ERVs and evolutionary predictions

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67

Oh my friend, I am in complete and vociferous agreement. Whatever “intelligent design” is, it’s not a scientific idea at all. (Much less a model, which has to do more work than just an idea.)

I hasten to add that lots of interesting and even good ideas are “not science.” What I am trying to respect is the fact that design is an interesting concept (cf. my references elsewhere to Dan Dennett’s writing on design) and that an atheist like me – who by definition rejects the existence of an “intelligent designer” god – should not make the mistake of conflating curiosity about design or even about gods with the widespread need among religious believers to gorge on falsehood. Those two things are not, to me, related. YMMV.

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I think we may disagree here but I’m not sure. My position on the involvement of omnipotent beings – in any aspect of the universe – is that they are out of the reach of science by definition and by design. A being with the power to direct an entire universe is a being with the power to cover that up. This is the definition of omnipotent. No scientific explanation – not evolution, not quantum mechanics, not fluid dynamics – can even ask whether an omnipotent being has manipulated reality or, for that matter, manipulated our ability to perceive and measure it. I don’t know how one would even begin to argue otherwise. That’s why I argue that evolution can’t speak to “whether a superintelligence oversees or meddles or guides it.”

Now of course scientists can and should (and do) argue that we have no evidence of such meddling, and we can discuss what such a thing would look like if it did happen. Since meddling need not involve gods or religion, and since the questions overlap substantially with uncontroversial questions about the capacities of actual beings and minds, the questions are both appropriate and necessary. This fact is often (indeed constantly) exploited by ID movement apologists, and that sucks, but I guess that’s the burden we bear when we confront a movement built almost entirely on lies.

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Agreed.

Gisteron seems to think that hypothesis, model, theory, and idea are interchangeable terms in biology.

Exactly, and this is why ID is as incoherent theologically as it is scientifically.

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This is a lie.

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How so? @sfmatheson just explained one of those misunderstandings; ID is not a biological model in any way, good or bad.

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Whether or not I seemed to think that hypothesis, model, theory, and idea are interchangeable terms in biology before sfmatheson made comments in response to me is not at all a function of their comments’ contents. I have at no point said or indicated that I do think that hypothesis, model, theory, and idea are interchangeable terms in biology, nor permitted through vagueness or brevity any ambiguity about whether or not I do think that. To say, therefore, that I seem to think that, i.e. that there is some amount of evidence to indicate or make plausible that I do, is a lie.

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I have no idea what you are trying to convey here. I’m also referring to my own conversation with you.

You just clearly conflated an idea with a model above.

You have provided ample evidence that you do, in “Side comments on guided mutations.” I explained it in the final post.

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Oh, my bad. I thought that when you said “sfmatheson just explained one of those misunderstandings”, and when you quoted their response to me to continue speak what I called a lie about what I seem to think, that you were referencing what sfmatheson said. I should have sensed that the direct quotation from their post and the explicit mention of their contribution to this discussion was actually supposed to not be a reference to anything they said but rather to your own conversation with me. My apologies.

If so (and I’m not granting as much, for now), then irrelevant. You said that I seemed to think hyothesis, model, theory, and idea were interchangeable terms in biology. Whether or not I conflated two of them is not me saying that I think that, or indicating that I think that, or permitting through vagueness or brevity any ambiguity about whether or not I do think that.

I shall not ask for a quote of you explaining in the final post of that thread the evidence to indicate or make plausible that I think that hypothesis, model, theory, and idea are interchangeable terms in biology, for this is perhaps side-tracking a tad too far. Suffice it to say that even reviewing that post now, I must be overlooking where in it is supposed to be your explannation of the evidence to indicate or make plausible that I think that hypothesis, model, theory, and idea are interchangeable terms in biology.

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Hi there, FWIW I don’t assume or believe that you are unaware of the differences among these important but often misused terms. (Often misused but also rarely well defined during a discussion–most misunderstandings and even arguments would evaporate once people wrote something like “…and by ‘theory’ I mean…”)

What I do see in your writing is carelessness. (@Mercer has noted this carelessness before, and you should listen.) You wrote a treatise on ID as a “model” in a conversation that wasn’t about that. You were writing (it seems) to disagree with what I wrote about – ironically – a need for clarity in defining what we mean when we write/speak about “ID.” It looks to me as if you ignored the comments (by me) that you were using as your foil to write your denunciation of “ID as a scientific model.”

