After re-reading the source, you are correct.
The AVIDA examples don’t show any cases of zero function either.
On consideration, the situations where zero function is likely are short sequences - shorter than needed to accomplish the function at all - which is not interesting. The relative number of non-functional short sequences becomes vanishingly small as sequence length increases, so it doesn’t matter.
I don’t think so. If ID proponents are making falsifiable claims, and I believe they are much of the time, they cannot be dismissed as non-scientific purely on the basis that their claims are not falsifiable.
Well, with all due respect, that’s a bit of a bait and switch there, itself. We can’t know anything about an unknowable designer, But I don’t believe ID’ers generally hold that the “designer” is unknowable. Some of them even insist they have met him in person!
All said, I think there is general agreement that ‘information’ can be said to exist or be transformed in ‘life’. But … choosing a metric that is both appropriate and determinable in practice is where things fall down.
I’m not aware of any metric that forbids or indicates that biological evolution is impossible or even unlikely. In a number of metrics, it seems the opposite is likely. What is the source of biological information? Well, the environment and selection definitely provide a filter for its acquisition.
I think if one wants to make the case that the origin of life is or isn’t possible naturalistically, those are fair but contingent claims. I’d assign it a low weight in an argument because any definitive resolution either way appears far off at this point.
Aside: Thermodynamics and ‘information theory’ display many similar features but if you burn a deck of cards that is sorted by suit & rank and compare the heat output to a randomly shuffled deck made of the same materials, you’re not going to measure a difference. I suspect the term ‘entropy’ refers to somewhat different things in thermodynamics and information theory.
We can’t falsify creation of something by an unsupervised designer. However, I think we could confirm creation by an entity if there was sufficient positive evidence that one acted at the time and location where it happened. There are many ways in which a creator could specifically record or leave evidence of any particular interaction (stone tablets buried at the appropriate time, etc.), similar to how we investigate whether a particular bone or stone artifact may have been shaped by past humans.
One such attempt has been to argue that the chronological events of creation specified in Genesis were unexpected based on random chance and with information likely unavailable to humans of that era. Other people are still looking for a giant ark or conclusive evidence of a global flood. That hasn’t gone so well but at least some recognize the need to put forth positive theories of ‘design’ to make any inroads scientifically. Something the ID community was originally supposed to do by now…
Not bait-and-switch, just setting the story straight; ID proponents are making falsifiable claims about evolution, not about ID.
It is possible to define aspects of designer or the designer which allow falsifiable hypotheses. Material definitions make it possible for a designer (if they exist) to be knowable in a material sense. The Dependency Graph (Ewert 2016) is an example of defining what design might look like, which is why I cited it so often. It’s also the only example in all the ID literature of a hypothesis about Design.
Possible, but with very few exceptions testable hypotheses for ID just doesn’t happen.
And where tested, colewd will never accept that they failed…
Failing a test for ID is very different than failing all tests for ID. Newton based on his model of gravity saw Gods action as important for explaining the orbit of the planets as his model required corrections. This gravity plus design model was falsified by Einsteins model which did not require corrections to the action of gravity.
Most of ID presentations, as Dan mentioned, are not based on hypothesis testing but supporting a method of design detection. Winstons has been one of the exceptions. Behe’s work has been supporting design detection and as Dan mentioned his hypothesis testing has been testing evolutionary mechanisms such as gene duplication and divergence.
QED. All ID proposals are equally precious…