2 posts were split to a new topic: Are Anti-Evolutionists Welcome Here?
@pnelson: Paul, if you are still following, I really think there is more worth discussing. You conclude your eview with …
What happens if we do as you say, discarding MN and maybe CA as well? Methodological Naturalism is a method, a way of doing things that has been enormously successful in science. Anyone can employ MN, and most everyone does so on a regular basis, forming an idea and seeking evidence to confirm it (“I wonder if my favorite show is on tonight?” → picks up TV Guide). How do we discard MN, and what happens when we do?
It’s not clear to me that it is even possible to discard MN. How do we operate without evidence, and what do we do instead? Perhaps I am taking your statement out of context, and you do not mean what you seem to imply. How can we do anything resembling science without MN? How else should we logically draw a line between which species share Common Ancestry and those that do not?
I have been told in many other related discussions that I must first have faith before I can understand. To me this is equivalent to saying I must accept what they say and believe as I am told, without question or means of verification. This too is a prison, one defined by “belief”. Without MN to consider any evidence this prison is effectively escape-proof, and freedom is denied.
There is another way, one that does not imprison anyone. It’s very simple, even obvious, and sidesteps and those pointless arguments over Faith and reason. I think you know the answer already …
Accept both.
We can have both! Most people do have both, so it’s can’t be all that hard to do. We can have Faith and reason, religion and science. We don’t need to have this fight at all.
I will end here, but I hope the discussion can continue. If you don’t wish you discuss here at PS we can find another means. I could even drive down to Chicago to chat over coffee, if you are agreeable. Let’s not fight - Let’s talk instead.
3 Likes
Yes I’m struggling to see what relevance the putative reality of LUCA as the last universal common ancestor of bacteria and archaea, has to the GAE. Regardless of whether these two prokaryotic domains really share a single ancestral species, population, or bottleneck otherwise, and the extent to which horizontal gene transfer has implications for how “tree-like” individial gene-genealogies would have been ~three-thousand eight-hundred million years ago, it seems to me that has next to nothing to do with humans being primates, mammals, vertebrates, or even eukaryotes.
If the bacterial and archaeal domains ultimately derive from independent origins of life(and heck, even if the origination event was magic), and merely appear to share ancestry through some combination of radical levels of HGT and convergent evolution, then… what does that matter to how hairy my one hundred thousandth-great grandfather was, and if we should call him Adam?
3 Likes
Hopefully this passes the @swamidass meme filter, but this is what LUCA is in this specific discussion:
Unless @pnelson can explain why common ancestry between prokaryotes and archae 3.8 billion years pertains to the question of common ancestry between primates, mammals, and vertebrates then it can be safely ignored.
1 Like
It’s a gateway to atheism. Like how common wisdom concludes dancing leads to reefer madness.
1 Like
Science goes on its way.
Hypotheses are proposed and tested against evidence. We look for the best theories to explain the evidence. We explore, synthesize data, conduct the normal business of understanding and explanation.
I think you equate MN with the ordinary empirical attitude: science must be testable, intersubjective (e.g., the diploid chromosome number of Drosophila melanogaster doesn’t change if one is a Buddhist or a Christian or an agnostic), grounded in publicly accessible evidence, and so on. But that’s not MN, because I hold strongly to the ordinary empirical attitude, and I reject MN.
Here is MN, in the best short formulation I know (from the National Academy of Sciences, 1998): “The statements of science must invoke only natural things and processes.” The word doing all the work in this definition is “natural,” and – on analysis – means “derived ultimately from physics.” Thus, irreducible agency, or mind, are inadmissible as basic causal categories. Intelligence is a late-arising cause in the universe, contingent on a long evolutionary process. Thus, for instance, positing that life was caused by an intelligence invokes a non-physical cause a few billion years before that cause can legitimately be employed in explanation (say, for the origin of a hearth circle of stones in East Africa) – and therefore violates MN.
Josh doesn’t like the term “methodological naturalism,” but whatever term he prefers ends up in the same place. ID, where the “I” refers to irreducible mind, violates the rule of derivable ultimately from physics.