Unfortunately lost in this now uninteresting conversation is my question of whether you are willing to distinguish ideas and beliefs about design, including “intelligent design,” from the pervasive dishonesty of people who travel in the ID movement. It takes work, I’ll grant you that, but the alternative is to gibber like an ignoramus and thereby to join at least one Hall of Dishonor that is eternally linked to the ID movement itself.

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What you began by pointing out – or disagreeing with my perhaps somewhat crude initial assessment – is that “design theories” may not, at face value, be always centered strictly around a rejection of evolution. I should have acknowledged that part, so herewith I do. Indeed, while the motives of many (if not all) ID proponents are clearly anti-scientific first, with any pretense of asking questions and introducing concepts to address them being a mere facade, there is, at least, that facade, the “thin wrapper around creationism” I had called it.

What I went on to respond with was re-emphasizing the arguably more important rejection I asserted, namely that of scientific methodology. The reason I focused on that was, that, ultimately, the acceptance or rejection of either observed fact or established theory is not on its own necessarily dishonest or otherwise condemnable. If anything, some healthy amount of scepticism, some incredulity towards statements one does not find immediately intuitive is natural. Not until a commitment to such first impressions does it become anti-scientific. In my opinion it is the call to reject effective methodology found in pseudoscience that constitutes the greater threat in it, far above merely false claims about nature. Of course, the rejection of scientific methodology is not something found in the ultimate conclusions or core tenets of a given… “discipline”, but rather in its practice. Intelligent design is a pseudoscience not because it consists of inadequate descriptions of nature, but specifically because of the movement as it is: The way it arrives at its claims, the way it develops them further, the way it responds to criticisms, and so on.

That being said, the context here is my response to gbrooks9’s assessment that ID was “not the problem” unless and until blended with young earth claims, wherein I expressed, in essence, that ID (as a movement, if that qualifier needs to be added for clarity) is one that promotes a dangerously inaccurate picture of nature, arrived at by inadequate means to study it. I meant to express that ID as it is visible to uninitiated people serves as a gateway into potentially highly conspiratorial distrust of demonstrably effective methodology, as well as the facts thereby uncovered, and as such it is a problem, whether or not outlandish claims about the age of earth or the universe are bundled with it (and perhaps even moreso when they are not).

So, yes, I do acknowledge that there is a distinction to be made between ID’s tenets in isolation and its most prominent advocates, and I have already said that the character of the latter does not in principle affect the merits of the former. In practice, both the merits of the former and the character of the latter are… low. Consequently I feel comfortable speaking lowly about both, without the need to specify which aspect I’m showing a distaste for on every occasion. If pressed, I would say, that as a scientist I’m concerned with its lack of scientific merits, so that’ll be the claims. Yet, on the subject of whether it is a “problem”, I find it important to consider the impact it has on the public discourse, the cultural attitudes towards science and education, and that is arguably more to do with the movement of ID than with the collection of its central claims.

I hope this message sufficiently answers your question, and my motives and meaning in attempting to address it in the way I did until now. I understand that I have been verbose about this. Despite the subtleties and nuances of the topic, this may not have been the most effective way of communicating what I meant. Then again I’m not sure that grave misunderstandings have arisen in the course of this exchange, or gotten in its way.

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77

Well said! Thanks!

Again, very well said and very important. My view is that the dishonest and nakedly propagandistic nature of the ID movement has made it very VERY difficult to talk about design (which should be of interest to everyone regardless of their openness to invisible friends) and especially about roles for gods (which, in a better universe, would be interesting only in stories). I don’t want to minimize that fact.

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Not even close. :sweat_smile:

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There are no design theories. You’re doing it again. Working scientists do not use the term “theory” as used in the term “conspiracy theory.” One does not start with a theory.

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In the last post of the thread I mentioned.

