Thanks for playing along @colewd. Like I said, I’m not really intending this as a “gotcha”. I’m trying to figure out how we could actually apply this to some things I know something about. So, here are the examples I’m using and how I look at them:
This is aspirin. Of course we use it all the time and it is the simplest of the examples. Its particular arrangement of atoms is critical for its function. What is interesting to me about this is that aspirin is derived from nature. Originally salicylic acid was extracted from willow trees (people used to chew on the bark for pain relief) and in 1853 a chemist combined that with acetyl chloride to form the molecule above. We call this a pseudo-synthetic drug because we took what nature provided and tweaked it. Was it designed? I’m not sure. The structure of aspirin wasn’t intentional, the molecule was found by trial and error, based on a molecular in nature, I have a hard time thinking that’s designed. On the other hand, my students synthesize aspirin using a very intentionally designed experiment.
This one is rofecoxib, commonly known under the brand name Vioxx. It was a pain reliever designed by chemists at Merk. This is the only one of the examples that I would say confidently was designed. It also had a tendency to cause heart attacks and was removed from the market in 2004 and led to lot of lawyer commercials on TV.
This is called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and is an example of a class of reactions called “clock reactions”. They periodically (like clock-work) change colors. This one is a quite complicated and chaotic one. Others are more stable. The chemists who came up with these reactions didn’t intentionally design the chemistry, they used a lot of trial and error. In fact, according to WIkipedia they never got their work published in a peer-reviewed journal because they couldn’t explain how the reactions worked.
This is a picture (not a painting) of “lead trees”. I’ve done this experiment. These are absolutely just natural chemical structures of precipitating lead in a gelatinous fluid (to keep currents from nocking them over).
Based on looking at the pictures @colewd, I would have ranked them as you did, top to bottom for least to most designed. What I know is that the second one is the only one I would say is actually designed, and that knowledge has nothing to do with how it looks or behaves and everything to do with actual history. I certainly don’t feel like I can trust myself (including my mind) to determine design at this point.
You need to separate out design detection from design. You are testing it at the edge there and not where our “measurement” tool has reasonable detection. Any measurement will show false negatives/positives if the measurement is at the resolution limit of the tool.
As Behe claimed design detection is quantitative.
All that being said this was an interesting exercise.
Nope. That isnt it. It is all over the map because ID proponents lack the motivation to learn a general awareness of the limits of the scientific method.
You need to get past mere assertion as so far you have failed to establish this by argument. How exactly does the design argument fall out of the scientific method? The scientific method is for hypothesis testing. How do you apply it to theory?
Okay, but in addition to being at the detection limit (I teach instrumental chemical analysis so I can certainly appreciate that) the false positives could be because the measurement tool is just bad (not measuring what we think we’re measuring). In order to figure out the difference we should try to make some “measurements” above the detection limit. Where would you suggest we look?
How about we go a little bit bigger than the previous molecules? If we look at these two structures, which one (or both) of these similar looking molecules might be designed? What process would you use?
You mention above that it’s number of parts and how closely they work together, could we use for instance root-mean-square fluctuation between the active site on an enzyme and a substrate? So perhaps the more specific the enzyme is the more likely it is that it’s designed? Can we attach a “probability of design” to various enzymes?
We are way away here from the examples that Behe uses for design detection. The three examples in the video were involving complexes with multiple proteins. Part counts were large 30 to 40 in the case of the flagellum and part interaction was also high as all parts are required for the function.
All this being said I think your example is interesting. I would like to think it over.
Again, we are measuring design detection and not design or not design. It could very well turn out that all the universe is designed so in that case there is only one answer.
In this case you are trying to differentiate human involvement. Is that right?
Heh. All you’ve done for two years is make the same unsupported assertions: “this looks like a human design to me so it must be designed”, “this biological function has parts so they must be purposely put there”, blah blah blah.
Behe didn’t detect any design. Behe made the same tired argument from personal incredulity and assumed his conclusion biological functions were purposely constructed. For some reason Bill just can’t get it, or won’t get it.
