Of course, it’s a bad argument. It is about the same as to argue that because a car, which we know was designed, is heavy, it follows that a heavy rock was designed too. But the argument from FI doen’t work like that, not at all. It is not a very bad argument from analogy.
No. The burden of proof is on those who suggest the existence of forces in the universe that would be characterized as “supernatural” to account for the existence of things that exist in the natural, material world. as well as on those who suggest that there were intelligent beings who did not possess bodies that arose from DNA roaming around the surface of earth millions of years ago and zapping bacterial flagella into existence.
You then need to demonstrate why such scenarios explain the flagellum better than the demonstrable evoutionary processes that can account for its existence. But even before all that, you need to quit denying that the flagella has been accounted for by evolutionary biologists and the nature of its origin in no unsolved mystery.
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I see you’re going to dodge the question of why your calculated FI value for the Shakespeare passage changes drastically depending on which language it is in. No surprise there.
You’ve already said to can’t actually calculate FI for anything known to be designed, just guess, so it’s probably not important.
Looks like FI is in the same category as CSI and FSC - ID-Creationist buzzwords which mean absolutely nothing. 
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Actually the FI argument works exactly like that. It’s just putting window dressing on the same old argument from personal incredulity.
Really?
Websters definition.
: one that imparts motionspecifically : PRIME MOVER
2 : any of various power units that develop energy or impart motion: such as
a : a small compact engine
b : INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINEespecially : a gasoline engine
c : a rotating machine that transforms electrical energy into mechanical energy
The theory does not predict the origin of new macro machines like the flagellar.
Theories in geology do not precisely predict the exact path of the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon, so does that mean river is designed?
The theory of evolution does predict a phylogenetic signal in the sequence data, and that is exactly what we see. Design makes no such prediction.
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Of course it does. But I was making a joke about a claim that I’ve heard many anti-evolution proponents make.
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Burden of proof is not a useful concept here. The question is what we have evidence for, and what we do not.
First, the word “motor” is confusing you. As has been pointed out to you, it doesn’t matter whether one considers the flagellum a motor or not; it simply does not have any of the earmarks of manufacture, or known history of manufacture, which tell us that my bath fan is manufactured. It is not like a bath fan. And we know of only one origin for them: bacterial growth and division. That is not a process used by any known person or entity to manufacture anything.
Evidence, rather than an argument by analogy, would help you.
But it doesn’t matter. As Allen has pointed out, the fact that “motor” can be used to describe two completely different things does not make them the same.
No, because there are too many other possible interpretations – most UFO sightings involve mistaken belief as to what the flying object, or apparent flying object, is.
Until I see one – until it becomes “identified” rather than unidentified, yes. Some UFO sightings are actually of birds.
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Ah, but the argument from FI works exactly like that. Thing A has an attribute (which it turns out we cannot measure, but can loudly exclaim must be very high, higher than the blueness of the Infanta’s eyes, which, they say, are bluer than the Stone of Galveston!), as judged by a human-written definition, which we associate with purposeful function. We know that Thing A is manufactured. Thing B has the same human-defined attribute, and therefore thing B is designed. It’s the same bad analogy.
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I think that is correct, yes.
I think that’s not the correct way to understand this position. Rather, for any given object for which we do not know the origin, a burden of proof rests on those who claim to know how it originated.
It’s also important to note there are some subtle differences between claiming to know for a fact how an entity did originate, versus claiming to know that it is possible or plausible that it originated through some process.
When it comes to the very deep past, it is extremely difficult to show that some entity really did originate through some process X. In such a situation, since we can’t travel back in time, we are forced to make inferences about what is plausible or probable.
Even supposing you could design a flagellum here and now, that would of course not prove how the bacterial flagellum that we find in some bacterium originated. What YOU can do in the present does not tell us what happened long ago in the past before any of us existed. For that, we are forced to make inferences to the best explanation. And to do that, we must consider all the relevant evidence to be explained. The many different flagella and similar systems, their differences and similarities, the homologous relationships of the proteins that make them up, and so on. What best explains all the relevant facts?
Of course, you can reject the notions of CSI or FSC on the pretext that they were forged by ID proponents, but it will be difficult for you to use the same trick to dismiss the notion of FI since it was forged by a Nobel Prize winner and his colleagues and has been published in 2 of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, ie., Nature and PNAS. Bad luck!