We’ve been over this territory many times before here at PS, so I won’t go on. But if you think the ID research community wants to surrender testing, evidence, intersubjectivity, and the other praiseworthy features of the ordinary empirical attitude…not a chance.
It would be a treat to get together for lunch some time. Maybe we could meet at a halfway point between Chicago and your home in WI.
3 Likes
To T. aqua, Rum, Art, et al.
UCD is a problem, not because the early branching of the three primary domains bears in any way on the last few million years of primate evolution and GAE. Plainly lots of things could have happened 3 billion years ago which wouldn’t affect the monophyly of Mammalia or Primates in the least.
Rather, UCD is a problem because of the rules of phylogenetic inference it presupposes, and its connection to the origin of life. Take the character of human language, which is diagnostic of Homo sapiens. Could this character be a functional discontinuity which indicates that H. sapiens did NOT share common ancestry with chimps, gorillas, orangs, and the rest of Primates?
Not if the rules of phylogenetic inference which sustain UCD are in place. In the late 1980s, Stephen Gould argued for distinctive macroevolutionary processes to explain the Cambrian Explosion. His critics worried that Gould was wandering away from the fold of Darwinism (writ large). Gould punched back:
Did any proponent of increased disparity ever doubt that a cladogram would root, if not in the Arthropoda at least at a more inclusive level? We are not, after all, creationists, and we do accept a monophyletic origin for life!
(Paleobiology 17 [1991]:415.)
This is UCD held axiomatically, via rules which say that no discontinuity can be evidence of separate origins. Whatever we observe, life on Earth must fall into a single Tree, rooted in LUCA.
That’s a problem. So – don’t focus on the phylogenies themselves. Think about the reasoning by which the phylogenies are constructed, and how one might find out if life is not monophyletic.
2 Likes
Sure. But how does disposing of MN also give us any alternative explanation for the data showing common descent? If intelligence (by which you mean separate creation) is an allowable alternative hypothesis, how are we to test it against common descent using data? Since separate creation could in principle show us any data whatsoever, I can’t see a way. Can you? If not, there is indeed no way to do science with it, and we might as well put MN back in place.
4 Likes
Creationists recognize ad hoc hypotheses (within their own sphere of explanatory practice) as readily as any sane person. Go to a creationist research meeting some time. I’ve been attending them since my late teens. You’ll see ferocious arguments about whether some data set is predicted by a hypothesis, or not, with proponents often surrendering their preferred ideas after a long fight and failing to fit data to hypothesis.
Sure, a degenerate and lazy “God could have done anything” episteme is possible. But that’s not the actual practice of creationists, as can be seen from even a casual perusal of their journals.
MN does nothing for science that science cannot do for itself. All it does is protect philosophical naturalism from empirical challenge.
1 Like
To the extent this is true, YECs follow MN as I understand it. Isn’t that interesting 
3 Likes
Gould, it should be emphasized, was not a systematist and didn’t think much about phylogenetic analysis. Distinctive macroevolutionary processes are not at all in contradiction of common descent, nor are they ad hoc inventions designed to rescue common descent.
Once more you mistake the evidence for common descent. It’s not similarity; it’s not the absence of large events you call discontinuities. It’s the nested hierarchical pattern, which we see from species down at least to the base of Eukaryota, and now through Archaea. UCD is not an axiom but a result. Again, one may ask what alternative is supported by the data.
No, you think about it. What is your model of separate creation, and what structure in the data would it predict? My model would be of hierarchical structure down to the level of “kind”, whatever that might be, and no hierarchical structure connecting “kinds”. Whatever you may think a “kind” is, we do not see data matching that model. Incidentally, I would also expect that if there were indeed “kinds”, they would be obvious and easy to detect.
Separate creation fails all tests. This is a problem for you, one you have never confronted.
