Discovery Institute May Have Hit a New Low?

I also agree that the bad design argument isn’t sound. Vestigial structures aren’t evidence for evolution because they are bad designs. Vestigial structures are evidence for evolution because they fit into the expected phylogeny. A mammal with vestigial feathers or a bird with vestigial teats would be problems for evolution.

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Why are they twins? It is simply false that evolution requires the existence of junk DNA, and it is almost certainly false that there is no junk DNA. It is not false that at least some ID proponents talk about design in ways that suggest an expectation optimal design.

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There’s a bit of “human exceptionalism” mixed in there as well. This can also be seen in their attempts to dispute the genetic similarities between humans and chimps. Humans are supposed to be special to God, so surely He would take his time to make our genome special in some way (according to their logic, not the logic of many Christians).

Both arguments rely on, usually, tacit or questionable theological assumptions that are required for the argument to work.

Both arguments end up, in practice, straw-manning the opposing view.

Both arguments rely on very poorly specified notions of both “design” and evolution, and what we expect from each model(s).

Both neglect that there multiple models of design and multiple models of evolution, and at most they are only ruling out one variant, not the whole class.

The data is not cooperative with either argument, at least in the way the argument demands. You know the problems with the no-Junk-DNA argument, but claiming that particular biological features (e.g. the eye) are “poorly designed” also isn’t rigorous or consistent with the evidence. At best you could argue that biology does not look how humans would design it (and I certainly agree with this), or that biological systems are not perfect, but that doesn’t mean “bad design.”

Those are the sort of reasons I say they are twinned arguments. Though of course there are differences too.

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The bad design argument is not so much about supporting evolution, but is more about teleology. It is a sound argument against “good design”.

The classical problem is that an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent God would be expected to create the best of all possible worlds. In the domain of special creation of life, surely as good a job as could be imagined by an advanced civilization should be the standard. But what we find appears to include many instances of botches and kludges. As @T_aquaticus posts, this observation is to be expected given phylogeny, which does not begin with a blank sheet and a teleological objective in mind.

Bad design, however, does not sit easily with direct divine creation, given that design is the central mantra. This is why YEC in particular expends so much effort in disputing that the design is sub-par, or not essential, or suggesting that the original intent was compromised in the fall.

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Perhaps, but: nobody thinks that the crappiness of design is a very good argument against design, do they? My experience is that this issue ONLY comes up after the creationist first argues that the construction of things in nature is so rip-roarin’, rootin’-tootin’ amazing, so filled with intelligence and wisdom (Halleluia, and sis-boom-bah!) that its sheer brilliance attests to the fact that it can only have come from Baal or one of his mates down at the pub. That’s the context. This silly argument is made, and then the response is sometimes given that the design is not so rootin’, and not so tootin’, as it is being said to be.

As a primary philosophical or evidentiary argument for evolutionary theory, this would fail in every possible way. But nobody thinks it succeeds in that role anyhow. It is simply a retort to a bad creationist argument; it arises in dialogue, by the processes of argumentation themselves, by the conventions of turn-taking in conversation. Creationist says “the character of living things is that they reflect the transcendent brilliance of Baal’s wisdom,” and the response is that if that’s so, Baal needs to take a few classes in how to design living things, because frankly, he’s crap at it.

So who is the source of the crappy theology in this argument? Not the biologist; it’s the creationist, supplying it on both sides. He supplies the crappy theology that says that nature reflects the masterful design of the creator, and is answered by the consequences of evaluating “designs” against this crappy theological standard.

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I certainly agree that ‘good’ design should not be a necessary assumption of ID, as we can observe a large number of examples of designed objects that are very poorly designed. However, since it is not my impression that many (or any) ID advocates are suggesting an incompetent designer…

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Its not sound against some brands of creationism, but against YEC and maybe OEC which posits God literally made everything good, it is.

The GULO pseudogene is my favorite in this regard. It is vestigial and is distributed among primates in a manner consistent with common descent.

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Um, no, we have not found a large number of examples very poorly designed biological artifacts, at least not in any scientifically rigorous way. There is not a scientifically rigorous definition of “poorly design”. If you try to make one, you might start sounding a lot like Behe trying to define “design.”

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It is poor design to give us a sun which helps with vitamin D biosynthesis, but also increases the risk of skin malignancies on exposure to it.

Biological artifacts? Sorry, you’ve badly misread my comment. I mean to say that people have made stuff, and much of it they have made badly. So clearly actual designers make stuff badly, so why shouldn’t the ‘designer’ of ID? Hence, not a necessary assumption.

Since we can know the examples in question are designed by, ya know, watching people do it, I’m not worried about the scientific rigor of ‘design’ as I used it. The fact that the ID camp can’t define ‘design’ rigorously as they use it sounds like a problem for the ID camp.

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The problem of God-talk in academic biology is far more pervasive than I have time to elaborate here.

