The Burden of Proof and the Problem of Composition

Conversation
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Some of you may recall back in October of last year when I argued here that as an explanation for the origin of functionally complex systems, the logic of what I call textbook evolutionary theory – where common ancestry is universal and selection is the central mechanism – runs afoul of the fallacy of composition. (See Is Evolutionary Theory a Fallacy?). At some point during the subsequent discussion I mentioned that I was writing a book that would include a chapter expanding on my argument.

That book was self-published in December 2023 under the title, Engineered for Life: The Failed Dogma of Evolution and a Fresh Model of Creationism. It’s a year later and sales have mostly dried up, but before moving on from the project altogether I thought Peaceful Science contributors might be interested to read my core argument from Chapter 5 – especially since it credits them for challenging me to develop the argument further. So I have posted a link to a .pdf of Chapter 5 below (the text looks a little better when downloaded, but the online preview still reads well enough):

Now I am not a scientist and I have no scientific credentials, and I genuinely respect scientists – more than they might understand from reading certain parts of my book. My argument calls into question the logic of evolutionary explanations as typically presented in textbooks and popular-level presentations, not the empirical data of biology (or paleontology, systematics, etc.) or the primary research of scientists. I write believing that while nonexperts are certainly wrong more often than experts, they occasionally have something worthwhile, even important, to contribute to a given field of inquiry nonetheless. And I think the history of science says as much.

In hopes of preempting a technical thrashing from the majority here, though, let me also point out what I see as areas of common ground: First, what I have called a “minimalist” model of creationism does not specify an age for the earth, and in principle allows for speciation, adaptive radiation, and extensive (albeit well short of “universal”) common descent. Second, despite my deep skepticism of textbook evolutionary theory I am happy to let scientists do their work as they see fit and have no desire to restrict their influence or alter public school science curricula. Finally, I appeal to the ideals of science in terms of tentative confirmation and ever-possible falsification to suggest that even if a certain long-standing scientific theory is the best theory on the market, it yet may turn out to be false (or mostly false). For any broad-based theory, there will always be viable alternative interpretations of the data.

Moderator(s), before deciding to approve please note that I don’t intend to stick around and argue my case further. Call me a chicken, but I frankly am not psychologically prepared to endure many of the harsher sorts of comments and accusations I got the last time around – and answering such comments only prolongs the agony (which may explain why it appears precious few serious critics of the consensus post here the way they did just 3-4 years ago). Neither do I have the expertise to debate finer technical points, or the time to do so even if I had the expertise. I am confident my argument doesn’t depend on technicalities.

Thanks for your interest, assuming you still have any. :slight_smile:

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@Don_Mc

I am very sympathetic to your line of reasoning explored in your Chapter 5.

But it does suffer one major fatal weakness: it is argument aimed virtually exclusively at non-religious advocates for evolutionary theory.

But it is helpless against those theists who believe God enthusiastically employed evolutionary principles throughout creation. How do we know who these evolutionary theists are?

Well, first, they accept the methods of geology and cosmology to DEFEND the idea the galaxies, and in particular planet Earth, are billions of years old.
[TYPO CORRECTED - - the word refute has been corrected to read DEFEND!]

Secondly, they reject the notion of God is merely a clock-maker; they believe a Universal conscious entity responds to human prayer in real time.

Thirdly, they represent tens of millions of Christians whose faith in Christ’s miraculous birth and resurrection poses no metaphysical or intellectual stumbling block to God working His design for humanity through the wondrous workings of natural laws as divinely conceived and invoked.

Lastly, some of these theists see God miraculously creating an historical Adam and Eve, about 6,000 years ago, for establishing moral purpose on this planet - - with the full intention of Adam imbuing all humankind that survived the resurrection (or were born afterwards) with that moral purpose.

As you can imagine, the great multitude of Christians - - which surely outnumber atheists of all kinds - - accept evolutionary processes as part of God’s design, rather than something opposed to design.

So, @Don_Mc, your argument accomplishes the rather small achievement of demonstrating the logical problems the fraction of humanity that are athiest evolutionists must negotiate … but you have accomplished zero traction in arguing that design (ID or otherwise) supports Young Earth worldviews.

