The Problem with the ID Argument

[Jordan (Jordan Mantha)]

@colewd

I would say the process that produced prp8 and ultimately the spliceosome is similar to the process that produced the 64 bit microprocessor. The microprocessor is in itself very complex but does not function on it own as it is a piece of a functioning system.

I think I agree with @Timothy_Horton on this part:

@Timothy_Horton

The process which produces microprocessors involves lots of discrete manufacturing steps including making a silicon wafer, using UV light to etch the circuitry onto the wafer, doping the wafer with SiO2 to produce transistors, then cutting the wafer into individual pieces which are then installed in the final physical package.

How did you determine proteins are produced with the same process?

The similarities between the spliceosome and a microprocessor seem to be superficial, at most. The only thing I can see is that they are both a complex assemblies. But on the other hand, they are made of completely different materials and in completely different ways (manufacturing plants vs. cells). If a model is an analogy, then the power of the model is in its clarity and correspondence to the reality it models.

@colewd

What we are discussing is beyond ID at this point but I am trying to offer some additional ideas.

How can that be? I thought ID was supposed to be a competing theory for the origin of living organisms. Do you mean that ID doesn’t have a specific mechanism for the spliceosome in particular? That’s OK, but is there a general mechanism by which ID proposes that new biological assemblies are generated? I’m assuming there is something beyond “an intelligence did it”, but perhaps not. If not, I think that is problematic for ID as a scientific pursuit.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a valid philosophical or theological pursuit, but I think it loses credibility as a scientific theory without some sort of specified mechanism.

@colewd

Bill do lions and tigers share a common ancestor? How about tigers and domestic cats? Yes or no and how can we tell?

I have no idea other than a guess. Do you now have a method to make a informed decision on whether common ancestry exists? Maybe Jordan can participate with you guys.

Well, I know not everybody can be expected to be a biologist or to recreate research papers, but I did participate in @John_Harshman’s excellent office hour: John Harshman: The Phylogeny of Crocodiles . I read a lot of Wikipedia articles and some papers, I installed phylogenetic software and learned a bit about the algorithms it uses. I made lots of mistakes but @John_Harshman, @davecarlson, @Rumraket, and @swamidass helped me understand it much better.

@colewd

If you have a clear way to determine ancestry between species then explain it. @Jordan what are your thoughts? Let’s see if @Jordan believes you have a clear hypothesis.

Well, I certainly don’t know a lot about this area. One of the things that I’ve learned is that scientists know their work very well. They are still human and may have a tendency to overreach at times when it comes to interpretation of the science, but they are mostly people passionate about getting to the truth of the what’s and how’s of the universe. So, all that to say, I generally defer to my colleagues.

Here’s how I understand the ancestry question. A phylogenetic tree shows hypothesized relationships between organisms. The interesting part to me is that computational phylogenetics uses very little in the way of biology. Very generally, you can put a set of protein/DNA sequences in and apply various statistical algorithms (which are similar to those used outside of biology) to generate a tree. I took a class on machine learning and statistical inference that included clustering techniques similar to those used in phylogenetics. One of the most startling things to me is how grounded in statistics evolutionary biology is. Look at the founders of population genetics, for instance.

Of course a phylogenetic tree is just a hypothesis of relationships based on statistics, so you want to compare it to other data. You could compare a tree with a known ancestry (if we have a record), a phylogenetic tree built from morphology, or to the fossil record. If common decent is a generalizable model, we should be able to have close matches between trees created from different data (DNA, morphology, fossil record, for instance) across many examples. This, according to my colleagues, is what we see.

So, I’ve had a peak at the methodology (which is grounded in statistical techniques used outside biology) and I’ve played with the software a little bit to see how it works myself. I see no reason to reject the common descent model. It fits the data.

Is it universal? I don’t know. I don’t know that anybody knows it’s 100% universal. I would suppose that those who have no mechanisms outside nature would merely assume it’s 100% universal. Those of us who allow for agents outside nature may wonder if it’s not quite absolutely universal but that does not invalidate the model or mean we can toss it aside for one we just happen to like more.

As Christians we have a ready example of this kind of thinking. Think of the Resurrection. “Dead people stay dead” is still a good and useful model for understanding the world, even though we affirm that there was an exception. I think it’s plausible that God was involved in the first cell, or maybe made a tweak here or there to steer things in the right direction, but I have yet to see clear/convincing evidence that it was anything detectable by science.