But, contra Puck – who plausibly advances the “it’s only a reductio for creationist silliness” rejoinder – one can find theological claims in genres and contexts where the creationists have long since departed. Encyclopedia articles on evolution, for example, or public school biology textbooks. This analysis of Dobzhansky’s famous 1973 article, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” by philosopher of science Steve Dilley, is worth a look:

The article is paywalled, but if anyone contacts me (paul.alfredp@gmail.com) and gives me an email to use, I’ll send them a copy. Fair use and all that.

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Apparently I did. I was discussing the bad design argument against creation.

I don’t think so. There are two opposing classes of arguments that, as far as I can see, really do rather accurately describe (and thus contradict) each other.

If we can see that there is a disadvantage or sub-optimality to some structure that could be rather easily fixed with some foresight (which evolution lacks) and biochemical/developmental knowledge, then it really does matter to the validity of a certain opposing class of arguments whether this is in fact a disadvantage.

And if someone is of the opinion that their preferred designer wouldn’t ever deign to create something sub-optimal, or otherwise disadvantageous that some mere human can see how could quickly be improved, then that sub-optimal design, if it really is sub-optimal, is evidence against that kind of conception of design.

That there are other people with different conceptions of design doesn’t mean these two arguments aren’t strictly (and accurately) contradictory.

I would agree with you that there are people on both sides who appear to be overstating their cases. It would be wrong to say that some sort of sub-optimality is evidence against design of any form, just as it would be wrong to say that the optimality (or nearly so) of some structure necessarily is evidence against evolution.

Some things just don’t make sense as the product of a sort of ex nihilo special creation because they have flaws in them that really do look like the contingent products of a historical process that doesn’t have a sort of bird’s eye view of the internal wiring of an organism, and can’t see into the future to plan the development of future descendants of the organism. This is because there really are people with very specific, grandiose views of what this ex nihilo special creation apparently entails.

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How about a design that has a quick and obvious improvement? How about not requiring braces to get your teeth aligned properly when you grow up? Or not having deteriorating eyesight with age?

I’m sorry but your argument is just not good at all. Even if there isn’t really an objective dividing line between good and bad (I don’t care about the label “poor” or “good”), it is rather easy to see that there are relative differences in function and performance of innumerable biological structures and attributes and that some things really can be improved.

Is one thing more robust or stable or flexible or wasteful than another? Can we see how this one thing could be made to function just as well by using less material, or remain stable even at higher temperatures, and so on? Well yes we can.

So what is a good explanation for why they haven’t been further improved? I mean if we can see that they can be, why haven’t they been if they were designed? The designer just doesn’t care? Oddly enough I know of no actual believer in design who would agree that the designer just doesn’t care.

Turns out there are perfectly good explanations for this in evolutionary biology though, where the explanations really do owe to some combination of historical developments and limitations in the efficacy of natural selection to further improve a trait.

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How does ‘no junk DNA disproves evolution’ rely on a theological assumption? Bad designs of course rely on theological assumptions, but that seems fair in response to ID advocates who are making those same assumptions.

The anti-evolution argument, I believe, originally relied on a poorly specified and badly out of date notion of evolution. More recent versions have been squarely targeted at Dan Graur’s claims – and they would have been sound arguments, had Graur not been mistaken, and had genomes really been junk-free. But even Graur does’t believe his argument now, and the genome really is full of junk.

On the other side… is there any model of design that isn’t poorly specified? But rather than rely on design models, which seem to be rather thin on the ground, we can look to at least one example of what design-proponents (including DI luminaries) do predict: they predict that the entire genome is functional. As far as I can tell, they base that on the most simplistic reasoning about efficiency and optimal design – exactly the kind of argument you’re dismissing as a straw man. Given their own stated expectations about design, the human genome is badly designed.

There are of course other kinds of design argument and other kinds of design advocates, but ‘bad design’ arguments are generally aimed at those advancing informal, non-rigorous claims about the evident design in biological systems. If design proponents don’t want ideas about design to be judged by the standard of ‘looks (un)designed to me’, they should stop offering that kind of argument.

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Theistic evolution, such as you personally hold to, is a model of design that is specified, is not?

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We can compare and contrast similar biological designs with each other, so we have an internal control.

An example is the far more intelligent design of ending than of beginning translation. Same process, and it’s easy to see the difference. A protein can end with any amino-acid residue, but must begin with methionine.

Consequently, there’s a massive amount of machinery devoted to replacing or adding stuff to N-termini that could easily have been avoided by having a start codon that does not specify an amino acid.

Not, I think. It’s just two words mashed together, vaguely referring to God somehow being involved. But if I’m mistaken and it actually is specified, could you specify it here, now?

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It could also be said that if life was designed then it was done so by a committee of rather limited designers. In addition, they would have had to artificially imposed a design process that would result in a nested hierarchy, perhaps something like a branching game of telephone. We could think of any number of tortured design scenarios that could explain the data, all of which would probably not be to the liking of ID/creationists. However, parsimony pushes us to favor the known and observed process that would naturally and necessarily produce the patterns we observe in biology.

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