I think the difficulty is all yours. A descriptive construct like “FI” can be useful in some domain or other without forming the basis for a good argument by analogy. The problem is that while it may be a good shorthand for characterizing some aspects of some things, it is still just an descriptive term for an abstraction. But two things that can be characterized by the same abstraction are not, by that fact alone, meaningfully analogous to one another, especially for the purpose of judging something (“design”) for which the abstraction is not useful and was not intended.
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Read again. @T_aquaticus is pointing out that designed motors have human-made components like coils of wires and metal pistons. You are again trying to take the characteristics of designed motors and apply those characteristics (including the evidences of human design) to all motors, especially biological motors. You are once again confusing everyday English language labels with precise scientific terms while ignoring the pitfalls of the equivocation fallacies.
I had hoped that my previous illustration would be sufficient but perhaps not. So I will go more extreme and create another illustration using Puck’s bath fan:
(1) When I had a rock band doing gigs in the Midwest, we had lots of fans. (I know that for a fact because I knew both of them by name.)
(2) All of our fans were sentient beings. (I can’t say that for our drummer but that’s a whole 'nother story.)
(3) Fans are found in most bathrooms.
(4) Therefore, we can conclude that bathroom fans are sentient beings.
===> One more time: Human languages commonly apply labels liberally, equivocally, and ambiguously—so that doesn’t necessarily dictate essential, once-and-for-all classifications and Platonic ideals.
POSTSCRIPT: I recently started a new band called “1023MB”. We may never manage to get our first gig. (Almost but not quite.)
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While this conclusion does not follow from the premises, I will say that mine does howl like a banshee. Something is going on there. So perhaps SOME bathroom fans are sentient.
Ha! And there’s another funny linguistic ambiguity. One might expect that a “Gig” would be 1,000,000,000 bytes, and a literal reading of the term would suggest that. But for obvious practical reasons, that’s not what it usually means as-used. It’s like the “baker’s dozen” of data processing.
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I actually agree with Gil that the definition of FI is coherent, and I do not see any ill motives or confusion in the concept as it has been put forward by it’s authors.
What I take issue with is it’s usability in analyzing examples of entities from real biology. While we can understand and make sense of the concept given it’s theoretical definition, it is extremely difficult to employ in practice for anything but the most contrived and simple examples.
And it is unfortunately too often the case that for the entities who’s nature and origins we are trying to understand, that they lie well beyond the scope of practical useability of FI.
Hazen & Szostak even conceded this much in their 2007 paper that Gil linked above:
We conclude that rigorous analysis of the functional information of a system with respect to a specified function x requires knowledge of two attributes: ( i ) all possible configurations of the system (e.g., all possible sequences of a given length in the case of letters or RNA nucleotides) and ( ii ) the degree of function x for every configuration.
These two requirements are difficult to meet in many systems. In the case of letter sequences, for example, the sequence is obvious, but it is difficult to determine quantitatively the degree of function of many sequences. By contrast, it is relatively straightforward to determine the degree of function (for example, the ligand affinity) of any given RNA sequence, but impossible with present technology to measure all sequences in a large population, e.g., ≈10^14 randomly generated 100-mers as used in some aptamer evolution studies (although single-molecule methods may ultimately provide a technical solution to this challenge). However, these concepts may be placed on a firmer footing in the case of computational systems, such as the artificial life platform Avida.
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It would be helpful if they correctly described what they are actually measuring, which is mutual information, not functional information.
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No, just pointing out that it’s not simple. I’ve never understood why theodicy can’t apply to evolution for Christian denialists.
Then you have an enormous gap in your understanding of evolution.
If you really believed that, you would explain instead of merely asserting, Nigel.
It makes predictions about the relationships between its components and ancestral ones.
There’s no such thing as “the flagellar,” because “flagellar” is an adjective. The fact that you have so much trouble with the most basic terms suggests that you aren’t paying very much attention.
It sounds like your bathroom fan is possessed. I would recommend hiring an exorcist to stand outside your bathroom, ready to chant “Come out! I cast thee out!” whenever the fan is turned on.
Yep, megs and gigs can serve as yet another example of why hyper-literal interpretations are risky.
Human languages are really quite sloppy and subject to interpretation. And that’s why arguments based on individual words instead of the underlying concepts are fraught with problems.