What if Evolution is Compatible with Design After All?

Some ground rules before a game of Brockian Ultracricket breaks out.

ALL comments will be moved to the side/comments thread except those I deem a positive contribution to the discussion. I may move them back if persuaded otherwise - we can discuss that in the comments thread.

Comments that I deem to be redundant are likely to be removed. Please review existing comments to see if the question has already been asked. If a lot of people want to ask the same question, put your heads together and have one person ask on behalf of all.

I have limited time to deal with this today, and this looks to be a time-sink. Try to self-moderate and resolve potential problems in the comments thread BEFORE I need to deal with them.

/fnord

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Hi Rope and welcome.

I hope you don’t mind a couple of quick comments while I digest the rest:

I don’t think anyone has ever rejected the idea that design and evolution are compatible, not least because they can be shown to be compatible by looking (as you do) at implementation of genetic algorithms.

Thanks for the link.

Perhaps it’s my background in implementing evolutionary algorithms, but that paper seemed rather shallow.

Some specific issues I found with it are:

  • It doesn’t mention one of the most vexing issues when implementing evolutionary algorithms - their tendency to take advantage of loopholes in either the fitness function or the environment and reach ‘solutions’ that are nothing like the implementer’s goal[1];
  • It refers frequently to Dawkins’ ‘weasel’ program, but not to any more recent or more sophisticated evolutionary algorithms, which generally don’t share 'weasel’s simplifications;
  • It seems to assume that selection takes place by looking at the fitness values of the entire simulated population, but there are many evolutionary algorithms that implement selection by directly comparing two (or sometimes three) individual ‘organisms’, without ever calculating a fitness value.

  1. Such as the one intended to produce a signal generator, which produced an aerial and amplifier instead. ↩︎

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Mercer

Hi Rope,

I’m a Christian molecular biologist with a wide range of experience, much of it directly relevant to the misrepresentations of science pushed by the ID movement, particularly those of Axe.

Your framing, using “ID arguments” as an obvious ground state, while portraying people like me as the critics responding to them, doesn’t make sense to me–except as polemics. I would think that any truly comprehensive, intellectually rigorous inquiry must necessarily begin with the real science being criticized by the real critics (IDers), not the rhetoric of arguments and responses.

The title alone reflects the issue with your framing, as does my sampling of its content. Did everything you could get your eyes on include most of the relevant primary scientific literature?

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Unfortunately, in my opinion you are mistaken. Perhaps you could try explaining briefly what the substance of this compatibility is. What does God add to evolutionary biology that evolutionary biology needs?

That’s not the important question, which is rather whether the quote is being used to say something that Carroll, in context, didn’t mean. I and others would say that it is.

I’m afraid not. You have focused on peripheral issues without getting into the substance. I for one still don’t understand what you mean by the compatibility of evolution and design and whether it means anything beyond the ideas of Behe and Denton. Where, again, does God fit into evolution? Beyond that, how would we tell?

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Dear Faizal

Sure, but you can then go on to investigate those constraints in more detail to get somewhere. What are the situations which foster evolution, and what are the ones that hinder it? Could we imagine a cosmos in which evolutionary processes fail to produce complex functional structures like eyes? If so, what explains their success in our world? If my book is too suspicious as a source, maybe you would like George McGhee’s Convergent Evolution: Limited Forms Most Beautiful or his Convergent Evolution on Earth: Lessons for the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. .

Thanks Roy! There’s certainly plenty of people who reject the compatibility of evolution and design, and the compatibility of evolution and biological design arguments. If you need sources for this, I think there should be lots in the open access publications I’ve linked, and more in the book.

Jeavons probably does not mention those examples, because his article is a response to / evaluation of my book in which I do also point out examples of genetic algorithms producing designs that were unanticipated. So there was no need to talk about examples that we both agree about, given that this does not change the conclusions in any way - you still need plenty of design expertise to get such algorithms to produce interesting results. I hope you can give Jeavons the benefit of the doubt, since he is an expert in this field. See his details here.

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Hi Mercer, nice to meet. But who could ever read “most of the relevant primary scientific literature”? I did read lots of primary scientific literature. However, even if I did not, I would expect that at least lots of the relevant responses to ID arguments would be known to me based on reading the work of well-credentialed ID critics.