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I thought that when @Gisteron used scare quotes, they were being crystal clear. The lost minds of the ID movement regularly use the phrase “design theories” and whatever they are – I certainly agree that ID doesn’t have a single legit or coherent theory – it is reasonable for @Gisteron to refer to them as they did.

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Could be. OTOH, @Gisteron was asking for explanations.

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It is true that in casual usage, when it comes to a baseline scientific-ness, I make little if any distinction between models, hypotheses, and theories, treating, in particular, the latter two as subsets of the first, different for the most part in regards like scale and success. I believe it is reasonably clear within the context of my writing, that the criteria by which I decide if a given collection of ideas qualifies for this category is whether and how well it contextualizes experimental data in such a way as to allow for the derivation of predictions of data beyond what said collection merely accomodates. I believe that this has become clear enough, because there seems to remain no inquiry for further clarification, nor an apparent misunderstanding or disagreement on this.

“Design theory”, in my opinion, may technically just about satisfy this criterion. One could, at one’s most charitable, say that it is an attempt to contextualize, say, the admittedly vast discrepancies between some lineages, or particularly complex systems present within them, as a consequence of manipulations we would recognize as a goal-oriented – a designing, if you will. And, with as much charity, one could attempt and derive logical consequences of that contextualization. One could say that knowing what we do about good design practice, we should expect natural systems, if they indeed contain what we could recognize as design, show some efficiency of implementation. We would not expect excessive wastefulness, such as junk DNA, for instance. Whether this sort of reasoning is something commonly seen among design proponents is another question, but I do recognize, and insist, that at least in principle, the ID idea could deep down just about qualify as what I call a “scientific model” - more than just any “idea” about how things might work.

Needless to say, “design theory” is not a scientific theory. To the extent to which it may just about qualify for the broader category, its predictions – again, to the extent to which one could charitably try and derive any – are to my knowledge not borne out by the data. To the extent to which it is testable at all it is failing the tests, so it cannot be promoted to “theory”, a successful model of natural phenomena.

And indeed, the quotation marks around “design theory” were supposed to indicate that I am referencing the thing by the name it was given, not describing what it is in the context of an academic discipline, and even that I am only doing because apparently this has become a point of contention. Eventhough that too has “theory” in its name, “probability theory” it is not describing any natural phenomenon characterized by empirical data, nor advanced by empirical testing of logically derived inferences. It has even less in common with scientific theories than intelligent design, somehow (or conspiracy theories, for that matter), yet something tells me I would not have to worry about how my understanding of the operations of science in general or biology in particular are perceived, all for calling that branch of mathematics just by the name its students do.

Until elsewise indicated, I am not convinced that there was any grave confusion in the first place, regarding my stance on the scientific-ness of ID, or what the central metrics I would use to analyze such are. Whether my proprietary terminology perfectly aligns with some apparently well-established glossary used in biology, I have made no claims on. My goal in choosing words, for better or for worse, is communication. And I consider that goal well met when the harshest criticism I receive amounts to – with all due respect, and gratitude – quibbling over vocabulary.

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I agree, then note that this is exactly why the ID movement should IMO be kept conceptually separate from ideas or models or theories that either invoke design or seek to define and then detect it. I have mentioned before that I see almost no serious consideration of what design is, or how to detect it, or what its presence means, in the “work” of ID propagandists. No one who cares about design would care – much less desperately need, as is obvious – common descent to be false. That’s just flat-out interventionist creationism, but more pertinent is the fact that common descent has no specific relevance for design, especially the kind of intelligent design that involves a superhero.

This is where I’m reluctant to agree with you. I think it’s too easy for ID apologists to create a list of “predictions” that are “borne out by the data,” and to thereby direct attention away from the fact that there is no such thing as a “design theory” in the first place. Hugh Ross and his pitiful apologetics outfit have done this for many years – back in the day (and probably continuing to this day) he loved to trumpet his “model” and write hilarious lists of “predictions” of the “model.” To enter into a discussion about these “predictions” is to risk granting them scholarly respect that is oceans away from what they deserve.

