Has Intelligent Design some merit to get to new theories?

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It might help if you didn’t repeatedly say such things …

… like this.

In fact, Dembski would have us ignore well established systems of inference (including statistical inference) for his made-up system which has no theoretical support. Dembski must reject all established methods, otherwise there is no other way to get the conclusion he wants.

Consider the classic ID statement, “The odds of the protein being assembled randomly are so small that is can only be designed.” Some small probability is calculated, call it P, and this is used to determine the odds. This statement happens to match the interpretation of a Bayes Factor, a well accepted method of inference. Let’s see what happens if we consider P in a Bayes Factor, which is the ratio of two probabilities:

Bayes Factor = P / Q

Where P is now formally the probability of protein assembly under evolution and some prior assumption and Q is the probability of protein assembly under intelligent Design and the same prior assumption. Now we can compare P, the odds against evolution in the classic ID statement, to the Bayes Factor …

PP = :question: = PP / QQ

The only way to get the left and right sides to be equal, is if Q = 1.0.
And now we have to wonder what sort of prior assumption could consider the same evidence (data!) to arrive at a very small probability P for evolution and probability Q=1 for Design, which implies absolute certainty.

The answer is that no such prior assumption exists that I am aware of, except to simply assert Q=1 and ignore the evidence entirely. The likelihood of evolution can only get smaller the more data that is considered; the probability of Design is always 1.0 and the data is never considered. “Q=1” is a tacit assumption underlying all of Intelligent Design.

This is why I say the Explanatory Filter or similar arguments for ID are Circular Arguments. There is always consideration of some likelihood of evolution, and never any consideration for the likelihood of Design. The prior assumption - even if we can’t actually write down what that is - implies Design is the only allowable conclusion. The conclusion is exactly what was already assumed.

A few things to note:

  1. I have been hand-wavy about the math in order to quickly get to the point about the tacit assumption of Intelligent Design.
  2. The simplest way to prove me wrong is to show a calculation for the probability of Design.
  3. For 20 years and counting now, my complaint is not that some Divine Creator could exist, but that proponents of ID are making bad arguments.

@Giltil I think you are assuming Q=1, and I’m OK with that. The trouble comes when people plug that prior belief into their inference to make grand claims; those claims can only be a restatement of belief.

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any questions?

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I collected hundreds of ‘definitions’ of irreducible complexity from dozens of people, quite a few of them showing that the authors didn’t unterstand the concept. I think about the first definition published in Behes Darwin’s Black Box p. 39

‘Irreducible complexity’ is a concept concerning different levels. One is a property of a system as you can find in the citation above. Another one is following out of that property: It’s not evolvable by certain mechanisms, but (mabe) by others, as Behe even concedes one page later.

Behe (and many of his followers) make the unsubstantiated conclusion ‘not evolvable ergo design’.

I don’t. I wrote that I’m a staunch naturalist.

I fully agree. That’s the weakest part of his book.

That’s a difficult question: How to test a hypothesis that concerns limits of knowledge? If you would know that something is designed that would mean that there is no explanation.

An explanation is naturalistic or it isn’t one. If interventionism would be true, you can explain only what that entity reveals to you. That would be an unexplainable ‘brute fact’.

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I agree with that, but then that just raises a question about what your overall point is, if you still think real evolution has workable solutions to the phenomenon of irreducible complexity?

The WEASEL program makes for a poor solution to the sort of irreducible complexity where partial solutions to certain words don’t provide fitness benefits. Okay, but then where do you want to go from that?

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SFMJI

Living in Germany ID isn’t YEC in a different name for me.

ID is a very old concept. Do you know the example from Cicero or an even older from Sokrates? Sounds quite modern.

Maybe the ID-movement in the US is, but I’m not so sure. Most of prominent ID-proponents aren’t YEC and the history of that movement shows that there are few people in the DI and a YEC-organization. Think about Morris, the founder of modern YEC, he wrote literally on his deathbed a philippika against ID.

Living in Germany I argued against YEC since 50 years. When the ID-movement in the US began, the first proponents in Germany were Jehovas Witnesses like Lönnig, Meis or Rammerstorfer. For most defenders of a naturalistic evolution it took some time to realise that ID and YEC are different issues.

Do you agree with

Ross, M.R. (2005) ‘Who Believes What? Clearing up Confusion over Intelligent Design and Young-Earth Creationism’ Journal of Geoscience Education 53 (3):319-323

YEC is a position with a specified content (bible in a very literalistic interpretation), ID is a mode of argumentation compatible with lots of different positions. You can be e.g. a muslim arguing via ID, but not muslim and YEC. Harun Yahya for example used arguments from american YEC purging mentions of the bible. He didn’t need to do this concerning ID.

