That’s just not consistent with your writing so many words about it.
One would think that you have some great desire to convince someone of something. Why not the things you write about?
That’s not the method ID proponents use because of one major difference: they define the target after the mutations have already happened. This is known as the Sharpshooter fallacy.
To use your playing card analogy, the probability of any 5 card hand is the same. Therefore, if I got to define the winning hand after the cards were already dealt then I would get highly improbable hands every time, but it would still be due to chance. Defining the target for genomes after they have already evolved runs into the same issues.
The mutation rate is more than enough to account for the number of differences between genomes.
So I could find statements from a few people at the Discovery Institute and use that to describe the entire ID movement?
I suspect that we would need to delve into quantum mechanics in order to fully discuss that topic. Mutations occur at the molecular level where quantum effects would be in play. Therefore, I don’t think we can directly apply the billiard ball analogy. Perhaps quantum physics is deterministic, but it certainly doesn’t behave like billiard balls.
Those people are rather difficult to have conversations with. I am also curious about what normal, everyday people think.
They would of course deny that they do this. But this is not the place to argue that. Our topic here is not “whether ID arguments are valid” but “randomness and theology”. So I won’t take this up, but you are welcome to start a new topic called, “Does ID Commit the Sharpshooter Fallacy?”
Evolution, in the sense of producing radically new bodily forms, requires more than changes in genomes. Gene expression, not just genes, determines what creatures will be like. A full account of evolution will discuss not just mutation rates and changes to genomes, but how, why, and when certain genes are expressed or not expressed, developmental processes, environmental feedback, etc. But I think you already know this, so I write this not for you but for others who might take your naked and un-nuanced statement as an adequate account.
No disagreement. I did not think you held to a billiard ball conception of evolutionary history, and it appears that I read you rightly.
If your goal is to learn what the Christian tradition has taught, you don’t need to have a conversation with any of them; you just need to read them, slowly, patiently, carefully, etc.
If your goal is to have a conversation with modern representatives of classical tradition, you could try writing to people like Alvin Plantinga or Edward Feser.
If your goal is to have a conversation with modern representatives of theological liberalism, you could write to Oord or Stump or Enns.
If your goal is to find out the beliefs of the typical Christian in the pew (who thinks very little and very rarely about systematic theological questions) you could drop in on some church services and try to buttonhole some of them during the coffee hour. In the latter case, expect the topic to be changed very quickly by most of the people you will ask, especially if they are older than about 30.
Your best bet for a lively theological conversation with everyday churchgoing Christians would be to attend a church service in a university town, at a church frequented by university students. They still have the young person’s intellectual curiosity about theology in many cases. I remember, after the Sunday service, a number of university grad and undergrad students would go for lunch or coffee at some local establishment and parse or debate over the pastor’s sermon of that morning. Later, when I went to a more gray-haired establishment, frequented largely by everyday folks, I was struck by how little interest anyone had in talking about the sermons afterward, or what theological books they were reading, etc.
Your worst chances will be at a suburban or downtown “mainstream” Presbyterian or Anglican or Methodist etc. church filled with gray-haired people who have long since ceased to reflect (if they ever did reflect) on theological issues within the Christian faith, and are more likely to get worked up about changes to the old-fashioned liturgy they grew up with, or the use of rock music in services which they find undignified and not conducive to sober worship.
For the theoretical questions I’m interested in, the most useful sources are old books, or new books by modern scholars who have read a lot of old books; sadly, the conversation of most churchgoing Christians is of little use. I don’t suppose it was ever the case that most Christians engaged in long conversations about deep theological subjects, but it’s sad how even the minority that was deeply interested seems to be shrinking over time, at least in most denominations. So I have to find conversation “partners” in dead writers, or academics I talk with by email, or people who contribute to theology blogs, etc. The possibility of enriching local theological conversation has become noticeably worse, within a radius of at least 45 miles from my home, over the past few decades.