More specifically, I don’t know how we might try to document the assertion you are making. Which “predictions”? Which data? What would it look like if a “prediction” were supported by data? For me, to engage in this conversation is to give ID propagandists just what they need: the appearance of a scholarly disagreement.

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When I speak of a model’s predictions I’m not so much referring to what advocates of the models say should be expected so much as what logically follows from its postulates.

The example I mentioned concerning junk DNA is something quite like what I’m thinking of for intelligent design. If it is the case that biological structures arose by some being’s intent, and its intent is intelligible to us, and DNA is part of the mechanism by which it encodes its organism designs and “programs” their bodies to develop as they do, then I believe a fairly reasonable inference is that we should expect little to no junk DNA. Exactly what the tolerance threshold is may be fuzzy, and with the possibility of identifying function in sections whose functionality has not been conclusively ruled out yet there is marginally more uncertainty in testing the claim, but I dare say the sheer amount of unambiguously non-functional DNA in some organisms we have mapped it in already is… well, it’s at least something ID proponents who can agree with the consistency of the prediction with their postulates need to come up with some excuse for. Frankly a case could be made that the amount is nowhere near low enough to still permit for the postulate that the designer is competent, but even if we admit the fuzziness of the prediction and the uncertainty in identifying the fraction of non-functional DNA, or prospects of reducing that fraction in future, what we can currently say is that the data as we currently have it is at least not readily in agreement with that prediction.

Edit: It is occurring to me that the existence and vague fraction of junk DNA may have been known to some extent before a prediction of this sort was rendered. It becomes a semantic question at that point whether “prediction” remains a good word for it. In the context of scientific methodology we are looking at a structure quite like predictions, but it may be more accurate to say, perhaps, that ID fails even at accommodating data available to it, let alone predicting any that may yet be gathered someday.

Someone more versed in biology and intelligent design than I could no doubt propose more predictions reasonably and charitably inferred from ID’s core tenets. Perhaps they could even derive more quantitative ones than what I came up with, and judge how well or poorly the current body of known and relevant facts aligns with them.

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I applaud @sfmatheson assessment in his posting above.

At the same time, it seems you, @Gisteron, are trying to grind me down with your forensic skills. But you are running close to the threshhold where discussing these matters with you becomes a waste of time:

A] you dismiss my points because i have not addressed or included the writings of the Quran. Really? Are you going to keep dancing to that tune? All you have convinced me of is that you are trying to obfuscate much more than you want to elucidate.

B] you require me to PROVE that the majority of English speaking Christians accept Resurrection along with their Evolutionary science.

You may be familiar with the long running surveys that show a consistent 37% to 42% share of Americans believe in 6 days of creation … while in the UK, this group is much smaller: 13% to 15%.

In a future posting I’ll see what these percentages look like for Canada, New Zealand, Australia etc.

I was more-or-less raised as a Unitarian (a group of “non-virgin birthers”). There is very little confusion about evolution in our discussions; what’s more we represent a tiny demographic sliver of Christianity!

So what about everyone else? Mainline denominations like Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and so on? Remember, we have already counted the Young Earth folks (regardless of denomination).

This leaves us all the various flavors of Old Earthers who ACCEPT evolution as a basic scientific reality. Setting aside Unitarians like me, we are left with Christians who implicitly mix some degree of the divine with their daily diet of science.

Which part of the Divine? Do they tend to be more interested in a divine birth of Jesus than in Jesus being raised to the God-head? We would do ourselves some good to find out if mainstream Christian evolutionists favored “this or that” part of the divine life cycle.

But what can we say for now about this remainder group of mainstream Christians? I think it is easy enough go see that everytime a certified atheist argues - - in the dozens of posts every week at Peaceful Science - - that evolution is sufficient WITHOUT any divine involvement, we are actively alienating the support of the the part of the Christian Communion that PS was hoping would embrace the work of opposing Young Earthers!!!

If we dont work harder to tolerate some speculative discussions of the divine … as PART of an evolutionary view of the Universe, our relevance will continue to be a sideshow run by Atheistic Evolutionists who cant tolerate even mildly miraculous ideas shared by minimally enthusiastic Presbyterians and Congregationists!!