Please explain, using the data from the paper I cited, how RV+NS has not evidently found multiple solutions during the evolution of chloroquine resistance.
The opposite is only evident if you don’t look at data.
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That’s such a silly response and really shows they have nothing sensible to say. I’d have responded to that by saying that if something has changed, whatever it is, what it changed into is new. If it wasn’t there before it’s new. If A changes to T, that T wasn’t there in that position before, so it’s new.
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I don’t see how any of that means the relevant attributes of the sponges aren’t things like their shape, size, density, strength, and so on. It is the particular arrangement of the 3dimensional structure, and the material of which it is made, that gives it the adaptive properties it has. I just don’t see how the things you quote are supposed to imply the particular arrangement we see could not be produced by natural selection.
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It’s cool there’s a Java version of boxcar2d I didn’t know of, but the old flash version still works if you run an old flash-capable browser on a virtual machine. I have an old winxp installation on a virtualbox I some times use to run old software like that.
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Yes, it is silly. But it"s right out of DI’s playbook. Step 1: Say there is no evidence. Step 2: When presented with evidence, say it doesn’t count. Lather, rinse, repeat
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In fact, given that FI depends on the function defined, the FI associated to a defined function in a given and stable environment cannot change.
Rather than sponges having an optimal form, I would rather say that sponges display an optimal architecture. As for the category mistake, it doesn’t seem anathema to me to say that an optimal phenotype (here the sponge architecture) involves an optimal genotype representing optimal functional information.
Gil, you keep using the word optimal, but you haven’t explained how you determine if something is optimal or not.
Yesterday I had a discussion in my Human Biology class about the anatomy of primate shoulders. Yes, the increased mobility is good for swinging through trees. But it is also more prone to injury. About half of my class has experienced either dislocated shoulders or torn rotator cuffs. They were not convinced that shoulder design is “optimal.”
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Alternate Step 2: When evidence is offered, ignore the offer and don’t admit your false claim.
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Optimal functional information is the FI associated with a global optimum (as opposed to local optima) in the sequence space.
Regarding the issue of optimality in biology, you may be interested by this recent post by B. Miller at EN.
If I may add a suggestion: my specialty of course is not science but rhetoric, and I do think that when you’re dealing with non-science majors, especially, they’re likely to fall victim to the rhetorical strategy of this argument as much as to its substance. By speaking of “information” like some sort of new “elan vital,” the IDC people give the impression that the evolution of “information” is something new, separate from, and additional to the evolution of form. I think that a point that a lot of them are liable to be missing, simply, is that the evolutionary processes under discussion are the SAME evolutionary processes which we talk about when we talk about evolution in phenotypic terms. Genetic “information” is just our way of characterizing how we talk about part of the chemical “nuts and bolts” of the process, but it’s not some sort of novel problem that calls for novel explanations. That forms evolve successfully tells us that the information underlying them evolves successfully, too; the difference is in the manner in which we view the process. I know that that’s liable to seem rather obvious, and unnecessary to state; but it does seem to me, in discussing this with creationists, that this is a point which has many of them deeply confused, and so it may be less intuitively obvious to some of your students than to others.
The script in some of these IDC books is pretty much, “Darwin proposed the evolution of physical forms, and that seemed as though it made sense, but then, Crick and Watson! Information! GAAAAHHH! Now the whole thing has fallen to pieces!”
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With respect to the glass sponge example, I would rather say that the question of whether the design can be reached through natural processes hinges on whether there is a functional gradient connecting the suboptimal architectural solutions with the optimal one.
For the record, here is, according to me, the relevant passage in Helder piece:
To find out why the sponge skeleton has such interesting properties, the Fernandes team set up four different grid designs. Option D was a 2-dimensional square divided into quarters. Option C added cross bracing to each quarter so that each square was divided into four equal triangles. Option B added the cross bracing to only two squares (numbers one and four) of the design, while the other two squares were open. Option A, the most elaborate design, mimics the Venus Flower Basket design. It had double strands of cross bracing in squares one and four, while the others were open. When these designs were tested for load-bearing capacity, design A (like the Venus’ Flower Basket) displayed the best resistance to buckling stress. Having demonstrated the superior resilience of design A, the scientists wondered if they could improve on this glass sponge design. They conducted seven separate optimization experiments. Their studies demonstrated that “the sponge-inspired design provides a superior mechanism for withstanding loads
Now, given the above, how can we explain design A (the optimal design) in glass sponges within a naturalistic framework ? There are two possibilities. The first one is that RN+NS directly stumbled across design A. The second one is that RN+NS first found a suboptimal solution (for example design D) and then following a functional gradient, arrived at the optimal solution, ie., design A.
Whereas the first scenario is akin to a miracle, what about the plausibility of the second one? In order to answer this question, one would need to know all the molecular steps that would be required to connect design D with design A. Since these steps are unknown, I grant you that we cannot rigorously assess the plausibility of the second scenario and one cannot exclude that an evolutionary pathway exist that connect D with A. However, the field of engineering teaches us that the task of transforming a particular design fulfilling a given function into another one fulfilling the same function is generally tricky.
And what about the logic of evolutionists ?
As far as I can tell, it is this:
Fact : The structural design of Euplectella aspergillum is highly optimized to deal with buckling strain.
Assumption : There is a functional gradient for evolutionary processes to produce such a design.
Conclusion : Therefore, evolution has an explanation for the structural design of Euplectella aspergillum
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As shown in this figure for chloroquine resistance:
Of course, Gil is ignoring that there exist different optima in different environments.