Steering this back on course, the ID claim that modern species were the targets is in line with what you have described before. They start with the assumption that modern species were the intent of the design, and then claim that random mutations could not hit the target.
Gene expression is determined by DNA sequence. I know this from first hand experience having altered gene expression by altering the DNA sequence upstream and downstream of a coding region.
I don’t think the billiard ball analogy is completely wrong, either. As mentioned before, evolution is as chaotic as other natural processes, such as the weather. Was the weather today a necessary outcome established at the Big Bang? Maybe? Hard to say.
One of my goals is to understand what beliefs Christians have today.
I doubt they would be willing to talk about the intersection of random natural processes and theology. I’ve also found that written conversations offer better discussion.
Do you really not realize that mutations change gene expression?
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Distinguo, if you please. ID writers claim to prove, or at least to provide evidence, for the idea that certain biological features were “targets”, i.e., intended outcomes. The theological tradition I was speaking of, however, does not claim to prove or provide evidence for that; it takes for granted that those features were targets based on its interpretation of the Bible and theological tradition. The intellectual procedure is quite different in the two cases.
A perfectly reasonable goal. But my focus has always been very different. I’m interested in the beliefs of modern Christians, but in the light of the beliefs of traditional Christians, and in the significance of the many contrasts that I observe.
I’m sure most of them wouldn’t be. But in previous times they might have been willing to say that if evolution is true, God determined the outcomes in advance. Nowadays, you’d be lucky to get statements of even that general popular kind. From the vast majority of people attending services, I mean.
I have tried to tell him this but he refuses to take note. Rewiring GRNs by mutations to the DNA component produces changes in gross morphology.
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I have yet to see this happen at the genetic level. I haven’t seen ID supporters produce evidence that demonstrates a specific mutation was guided and was not the product of natural mutations.
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A good example of mutations changing gene expression is lactase persistence in humans. The ability to produce lactase into adulthood has been traced to mutations upstream of the lactase coding region:
In fact, different populations have different mutations conferring lactase persistence.
Beyond that, there are tons of tools in molecular biology that swap promoters in and out of different vectors to measure how those promoters control gene expression.
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Your analogy does not reflect Darwinian evolution.
If it was straight-up 5-card stud, yes. But if one introduces selection (multiple rounds of discarding and drawing), the high-ranking hands become common.
It’s interesting that you are so fixated on Darwin that you like to ignore drift as an evolutionary mechanism, while your analogy excludes selection and thus has nothing Darwinian about it.
Only with intelligent selection. Not if the discarding and drawing are random. Reference the blind watchmaker weasel program where he was able to hit a target sequence if the sequence itself is the reference point. This is an algorithm with the human (intelligent agent) providing the reference sequence.
Not this again … the WEASEL algorithm will go after any pattern given, whether it is given by an intelligent agent or not. “Natural Selection” is all about some patterns being favored above others with no advanced knowledge of the what patterns are favored.
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Poor understanding of the weasel program and of natural selection. Wouldn’t the example work as well if a randomly selected sequence of characters were the target? It would of course be a better simulation if the target were any sequence of characters matching some quantitative criterion. Then it would be a better representation of how the environment guides selection.
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There is no reason why they should, given that their thesis does not require identifying specific mutations that were guided. It requires showing only that the overall pattern of changes is not one that would be expected due to the proposed mechanisms.
In order to argue that the Pyramids were not the product of unguided processes (supposing for the sake of argument that some scientists have proposed a particular set of unguided processes that they claim produced the Pyramids), I don’t have to prove that a particular stone was miraculously teleported into position; all I have to show is that the set of proposed unguided mechanisms for assembling the stones into a Pyramid could only produce a Pyramid under circumstances so freakish and unlikely that the occurrence of the whole series would for all practical purposes amount to a miracle.