The biggest YEC-organisation in Germany (Wort und Wissen) tried SD (Specified Design, meaning Intelligent Design with specifying the Designer explicitly as the God of their version of christianity). Since many years they argue publicly mostly with ID, but they’re honest. If you ask them “how old is the earth?” they say “I believe some 1000 years, and I know that that’s against scientific knowledge. But I must believe it for theological reasons and I hope that God will provide me with a solution sometimes in the future”. American YEC regard that as weakness, it’s not by chance that the many, many articles and books they publish are translated in quite a lot of languages, but not in English, even as they tried hard.

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NOPE. That’s like answering the question “How works the engine of that car” with “red”.

‘Evolution’ is a term for something happening in nature, ‘cumulative selection’ is one mechanism explaining that. There are lots of other proposed mechanisms, interventionistic, naturalistic or others.

I used a PASCAL source code which Dawkins didn’t recognise as his own but didn’t deny either. It generates exactly the kind of output he described in his The Blind Watchmaker. I modified just some lines of code in a subroutine of that program and for in- and output.

I didn’t intent to show that naturalistic mechanisms aren’t able to generate IC-systems (they do trivially, just take a redundant system and delete some parts).

I just wanted to show from a historical point of view that Behe had an argument against at least one mechanism. Not any mechanism, but the most important mechanism then. Don’t forget the Christmas Lectures Dawkins gave then. There he even demonstrated his mechanism by a model of Mount Improbable crafted by his parents.

It’s interesting if someone writes a program generating IC (you remember

Lenski, R.E.; Ofria, C.; Pennock, R.T.; Adami, C. (2003) ‘The evolutionary origin of complex features’ Nature 423:139-144

?) but that isn’t of any relevance for my issue.

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Yes. Why do you try to pretend that the “weasel” is intended as anything more than a toy model created only to demonstrate a single point?

On what basis do you claim that indirect routes require non-Darwinian mechanisms? You still haven’t offered anything valid.

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I’m writing a PhD-thesis about IC and I’m interested in different aspects. One of them is the weight regarding evolutionary mechanisms, but another, more important one for me, are discussions about that concept. Regrettably many, many critics didn’t even understand that concept. I’ve collected quite a lot of ‘definitions’ clarly showing that.

My time frame was intended to be between the 1990s and the Kitzmiller-Trial. But I realized that Behe changes his positions.

I’ve read through quite a lot of discussions in the literature. Behe could quite often show that his concept wasn’t understood.

Recently I found this forum watching YouTube-discussions between Behe and e.g. Swamidass or Stern Cardinale.

Maybe I’ll have to do some homework.

My point with the WEASEL-program was to show a real problem for certain mechanismus. Do you know

Thornhill, R.H.; Ussery, D.W. (2000) ‘A classification of possible routes of Darwinian evolution’ The Journal of Theoretical Biology 203:111-116

(I posted a link and the system asked not to do that a second time). They agree that IC is really that problem for one of these. But that was a very important one.

But my highest goal is a fair, but effective, discussion using the ‘principle of charity’. Not to let the interventionist some air to breathe, but to make the argument as effective as possible.

Discussing with interventionists in RL since 50 years I found that it’s very contraproductive if your argument has flaws. That enables your opponent to stick to this (e.g. an insufficient definition of IC) and to conceal his utter weakness (there is no valid connection between ‘is IC’ and ‘must be design’).

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Don’t worry too much about that. It’s mostly intended to reduce repetitive media content like memes and videos :slight_smile:

The term “Steelmanning” seems to apply. That’s a good approach, but should also reveal any flaws.

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Maybe at some point you might deign to state exactly what your “issue” is. That might help.

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In public schools in the United States, YEC, ID, Old Earth Creationism, and Theistic Evolutionary Creationism can’t be taught or even mentioned as an alternative to evolution. A Federal court ruled in the Dover case that Creationism is religion and would be against the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution for it to be taught in public schools. There is an organization in the United States called Freedom From Religion Foundation that monitors any incursion of ID or creationism into the public schools. So far the line is holding but every year over a thousand complaints are filed.

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I don’t pretend, I look at it as it is. The intention of the author is one thread, what he achieved another.

Dawkins wanted to demonstrate what cumulative selection can achieve, I showed what it can’t.

Where is the problem?

I said that it’s not trivial to define ‘darwinian mechanism’. If you look in articles about the history of evolutionary biology you will find what I mean.

Do you know

Kellogg, V.L. (1907) ‘Darwinism To-Day. A Discussion of Present-Day Scientific Criticism of the Darwinian Selection Theories, Together With a Brief Account of the Principal Other Proposed Auxiliary and Alternative Theories of Species-Forming’ New York, Henry Holt URL: http://archive.org/details/darwinismtodaya01kellgoog, letzter Zugriff: 16.06.2021

Kellogg wrote this book as a Darwinist defending Darwinism in 1907 for the first Darwin-year 1909 (Darwin’s 100th birthday and 50 years Origin of Species). In these times it was usual to put an abstract in the title of a book (Darwin did that also …). Kellogg’s book was intended as a complete list of all evolutionary theories known in 1907 and he made two groups: one auxiliary (these would fix certain problems of Darwin’s theory) and alternative (not compatible with Darwin’s theory).