OK, here’s another thought: does an internal combustion engine have a higher probability of being designed than the chemical reactions in the combustion itself? If so, how is that measured? If not, why not?
I realize I’m working more on the lower end, but I’m a chemist so I’m working with things I know and also we physical scientists are well known for our reductionism (“ok, so we will model a cow as a point with mass m”). However, there is good reason for that if you’re trying to assess competing mechanisms and/or hypotheses.
But how can you determine detectability without known examples of the thing to be detected? We don’t even know if we’re at a detection limit if we don’t actually know we are detecting anything! And we don’t know if we’re detecting anything if we don’t have a known example of the thing we are trying to detect with which to test our instrument/protocol. So if we are trying to determine the detectability of design, we need known cases of design to compare with for use in our tests. We can’t use any of Behe’s example because they are the thing in question!
You can’t measure the detectability of something you don’t know you’re detecting. You have to have known examples to use to determine detectability. If you can’t tell signal from noise, you are sunk and you have a failed instrument and/or protocol.
Yes, because that’s the best (only?) source of design I have any hope of knowing well enough to make assessments on detectability, etc.
The ID folks keep saying that a mind is the only source of design we know of so I figured it would be the best place to start. Am I wrong in that?
In my world the chance is the same. The universe is designed. One however is direct design the other is indirect design which comes from the laws of physics and chemistry. Most of science is trying to find indirect design.
Mount Everest and Mt Rushmore are examples of levels of design detection. So was the kaleidoscope pattern and the kaleidoscope cat. In the same way the flagellum looks like an outboard motor, the plant hoppers hind legs look like a motor gear, and the bacteriophage looks like a lunar landing module. We are detecting design based on known design standards.
Oh, this is interesting. I’m glad I asked. So as a Christian I can certainly see a difference between direct design and indirect design (Mt. Everest and Mt. Rushmore are a good example). Do you think we can quantitatively distinguish between direct and indirect design?
The reason I asked about the engine was that I certainly know the engine is designed. Not only do I know its history, it’s got clearly machined parts and that are made to fit and work together. The combustion reactions themselves seems much less designed. They are just spontaneous chemical reactions. However, the system of combustion reactions we find in an engine are quite complicated. Last time I looked there were over 100 different reactions, and in fact there is an entire national research lab in California called the Gas Combustion Research Facility (i’ve been there) that researches these types of reactions (among other things) to understand how to make them more efficient, etc. Now, if you take out a key reaction (and there would be several) then the whole system would look much differently, and perhaps the engine no longer has enough power to be useful at all. According to the ID definitions of design, would this set of chemical reactions that the engine is harnessing be just as designed as the bug gears?
Let me rephrase this a little and see if you still agree (just because it makes more sense in my head):
We are establishing the likelihood of being purposefully designed based on level of similarity to known designed exemplars.
Would that be a decent restatement? I just have some issues with “standards” and “detecting” just because in my field they have meanings that perhaps you don’t intend.
I think the ID guys like Behe are identifying aspects of nature that are not explained by the laws of physics and chemistry (indirect design). Identifying indirect design is most of what science is doing. The quantitive effort would be to show that causes based on physics and chemistry are unlikely and a mechanism as powerful as a mind maybe required.
We are clearly in the first inning of this type of thinking and Mike Behe is a leader here. At this point the value I see to this hypothesis is as an alternative hypothesis that biology, physics and chemistry can test against.
I think it may be a more sophisticated than bug gears but it can be a least partially if not fully explained by physics and chemistry. So standard scientific methods can be used to explain it. On the other hand the observation of bug gears is a challenge for the laws of physics and chemistry to explain.
Let me think about this. As a minimum you are on the right track.
The game really starts when we see more applications especially in other sciences like physics. Mike’s demonstration of the bacteriophage was eye opening to me. What is the origin of these external mechanical molecular parts that coordinate DNA injection?