Similarly, when ID proponents suggest that the development, of, say, the camera eye required intelligent planning, their argument does not rest on any claim that some particular mutations affecting retinal development or corneal structure were achieved by miraculous intervention. They don’t need to discuss individual mutations at all. Their argument is: “For evolution of the camera eye to have occurred in the way that theorists propose that it occurred (i.e., by a set of entirely unguided mechanisms), a series of things so improbable as to amount to a miracle would have to have happened.” If the argument is sound, identifying which particular changes were due to naturally occurring mutations and which ones (if any) were due to miraculously produced mutations would be unnecessary intellectual labor.
Of course, you dispute that the argument is sound. I realize that. I am not in this discussion trying to refute you. I’m merely setting forth clearly wherein the dispute lies, i.e., that what ID proponents think is wildly improbable, mainstream evolutionary theorists find quite probable. And their argument is based on the unlikelihood of a whole complex series of events, not on the analysis of some particular events (mutations) to show that those particular events must have been divine interventions.
We will have to agree to disagree on that point.
That pattern is consistent with natural processes.
https://biologos.org/articles/testing-common-ancestry-its-all-about-the-mutations
ID proponents are arguing that the dunes around the pyramids are designed because they believe that the exact pattern of sand grains is so improbable that it couldn’t happen by chance.
That would require them to show us the mutations they are talking about and the probabilities attached to them. That would also be a Sharpshooter fallacy because they are calculating the odds of what evolved instead of all possible evolutionary pathways.
It’s not enough to just say “we think it’s improbable”. They have to show their work. They aren’t doing that.
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On the issue of whether evolutionary outcomes can be predicted with little or excellent precision with mathematical models, I present the findings of a study which investigated this using insects. It turns out we can predict evolutionary outcomes quite well if we know the dominant factors or poorly when we unaware of significant noisy variables. Enjoy.
Source paper:
“Intelligent” is not the antonym of “random.”
Natural selection is not random.
Disagree if you like. All I can say is that I’ve read just about every major ID book, and a good number of the second-string ID books as well, and scores of articles by ID proponents, and in the 16 years since I first heard of ID I’ve never seen an ID proponent claim that any particular mutations must have been miraculously guided. Even Mike Behe – who is the ID proponent most often accused of arguing that God miraculously intervenes to manipulate the mutations – has never made that claim. He has argued only the the overall pattern of results implies design. If you can find me passages where ID proponents suggest that God tweaked this or that part of a genome to give proto-birds the possibility of winged flight, or the like, please share them with me.
No. Dembski and others have many times explicitly disavowed that argument. It is not enough that the even is improbable. They concede that improbable events happen all the time, and that mere improbability is not sufficient to establish design. That’s where the notion of specification comes in. You either haven’t read Dembski’s (and the others’) discussions very carefully, or you’re misrepresenting them for some reason unknown to me.
As Behe points out, malaria has had ample time/number of generations to explore vast numbers of evolutionary pathways, so his argument doesn’t rest on picking only one pathway and ignoring the possibility of others; the results in the case of malaria give us a pretty clear idea of the probabilities of certain combinations of mutations occurring. For the detailed arguments, which I won’t reproduce here, see not only the Edge of Evolution book but his many, many replies to his critics on websites and in his new book. Again, I am not here trying to prove that Behe or anyone is correct; I am merely trying to correctly characterize what ID people have argued. Their conclusions might be incorrect, but it is not right to charge them with asserting or arguing things that they have not asserted or argued.
Anyhow, you are losing focus on “randomness and theology.”
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My condolences. That must have been painful, based on my lesser sampling.
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Then how can they claim genetic changes are improbable if they can’t point to a particular mutation?
You can’t calculate probabilities with “overall patterns”.
Specification is the act of drawing the bulls eye around the bullet hole. All I need to do is claim the dune is specified, and then stand amazed at how improbable the dune is, so improbable that it had to be designed.
It is a false assumption that just because the evolution of resistance to a specific drug requires a narrow evolutionary pathway that all adaptations must also have narrow paths. That makes no sense.
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