I asked for your definition. To quote Princess Bride “you keep using that word…”
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No, I am not. See my answer to Dan here:
Thank you. That’s a great point and very helpful. This year I’m doing a better job of talking about how the same evolution/natural selection that applies to plants and animals also applies to molecules. So the origin of biomolecules, and as you point out information, is part of one long continuous process that ends lions and tigers and bears (oh my!)
I also think part of the problem is that scientists describe thing using metaphors (or is it analogies?) - bacteria are “the powerhouse,” DNA is a “language.” Metaphors are useful, especially when explaining things to non-scientists. But like all metaphors, they aren’t perfect. DNA is not a language the way English or French is. Languages are arbitrary, whereas DNA operates according to principles of Chemistry and Physics. But ID’ers pick up on the phrase “molecular machinery” and say “machines need a designer.” I am interested in your thoughts on this idea.
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There is a misunderstanding here regarding the meaning of the word solution. As I use it in the context of this post, solution means something like a strategy. IOW, a global or overall solution to a problem. And of course, many particular solutions (let’s say a set of particular solutions) often exist within the space of a global or overall solution. The QC résistance in malaria is a case in point. Indeed, as you’ve noted, many particular solutions exist to confer QC resistance. But they all belong to the same set of solutions, to the same global or overall solution consisting at modifying the activity of the PfCRT receptor. IOW, during all the history of the fight between QC and Plasmodium falciparum, the bug has been able to find only one strategy or overall solution to resist chloroquine, a strategy moreover that does not involve the development of a new function but the modification of an existing one. Not very impressive I should say!
That’s a very important point. And while I’m not entirely sure what to do about it I do have some thoughts on it.
My experience has been that there are some people who really struggle with the “implicit” expression of analogy, e.g., “DNA is a language,” as opposed to weaker forms of expression of that analogy such as “DNA is in some ways akin to a language.” For many people this “analogy versus identity” thing is really hard to work out. If Jesus said to them that the Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, they would assume it is small, roughly spherical, and yellowish-brown. If the error in this is pointed out to them, they will quote Jesus, cross their arms, and feel they have won the argument.
One note, obviously, is just to be cautious about the way in which you express metaphors. But you don’t always have a simple choice there, because you have such things as textbooks in addition to your own statements. And once that mustard-seed of bad metaphor gets started growing, well, you know how big it can get.
It may be that your various non-science, liberal-arts students do have some experience with this in other contexts, though, and that’s helpful. You may just need to point out to them the ways in which they are unconsciously relying upon metaphors as identities and, additionally, in some cases, on mere verbal ambiguity (consider the discussions here about how if a flagellum is a “motor,” it must have been designed because we all know a Ford V-8 is designed). I might even, if you feel the whole discussion is freighted with assumptions about Christian faith, bring Jesus and the mustard seed into it. Jesus surely is saying that the Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. Does he mean it is like a mustard seed in ALL respects, or is he attempting to use a helpful analogy which only applies so far as it is helpful? Likewise, when a textbook says DNA is the language of cells, does it mean it is literally a “language” in the precise same sense as “French is a language,” or does it again only mean to invoke the concept of language to helpfully explain some aspects of DNA’s role? Putting it that way might, for the right student, be an aid to understanding.
I don’t have the right terms and all to discuss it, never having been a huge student of abstract philosophy, but there’s an important philosophical concept here that people seem to miss – intuitively obvious to most cautious people but not necessarily so to a young and inexperienced thinker like some of your undergrads: Explanations do not make things work, but instead usefully characterize how they work in ways that are helpful to us. Explanations are our own constructs. “Natural selection,” for example, as such is not a force in the world like gravity, but it is a good human characterization of the way that various events in nature play out, bringing about certain types of results. Likewise “information.” It’s handy to be able to read a genome when you know something about how genomes work – one can see how the correspondence between gene and protein runs, for example. One can then write the relevant sequence down, encode it in software, and do all manner of operations to it. But it’s still chemistry; the sequence is meaningful to us because we have the ability to consider what it does, but it doesn’t DO any of that in any context other than the chemical. So here we have an aspect of nature that’s simply been carrying on its own activity for billions of years, and suddenly to US it’s “information.” It is indeed, but what is “information”? It’s an explanatory construct, like natural selection. When we use it as an entity for discussion and analysis, we need to be careful that we do not reify it in the process.
Again, of course, my intent is not to explain that to you because I’m sure you understand that as well as or better than I do. My intent is to say that you may not always be aware how poorly OTHERS understand it, and consequently that when you are discussing these thing with your undergrads you may need to be more explicit about such points than you would be in discussing them with a colleague.
Once ID’s victim has received the idea that “information” is not just an explanatory construct, but is instead a kind of essence of its own, he is well on the way to treating “information” as the elan vital which is the secret ingredient of life – the thing which Victor Frankenstein must have somehow gotten into his creation in order to turn the non-living into the living. “Information” comes from minds, doesn’t it? Shakespeare’s plays are information, and they came from a mind. How can DNA sequences come from anything other than a mind? This ID strategy is a shell game, but it’s a fairly sophisticated shell game and it sometimes fools people who you’d think were too clever to be fooled by it.
I admire your willingness to take these issues on and to engage with your students on them. I would love to hear more of your experiences; you are so thoughtful about these things and I am sure your students are lucky to have you.
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The principles of chemistry and physics don’t explain the specific DNA sequences (the functional information) responsable for the dance of life, not at all. It is like saying that a Shakespeare sonnet is explain by the chemistry and physics of a piece of paper, a pen and ink.
Sorry, this is incorrect. You didn’t ask for my definition, not at all.