Maybe you remember the ‘Eclipse of Darwinism’ beginning 1900 when the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws persuaded most evolunary biologists that Darwin was wrong and scientifically refuted. Most theories at least till the 1920’s were lamarckian. Of course Darwin’s theory of common descent was ever since Darwin generallly accepted and remained so, but the mechanism behind that was (and is …) disputed.

Same issue today. Look for example to symbiogenesis. That ‘mechanism’ is the best imaginable refutation of Darwin’s theory. If Dawkins got it right in

Dawkins, R. (1985) ‘What was all the fuss about’ Nature 316:683-684

(a review of Eldredge’s book about Punk Eek) that would be a clear sign of creation, as Darwin himself wrote.

So we could make a list of proposed mechanisms in the recent evolutionary biology, define what we want to understand by ‘darwinian mechanism’ and check each entry. I’m cocksure that most theories about adaptation are darwinian, at least most about generating novelties not.

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I agree. Of course it has first priority to mind real mistakes (e.g. false quotes etc.). If that is possible there is no reason to do otherwise.

I would even go further: If a YEC wants to nitpick any details of evolutionary biology I ask him to clean his own house. If you believe the earth is only 6000 years old, don’t mind if a minor topic in evolutionary biology is not clear. Compared to his log that’s a splinter in the other one’s eye.

I have close contact with educated interventionists. Quite often we discuss an article from a more or less authority against their position and they greet me with “Hey, look, your buddy … did make that grand mistake” and regrettably, quite often they’re right. That annoys me and therefore I plead not to use poor arguments.

If not too well educated laymen watch such a discussion about invalid criticisms maybe they get the impression that a position has some merit because it can refute attacks.

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I just read that section of CTH. The paper in question is A Classification of Possible Routes of Darwinian Evolution, RH Thornhill, DW Ussery - Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2000 - Elsevier.

As CTH explains, Thornhill & Ussery only mention Behe’s IC claims in order to demonstrate that they are false. It would seem tendentious to even claim that this is shows that Behe’s work has “contributed to science” (as Mike Gene asserted), and demonstrably false to claim that this helped science “to get to new theories”.

If I claim that Moon is made of green cheese, get enough attention, and convince enough people of my bullshit, that some expert in Lunar Geology decides its worth their time to prove me wrong, have I likewise “contributed to science” or helped it “get to new theories”?

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I said “creationism” not “yec”. And I’m very specifically talking about the US-centered movement pushed by Discovery Institute.

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Then we have a semantic issue. In the big picture, theories do not come first; they are hypotheses that have survived many attempts to falsify them. Prions are a modern example of that. Most hypotheses are not derived from theories. Theories do, however, generate hypotheses for further testing. Using those definitions, “evolutionary theory” is actually a collection of intertwined theories.

But I’m willing to bet that none of them has tested an ID or YEC hypothesis, so their alleged competency is irrelevant.

I think it can be discarded as pseudoscience.

Your name-dropping style, your obsession with Dawkins while claiming to be well-read in evolutionary theory (not biology), the credentialism you used above, etc.

No. I’m asking if you can point to something OUTSIDE of biology. That’s why I specified “any other scientific field.”

I know.

I haven’t read it and never will. This is why I ask you why you focus on rhetoric and ignore empiricism.

And not useful to working scientists.

False. Common descent easily meets the criteria used by empiricists.

A negative and without mechanism, so doubly not a scientific hypothesis. Easy.

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Good. You created the opposite impression when you introduced yourself.

I think that “dishonest” is a more accurate description.

But science is about testing hypotheses. Pseudoscience pretends that it is merely post hoc explanations. Behe is a pseudoscientist.

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Do you also realize that Behe misrepresents the evidence itself and doesn’t correct his books after he admits to a false claim?

Dawkins did it to explain to laypeople. You have demonstrated nothing about evolution.

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from my point of view (from Germany, of course) ‘creationism’ without qualification is YEC.

Maybe ‘interventionism’ is a better term than ‘creationism’? People like Miller or Pennock would qualify as ‘creationist’ but not as ‘interventionist’. Accomodationists as well.

Do you know prominent authors active at the DI which are YEC? Wouldn’t it be appropriate to have a sophisticated nomenclature?

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of course. But why do you ask? We’re talking about the weasel-program.

He didn’t explain ‘evolution’ (a pattern) but cumulative selection (a process). He was interested in showing what this mechanism can achieve, I showed a problem.

Where did I talk about evolution?