G.Brooks

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This uniquely demanding burden of proof was established by none other than Charles Darwin, whose only proposed “test” with the potential to actually falsify his theory was to “demonstrate” its impossibility: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

This statement is both absurd and fallacious. The fallacy being that if Darwin didn’t propose any other test, then no other test could exist.

It ignores the fact that in the 160 years since the publication of Origins, numerous (countless?) tests have been proposed and performed.

This claim appears to be a part of a general Creationist strategy to raise Darwin’s writings to the status of some form of holy writ, such that any flaw in these writings can be presumed to be a flaw in Evolutionary Biology collectively. The problem with this being that whilst many of Darwin’s claims have been upheld by later research, a number of them have been rejected.

Yes, Darwin ‘established’ the field of Evolutionary Biology, in that he started the field – but he did not ‘establish’ it in the meaning that he created permanent rules governing all aspects of it.

The field of Evolutionary Biology is not bound by every statement of Darwin’s.

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Uhm, okay.

Just to pick out a couple of errors in the parts most interesting to me, at a quick glance I found a couple of misunderstandings in the .pdf you linked.

For example you write that Matzke’s 2003 article on flagellum evolution argues that the T3SS must be ancestral to the flagellum, but that modern phylogenetic methods have shown that the T3SS derives from the flagellum. This is a common misunderstanding. Matzke’s 2003 model doesn’t require that the extant T3SS lies phylogenetically ancestral to extant flagella, merely that when flagella evolved, they passed through a stage that was similar to the modern T3SS system. It is noteworthy here that for the flagellum to even be able to be constructed by bacteria, a type of T3SS actually is built first, and this protein secretion system is then used (it functions) to secrete the extracellular flagellar components, such as the long “tail”.

Later on you also write that constructive neutral processes must be somehow intrinsically more unlikely than processes guided by natural selection (which really just shows that you’ve gone searching for what other creationists have said about it), but this just shows you actually haven’t understood how constructive neutral processes work at the molecular level.
One of the key ideas is that an intrinsic mutational bias unavoidably increases complexity (for example by producing an amino acid substitution bias towards hydrophobicity on solvent-exposed protein surfaces, which makes proteins stick together and self-assemble into more complex structures because the exposed hydrophobic parts repel water and instead attract each other). So it’s actually not increasingly unlikely, but the diametrically opposite: the mutation bias makes it basically unavoidable. Allow random mutations to accumulate and the increase in complexity is statistically the most likely outcome.

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This all seems quite futile, since he announced in advance that he wouldn’t be responding. And I won’t download his chapter from a web site that demands my personal information. Can anyone summarize?

How well short of universal common descent? Does he ever say? Does he suggest how one would determine just where common descent stops?

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Why not specify an age range for the Earth? That’s about physics, astrophysics, geology, chemistry and other sciences. The age of the universe and the Earth has a profound impact on which Creation models are viable. It sounds like a punt to not ruffle the feathers of YECs vs OECs. But that downplays huge, irreconcilable positions. One can’t have a coherent model of Creationism without tackling that disparity because they are mutually exclusive.

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I agree. The fact that he spent a lot of the last thread arguing about his misunderstanding of a simple argument - while ignoring repeated corrections - doesn’t give much encouragement to read it, either.

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If one doesn’t have “the expertise to debate finer technical points” of a scientific theory, perhaps one should take the advice of Proverbs and keep silent, lest one be perceived a fool…

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How does he accomplish that? I have never encountered a “logical problem” that is specific to me as an “athiest (LOL) evolutionist.” Can you name one?

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In a process akin to the summoning of Beetlejuice, if irreducible complexity and constructive neutral evolution get mentioned, I am bound to show up and talk about X-Men.

I explored that simulation further over a series of blog posts to demonstrate that irreducibly complex systems can evolve and they can even do so when complexity provides no selective advantage. Not only is it possible, it is the most common outcome in these experiments.

I’ve been wondering if this could be demonstrated theoretically with a formalism similar to representing entropy in terms of the size of the state space where different microstates have the same macrostate, such that systems tend towards high entropy because those are the largest portions of state space. Likewise, there are simply more solutions that involve two parts than one, and more that involve three parts than two, etc*. I’m not sure if such a result would be interesting or is already known or would be considered trivial.