Also, this method of making large conclusions about me / my framing based on a few sentences and the title of my book seems unreliable, no? Do you not think there is room / need in the scholarly literature for studies of debates between mainstream positions and their critics, or studies trying to understand the way critics of mainstream science argue?

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Dear Tim, thanks for the welcome! I found your representation of the book and your critique here less than fair, unfortunately. For example:

  • You mention critique of the design argument’s logic (arguing that a designer would make any phenomenon more probable, and therefore explains nothing). But you do not mention that I discuss this same criticism in the book and respond to it. I suspect you would react quite critically if a book defending your own position was criticized in this same manner - repeating arguments that are actually responded to in the book, without even mentioning the responses. Regardless, such philosophical critique of design arguments is distinct from critiques based on evolution as such.

  • Similarly, you now point out that the idea of “laws of form” is linked to structuralism as if this was something I should be surprised by - but I actually discuss this same issue in the book, and even reference the critique of structuralism from the Edge symposium Moran discusses in your link. However, I do point to lots of non-structuralists who also argue for the role of constraints in influencing evolution - and one does not have to use the term “laws of form” to come close to the same idea. I also argue that the general thesis of the compatibility of evolution and design does not depend on structuralism, though structuralism would fit it very well, I think.

Since you have access to the book, why not make an effort to steel-man my position a bit, and only then criticize it? And why not browse through the articles in the Zygon symposium, as well as my response, and then develop critique that goes a bit deeper than the ones there? I think this would be more helpful for developing good objections than, say, criticizing my acknowledgements-section or the Carroll-quote, which I do not use to say more than what it says right there.

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Unfortunately, if you understood absolutely nothing based on the already posted information, and the fine articles by David Glass and Mats Wahlberg, I suspect that further explanations will not help either. But: In my view, the point is not to say that God adds anything to evolutionary biology itself. Although the idea can raise interest in some research questions (regarding the constraints and directionality of evolution, for example), studying these does not require affirming design. Rather, the point is that the affirming all of evolutionary biology is wholly compatible with arguing that the evolution of complex biological functions is better explained on the supposition that God has created the process, than on the supposition that cosmos just happens to have the capacity for this kind of evolution. These are different explanatory questions, or different explanatory levels from evolutionary biology, depending on the preferred terminology.

I disagree! I do not think such a misunderstanding or misrepresentation has been demonstrated, even with Tim’s further posts. In context in the book, the Carroll quote is pretty much just flavor text, showing the history of the idea, and is used to argue only what it says in the quote. I then go on to argue (as does biologist Denis Alexander, the “scholar” mentioned by Tim) that the case is stronger than in the time of Carroll’s article. Nothing much depends on the quote, and I do go on to also discuss reasons for doubting that evolution has a necessary direction. So the careful reader should not be left with a false impression.

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As far as I can tell, evolutionary biologists have been doing just that from Darwin on. Are you really suggesting that, until recently, those scientists have disregarded or been ignorant of how basic physical parameters influence the process of evolution? For instance, did they not realize that a functioning eye would have to detect and respond to light waves in some manner? I don’t believe that is the case at all.

There are plenty of people who (correctly) reject the compatibility of specific evolutionary and design scenarios. YEC and common descent are incompatible, for example. But I know of no-one who rejects the compatibility of any evolution and design explanations (or arguments for them).

Perhaps we’re talking past each other, since I doubt English is your main language. There’s a difference between finding an unanticipated solution that fits the implementer’s goal but doesn’t resemble anything the implementer had envisaged (such as this radio antenna), vs an unanticipated solution that doesn’t fit the implementer’s goal because of a flaw in the fitness function.

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Roy, we might indeed be talking past each other since this does not seem relevant. The radio antenna was actually one of the examples I used. And yes, that is a basic distinction that I can affirm.

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Why would I need to suggest such a thing, or why think that I am suggesting this? I hope for better informed and more charitable criticism.

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A bit of background here. We recently discussed what constitutes “fair criticism” of ID. I made the point that the primary voices of ID do not admit to error, publish corrections to errors, retract flawed articles, or behave in a manner consistent with good scientific practice. They also do not produce practical results in the form of inventions, patents, medical treatments, and new areas of discovery. I asked “what should be the criteria for criticism of ID?”, charitable or otherwise. I didn’t get any answers.

