Probability Arguments for Intelligent Design

It’s my understanding that natural selection cannot look ahead and select for some future desired state. It is not my fault that people who argue against ID cannot frame their arguments in a way more in keeping with the theory of evolution. To paraphrase Dawkins, evolution isn’t like that.

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It is your fault you’re ignoring the point of the analogy that feedback increases the probability and attacking your own stupid strawman.

You did so well there too, going a whole two posts without the disingenuous trolling. But old habits die hard, eh?

That one is a real beauty too. Did you folks know according to Mung science has never found any evidence anywhere that natural selection has any effect on a population? :roll_eyes:

Does anyone still wonder why I view inputs like that as mere trolling?

I’ll graciously assume that @Timothy_Horton merely misunderstood my comment about natural selection. I by no means meant to imply that there was no evidence for natural selection ever occurring. I was under the impression that we were talking about a specific scenario, such as the evolution of a specific protein, since that was the example he raised.

If we have evidence that natural selection was involved in the evolution of the protein of course that should be taken into account. But we should not just assume it, nor should we assume that natural selection was involved every step of the way.

I think my point about neutral theory still stands.

Now on to Timothy’s poker analogy.

We need to say what it is that feedback increases the probability of. Presumably, it increases the probability of a straight flush. But is that so?

Of course, the probability of getting a straight flush is higher in draw poker than it is in a game of poker where you are simply dealt five cards and must play those cards provided you don’t toss into the muck the cards in your hand that can be used to make a royal flush. But evolution isn’t like that.

You can have all the feedback you like, but if you keep discarding cards 10-A you may never see a straight flush. So feedback isn’t the issue. The issue is knowing what to retain in light of a future as yet unrealized goal. Something not available to evolution.

It would appear that bad arguments for evolution are no less frequent than bad arguments for ID.

The stupid strawman arguments for evolution anti-science ID-Creationists make up are certainly bad. But then again they’ve had a lot of practice in producing bad science.

3 posts were split to a new topic: Consider The Polar Bear

That’s a rather easy thing to demonstrate. In E. coli the mutation rate for antibiotic resistance is about 1 in 250 million divisions. If we transfer a few billion bacteria to liquid media containing antibiotics and then come back the next day we find trillions of bacteria with the mutation for antibiotic resistance. If we start with 1 billion bacteria there should only be about 4 bacteria with the mutation, but instead we find trillions. That is highly improbable for a random process, but it isn’t a random process. The reason for this highly improbable outcome is natural selection.

There is massive evidence for natural selection. All you need to do is compare several genomes and measure sequence conservation. You will find that regions of functional DNA have higher sequence conservation than genomic regions that lack function.

Why ignore all of the evidence and experiments that were used to test that assumption?

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You just assert that evolution can’t produce FI as defined by Hazen and Szostak without any evidence to back the assertion.

Have I said that there is not? The question is the extent to which natural selection needs to be invoked for a specific case and whether it should be invoked without looking first at the actual evidence.

When Joshua declares that Darwinism is dead he’s not just preaching to ID people. That pan-selectionism is known to be false needs to be taken seriously by all involved. Including Dawkins.

At this point I don’t think we are talking about the same thing.

No, I assert that conscious intelligence is the only known source of functional information. The only one who has challenged this assertion is Joshua with his own assertion that cancer can create functional information. I also think this assertion could also include the adaptive immune system.

In all cases this requires the preexistence of functional information so for the time being my claim stands. If we narrow the definition of function we then are back to conscious intelligence being the only source. So for a specific claim I would say that conscious intelligence is most likely the source of the origin of the ubiquitin system.

And you do so without any evidence.

Then you are just fine with all life we see today evolving from a universal common ancestor who had this original functional information?

“Of course, large quantities of evolutionary change may be non-adaptive, in which case these alternative theories may well be important in parts of evolution, but only in the boring parts of evolution, not the parts concerned with what is special about life as opposed to non-life.”–Ricahrd Dawkins, “The Blind Watchmaker”

Dawkins is just more interested in the positive adaptions. He is fully aware that the majority of genetic change is non-adaptive.

Then what are you talking about? If we are asking about the evolution of a gene then why isn’t sequence conservation and phylogenetics a test for natural selection?

I have lots of evidence that this claim has been out there for the four years I have known about and
that no one has come up with another source of de novo functional information. If someone does they will be $5 million dollars richer.

No, I think this claim is unsupportable. Start with the origin of the spliceosome.

I think Eric’s argument of information non growth is probably right and applicable to biology although my thoughts here are subject to change based on further evidence and arguments.

As @swamidass has already shown, evolution does produce functional information.

Ok, start there. Show us the generation of organisms before the spliceosome emerged and the generation after. Show us how the change over that generation was produced by an intelligence.

Does that help?

So lets use antibiotic resistance in E. coli as our example. The mutation conferring antibiotic resistance occurs once in every 250 million divisions, on average. If we transfer 1 billion bacteria to liquid media containing antibiotics and ignore natural selection then we would expect just 4 out of every billion bacteria to have this mutation when the bacteria are allowed to divide and increase their numbers. The probability of the mutation being found in nearly 100% of the population after the population expands is very very low. So what do we find? After the population expands nearly all of the bacteria have the same mutation, a highly, highly improbable event. What caused this highly improbable event? Natural selection.

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In my opinion he has not shown this. He has made an interesting argument but all I think he is demonstrating a cell losing regulation through mutation. He can define function as loss of regulation but there is nothing really new here as we know mutations of pre existing information can find some function. I don’t believe novel FI has been created here at best it is modified of existing FI. We end up only in a game of definitions.

The spliceosome conservatively requires greater then 5000 bits of FI. Again the only know source of FI (certainly this magnitude) is conscious intelligence. You and I have created this much FI in our conversations so we have a possible cause.

Do you think cancer can create a spliceosome? What cancer can do is cause rapid stem cell division and break cell cycle check points and up regulate check point proteins. It does what embryo cells do because that is the path it up regulates through mutation or inadequate amounts of regulating small molecules.

I need a functional multicellular eukaryotic cell for cancer and all this FI to be present as a working assumption.

Can you please show us how Hazen and Szostak used “loss of regulation” in their calculations?

I am still waiting for the evidence backing this assertion.

I am still not seeing any reference to the measurement of FI as laid out by Hazen and Szostak. Are you now using a different definition of FI?

Not to Creation, because Darwin did not explain how life began (he did speculate). Darwin was not the first to propose evolution, or that selection happens; Darwin’s key idea is that selection happens naturally, and this has been found to be better than all the existing theories of evolution that existed at the time.

I agree that statistics are not always necessary for inference, but the formalized method is correct. Statistics allow us to make inference in the presence of uncertainty.
With respect to the question of this topic, where arguments are based on probability, we can make statements objective statements about right/wrong ways of doing things based on mathematics.

Unrelated, but REALLY cool. A word game based on “evolving words”.
http://www.ersimages.com/weasel/index.htm

I previous mentioned that your sentence IS testable in a formal way (but it would be a lot of work, so let’s not go there). But the inference here is that you type the sentence - we do not infer that some previously unknown colewd exist because we have prior knowledge of your existence.

It is incorrect to leap to conclusions about things that may not exist. It’s OK to look for evidence of something you think might exist.

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Kirk and Joshua are discussing this so lets follow along.

I have made an estimate based on Hunt’s paper and a complex requiring 170 proteins ranging from 200 AA’s to 2500 AA’s. Since the total sequence space is some where around 1 million bits I think were safe at 5000. If you disagree please show why it is less then 5000 bits.

For starters follow the discussion between Kirk and Joshua.