2 Likes
I do not recognize a reply. Yes, you can form auxiliary hypotheses about the nature of God and test those. But can you supply any hypothesis that predict we should see what we see, e.g. the aforementioned nested hierarchy of data? There have been attempts, but all of them have been lame. Don’t you know of any that aren’t?
1 Like
There are other ways to argue against metaphysical naturalism (and I find them more persuasive than what’s been put forward by the ID community) So I don’t find your statement all that concerning. ID folks sure do love their scientism.
2 Likes
It’s not hard for me to find YEC non-scientists who take that “lazy” approach. Those are the people most often encountered. I might agree that creation scientists practice more … cautiously(?). But it’s the layperson YEC making ad-hoc arguments based on creation science where the real trouble starts, IMO. I know you don’t care for GAE, but it seems to me that an understanding (not acceptance) of GAE among lay YEC could be a step toward being less distrustful toward science.
5 Likes
UCD is a problem for whom?
I think you are trying to say that UCD is a problem for Atheists.
Do you think UCD is a problem for an evangelical like @swamidass? No, right?
So, I must ask you again why do you fixate on a version of the Universe where God refuses to guide evolution … and where God has nothing to do with evolutionary processes?
You seem quite determined to choke the life out of a world view that is not embraced in the Genealogical Adam scenarios. Why is that?
You carry mutations not found in either your parents, your siblings, or your cousins. Does this mean you don’t share common ancestry with your siblings and cousins?
It’s rather crazy that you would think evolution would be a problem for evolution. Common ancestry is just one piece of the theory.
That happens when there is mountains of evidence to support a conclusion. Scientists move on to other questions unless someone is able to produce a reason to question those extremely well supported conclusions.
You would need to show that there is a lack of phylogenetic signal among primates, including humans. Phylogenetic signal is MEASURED, not assumed.
4 Likes
But if you think the ID research community wants to surrender testing, evidence, intersubjectivity, and the other praiseworthy features of the ordinary empirical attitude…not a chance.Dr Nelson, please point to where your colleague, and prominent ID 'researcher', William Dembski's claims about Specified Complex Information (which claims have been described by a prominent mathematician as "written in jello" for their purported hopeless informality) have been tested, held up to (the vast array of biological) evidence, or otherwise subjected to even "ordinary empirical" scrutiny. As far I know no attempt has ever been made to calculate the SCI for even the simplest biological organism.
Likewise could you point to where Michael Behe’s claims about Irreducible Complexity have been tested. I know that, as of his Dover testimony, he had not subjected it to any testing. Whilst it is possible that he’s done so in the 15 years since, if he has, then he’s been uncharacteristically silent about it.
Likewise the entire ‘research’ contents of the 2020 Volume of Bio-Complexity appears to seems to be theoretical (Active Information) or speculative (limitation on extraterrestrial space travel), without any glimmer of “testing, evidence, intersubjectivity, and the other praiseworthy features of the ordinary empirical attitude”.
So to your suggestion that the ID apologetics community has any claim to these virtues, I would suggest that testing and the evidence suggests … not a chance!
2 Likes
So Paul, my rejoinder is now out. I’d love to hear your response. A couple highllights relevant to you:
My book does not address Intelligent Design (ID) directly. However, I am a critic of the ID movement. To their credit, I am humbled that many ID thought leaders looked past our disagreements to endorse or positively review my book.8
An outlier among his colleagues, Nelson’s review is negative. He worries of a false dialogue, one limited to “the strict boundaries, or rules, set by mainstream science.” His worries are misplaced.
Yes, I am “hailing” from mainstream science, but the conversation is certainly not limited to science. To the contrary, having explained the limits of scientific findings,Aside fr
- E.g., Sean McDowell, Walter Bradley, and Jonathan McLatchie. Though not technically members of the ID movement per se, I also refer to Richard Buggs, James Tour, and William Lane Craig.
1 Like
I think the problem for YEC is the fossil and molecular evidence, at least from the Cambrian forward, of indeed continuity. What you frame as axiomatic might be considered just extrapolation from a very well established basis.
Edit: typo → Cambrian
2 Likes