ID is perfectly acceptable as apologetics, and there are a great many people who see things this way; Old Earth Creationist, Theological Evolutionists, even the more reasonable sort of Evangelicals (like Biologos). The troubles start IMO with the effort to conflate apologetics and science, and think that is a very fair target of criticism. Those supporting ID could do much to further their cause by behaving as scientists, producing practical results, and acknowledging errors.

My emphasis added. I don’t have time to expand on this fully, and I wish to avoid stepping into @Roy’s topic of discussion, but …

you still need plenty of design expertise to get such algorithms to produce interesting results.

This statement seems to require a sort of Bayesian Prior assumption for the existence of the Designer and the intent to design. My own experience with evolutionary algorithms is they are very good at generating results, but those results are often not what the programmer expected, and *that is where expertise is needed. EAs are also highly computationally efficient, "Big-O of N*log(N) if that means anything to you. In practice that means the massively parallel and combinatorial approach of EAs can easily crack highly improbable solutions. [I will add a reference when I have time to follow up].
[There is also a recent example of EAs successfully being used to generate computer code, which Jeavons and others have criticised that EA could not do well. I’ll look for that citation too.]

EDIT TO ADD

From the Side Discussion, @Roy criticises MY comment just above.

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I haven’t read those fine articles.If you cited them previously, I hadn’t noticed. I’ll look. [Turns out I had read the first one but not the second. Didn’t help.] It would greatly help you here, however, if you could be more explicit in your ideas, perhaps tying them to some specifics of biology. But I would disagree with everything you say here, even your parenthetical remark. God adds nothing to the study of evolutionary constraints or directionality, not even inspiration. Why would you think so? “Compatibility” is so weak a claim as to be meaningless; God, particularly one whose attributes are undefined, would be “compatible” with any observation whatsoever. “Better explained” is a stronger claim, but if you are actually making that claim it needs to be supported: what processes, exactly, are better explained by creation or divine intervention, and how are they explained? Again, some specifics would really help to define the argument, if indeed there is one.

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Easily. 1 billion years ago there were no complex functional structures like eyes. A few Chicxulub-like impacts in quick succession that eliminated life on Earth then would produce your scenario.

It’s also possible that if some form of life emerged on Mars while there was still water there, but died out when the water went, that’d be another case of evolutionary processes failing to produce complex functional structures like eyes.

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If this is not what you are suggesting, then it is still not at all clear to me what you are suggesting when you talk about “investigat(ing) those constraints in more detail.” Could you provide a specific example of something you believe has not been adequately investigated because evolutionary biologists are not taking sufficient consideration for how the laws of physics might influence the evolutionary process.

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Just to add my response from the side thread - I would characterize what Roy did as design in the sense of purposefully arranging stuff, so this does not provide a counterexample. The nature of the organisms and the values of the variables would be part of the work of the intelligent agent operating the program. I think here Roy and I are simply using different terminology, where his term “design” has a much narrower scope than what is typically used in design arguments.

No, my statement about GA’s was meant to be based on what we can see in practice is required for producing interesting (not necessarily intended) results using them. Jeavons argues for this, as do I in the book. However, as noted, if you set the bar for “interesting results” very low, then you may disagree. But then that’s not relevant for design arguments anymore.

Our Bayesian priors and our assessment of other evidence pro/contra theism may very well differ. Perhaps it helps to note that there is a difference between presenting design arguments as supporting evidence for religious belief / design arguments as sufficient evidence for concluding theism. I think design arguments are very strong, particularly in combination with other arguments and considerations, as e.g. Andrew Loke claims. But design as weak or moderate quality supporting evidence for a Creator would already be interesting and valuable, I think.

[MOD EDIT to correct quote formating - Dan]

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I owe some citations, but my laptop is in the shop for a screen replacement (i dropped it) so I’m having trouble finding what I want.

Example of Genetic Algorithm reducing difficult problems to “linear time”.
Nopiah, Z. M., Khairir, M. I., Abdullah, S., Baharin, M. N., & Arifin, A. (2010, February). Time complexity analysis of the genetic algorithm clustering method. In Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS international conference on signal processing, robotics and automation, ISPRA (Vol. 10, pp. 171-176).

The other was a popular press article(s) on use of GA to produce computer code, a task for which GAs had previously not performed well. Still looking for that …

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Have you had a discussion on what constitutes good criticism in general, not just in relation to ID? Perhaps that might be helpful. There’s lots of guides to constructive, high quality academic criticism out there, right?

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