can’t evolve, and then reject evidence based on that standing conclusion. It’s a bit like a loving mother defending her accused son by claiming all of the techniques in forensic science are wrong because they make her son look guilty.

If we were to watch each of these mutations happen in real time, and the result is T-urf13, what would their conclusion be? From what I can see, their conclusions would be the same. They would claim that T-urf13 is too improbable, and therefore could not have been produced by evolution.

Their epistemological blind spot is the assumption that what we see is the only possible outcome. This is known as the Sharpshooter Fallacy. What they seem to ignore is all of the possible functional proteins that could evolve at any one moment, but don’t. As neutral mutations build up in any genome there is a chance that an additional mutation will unlock a new function that depends on the accumulation of those previous mutations. This is an unavoidable process. It will happen. It is improper to look at one protein out of trillions that could have evolved, and then be amazed at the improbability of one chain events.

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Thank you; that is a helpful elucidation.

Obviously, those who are from just these two “opposing” epistemologies, then, are destined to frustate each other a bit, when dialoguing about this level of detail, and can’t help but come across to the other as “blind to the evidence.”

The nub comes down to whether there’s front-loaded potential, or dynamically “downloadable” information available, to supplement what appears to be more normally degradative occurrences, or whether increased fitness and order can truly arrive this unexpectedly and ephemerally, given time… or, whether any of these options hold simultaneous grains of truth, while not necessarily rendering the advocates of each approach dishonest, artless, or brainless.
In other words, frustrating attempts at continued dialogue may actually move us to a more peaceful perspective on each other? (He asked, coming across as completely obtuse). :o)

I would say that it is a matter of training. Scientists are trained on how to avoid cognitive biases like the Sharpshooter fallacy. Outsiders may think science is simply having a good idea and then doing some experiments, but it is much more complicated and difficult than that. In my opinion, the hardest thing a scientist does is figuring out how to prove themselves wrong and designing the experiments that will produce that falsifying evidence if it exists. That is one of the biggest differences I see between the ID/creationist community and the scientific community.

A scientist would ask for the types of observations that would differentiate between the two.

For example, let’s say someone said antibiotic resistance was front-loaded into bacteria. With that vague information, I would conclude that genetically identical bacteria would have the same front-loading. Therefore, if antibiotic resistance is front-loaded then all of the bacteria should have the same reaction to the same stimulus. However, if antibiotic resistance was stumbled upon by a random search then only a few of the bacteria should become resistant.

What do we see? Only a few bacteria out of billions become resistant, even though they started out with identical genomes. To me, that points to a random search and away from front-loading. If front-loading looks identical to a random search, then why propose that there is front-loading to begin with?

If nothing else, we should point to facts and explain how we arrived at our conclusions from those facts.

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Agreed.

This thread is amazing. It’s like I’m reading Lents’ explanation of Behe’s Edge thesis again. Maybe I can interpret for you.

  1. The author agrees with Hunt that tURF-13 meets the criteria for design. (I agree.)

  2. The author disagrees with Hunt that tURF-13 was observed to evolve de novo. tURF-13 was there before the maize genome was first sequenced.*

  3. Some research into signal sequences show a match with a signal sequence for another protein that is functioning as a calcium ion channel in a normal biological context, i.e. not extremely deleterious.

  4. tURF-13 is under nuclear regulation. Why would an organism evolve this type of mechanism for such a deleterious function when the observed method of dealing with tURF-13, absent articifial selection for it, is deletion?

Conclusion: tURF-13’s designed features, it’s binding properties, regulation and gated ion channel were designed to do something else. Mutations broke or damaged, among other things, its regulatory mechanism and likely the ion channel itself allowing unintended molecules like the fungal toxin to “leak” through it in exactly the same way Behe suggests chloroquine resistance evolved.

Not one of the comments here have addressed any of these main points. Again, truly amazing. Instead, we get nonsensical, conspiratorial speculations about the authorship of the article. I personally await the day when the obviously singular anonymous author of this article feels comfortable revealing himself publicly, likely after he gets tenure.

*This was NOT the impression I got from Hunt. If this is true Hunt has done something all of us ID people are so tired of seeing. Inferences from sequence data about the evolutionary history of a gene are NOT the same thing as “catching evolution in the act”. tURF-13 was advertised as an example of a clear before and after scenario by Hunt and others. If that is not true I would be very disappointed in the dishonest way it was presented.

Why do you think that this is so hard for @terrellclemmons to grasp?

How can she not see that the problem is that ID claims to use MN, and not that there are gatekeepers allowing or disallowing certain inferences?

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It’s not really about dialogue.

The advocates from one approach test hypotheses. The advocates for the other approach don’t. The latter ignore most of the relevant evidence while falsely claiming that both sides are interpreting the same evidence differently.

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Sure of yourself much? Don’t make me get testy with you! ;o)
From my side, it’s too easy to see you as straining out a gnat, and swallowing a camel!
Certainty sometimes arrives after thorough study, and sometimes on the heels of ignoring possibilities.