Caveat: This pattern cannot be extrapolated indefinitely. In this particular case, adding additional parts is not always neutral or beneficial, so there is likely an inflection point past which the number of solutions decreases with additional parts.

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There you go again George, threating atheist evolutionists with distain. Atheist evolutionists are fine people and are the salt of the Earth. A little more respect from you is warranted this time of year with the Winter Solstice approaching.

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I would be interested to see your refutation, using the methods of geology and cosmology, that galaxies and the Earth are billions of years old. Or perhaps you mistyped.

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It’s hard to see how that would be possible, since evolutionary theory, which you are not-so-subtly misrepresenting as mere explanations, is completely derived from and integrated with that evidence.

Except that those worthwhile things that are contributed are not arguments, but hypotheses and most importantly, evidence.

Let me guess: your model does not specify any times because doing so would allow it to make empirical predictions that would make it falsifiable, right? That real, sciency stuff has to be avoided.

Why do you keep specifying “textbook”?

Evolutionary theory, unlike your “model,” is intelligently designed to be falsifiable.

That’s just a variation on the most gross falsehood in creationism. You can’t claim that people are interpreting the same data differently when you’re the one ignoring the vast majority of the data.

Now you are pretending that all of those data you are ignoring are mere “technicalities.” Why, if you’re so convinced that you have something to contribute to science?

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Maybe we should have minimalist models of other ideas?

A minimalist model of physics that doesn’t specify a gravitational constant, for example. A minimalist model of genetics that doesn’t include genome sizes. A minimalist model of chemistry that says there are elements, but we don’t know how many - could be 4, could be 4 billion - and doesn’t include a value for Avvogadro’s number. A minimalist model of geography that doesn’t specify a height for Everest or the width of the Atlantic. A minimalist model of economics in which the US GDP could be less than $50, and a minimalist model of astronomy in which the sun might orbit the earth every 47 seconds.

Or a minimalist model of his minimalist model which estimates it as being worth less than 10 nanoseconds of anyone’s time.

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Minimal creation theory that also needs to include…

Whether there was an ark and worldwide flood that scoured land based animals, requiring repopulation from the animals housed on the boat.

What animals belong to which Kinds and the order in which specific Kinds arose.

The expected genetic structure of the human population having originated from a single pair. (Note: This requires some proposal about the age of the Earth to begin formulating a model, as does the date of the Biblical flood, if one happened.)

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Be fair. It doesn’t require knowledge of the technicalities to see that he hasn’t even tried to make a serious case. His argument falls flat on it’s face anyway.

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There are 2^N possible solutions, where N is the number of parts (from the Binomial theorem).

I think you are correct this cannot be extrapolated indefinitely, but it can still be large. There was a recent paper finding about 50 genes associated with autism spectrum disorders. I think it’s safe to assume there are more than 50 genes that influence human intelligence overall.

Any to head off claims that 2^N solutions is too many for evolution to “test”, genetic algorithms handle this sort of problem in O[N \cdot \log(N)] steps.
(“on the order of” N \cdot \log(N). See Big O notation)

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@sfmatheson:

Whether attempted rational or sub-rational attestations for the existence of
God are used, athiests must go against the grain of American society and
strenuously argue that there is “no design/there is no God”.

This sucks all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to the average Christian-centric evolutionist. That is why there are hardly any of them that participate on these boards.

Christian evolutionists simply agree that there is design, and that the design can be demonstrated to involve evolution, billion-year Geology and billion-year cosmology.

If there were no atheists, I.D. as we know it would cease to exist.

Brooks

P.S. John Harshman, I apologize for the typo. Instead of REFUTE, by the time I finished that sentence I should have remembered to correct REFUTE to read DEFEND. I thank you for drawing attention to the error.

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Great. Now can you stop consistently misspelling “atheist”? Also, can you stop claiming to speak for all Christian evolutionists?

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I’ve always called it “Omicron notation.”

“Big O notation” refers to the closed-captioning of Meg Ryan’s famous scene in Katz’s deli.

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