Thacker has questions

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Thacker

So, I’ve reviewed some of this book, and here is the issue I’m seeing. Perakh’s discussion in Why Intelligent Design Fails (Young & Edis 2006, ch. 6) treats the openness of living systems; continuous energy and matter exchange with the environment, as sufficient to permit “local decreases in entropy” and therefore the spontaneous rise of “information.” This reasoning conflates thermodynamic entropy, a measure of energy dispersion (S = k ln Ω), with Shannon informational entropy, a measure of signal uncertainty (H = –Σ p log p). While an open thermodynamic system can maintain or even increase physical order through energy throughput, there is no empirical or theoretical corollary by which energy flow alone can create or preserve functional information.

Whoa there cowboy! Shannon Information is not Functional Information, however you define functional information.

Creating and preserving Shannon Information is analogous to a thermodynamic system, except there is no Second Law of Information Theory. There are several Information Inequality which are roughly similar to 2LoT, but none of these prohibit information from being preserved or new information added. The way this works is also analogous: First new (random) information is added to a population, then some of that information is discarded (not random).

@Thacker

@Paul_King

By “normal conditions” you mean in objects known to be built by humans. That is already a very significant difference. Given that we have no manufacture - the various flagella grow naturally - nor do we have a known entity capable of creating or implementing the design, the inference is not so clear. (I should note that I am not insisting that a “known entity” needs to be any more known than “a human”). Certainly not clear enough to justify inventing an ad hoc designer.

The appeal to human manufacture as the only valid reference for design is disingenuous.

It is not disingenuous, it is science. We appeal to human manufacture because we know humans exist and make things. If we appealed to aliens from Alpha Centauri manufacturing artifacts THAT would be disingenuous, because we have no a priori evidence that such aliens exist. Likewise, ID has no a priori evidence that a Designer exists.
This repeats a point I made before the thread split.

@Thacker

@Dan_Eastwood

Winton Ewert Dependency Graph hypothesis, which even the ID proponents aren’t too excited about.

The dismissal of Ewert’s dependency-graph work misses the point of what he was demonstrating. His model parallels what we see in every field of human design: a web of shared components and reused information rather than a simple branching tree of descent.

You misunderstand - Far from dismissing Ewert’s work, I think it is the greatest thing in all of ID literature, because it is the only example that comes close to stating a testable hypothesis.

AND because it is testable, it can be compared to hypotheses from evolution such as Common Descent. To my knowledge there has published a test of the Dependency Graph versus Common Descent using phylogenetic data, but the methods for doing so are well accepted. An ID research could use mainstream methods to test ID hypotheses, and there would be no arguments about the validity of methods made up from scratch (Like Dembski’s CSI). Someone could actually test ID hypotheses in the same manner as Theobald, White, and Baum.

THIS HAS NOT HAPPENED

It’s almost like ID researchers are afraid of putting their ideas to a real test.

@Thacker

The demand for falsifiability misses how science actually works in many established disciplines. Archaeologists infer design when they find artifacts that bear marks of intention …

Once again, archeologist infer human design. They do not infer the existence of humans.

And I lost the source comment, but Axe’s probability calculation and inference to Design makes the same error we started with - the probability of this (that) thread occurring by chance.

What is needed is a hypothesis for Design from which we might calculate a probability of Design to compare to a probability of evolution using the same data (Such ratios are at the heart of statistical inference).