I want to point out that this is one of the best articles I’ve read from ID. The article does not have the combativeness I’ve come (rightly or wrongly) to expect from ID. That is good.
The idea here is novel too. They propose an actual design principle. Look at the abstract:
The hierarchical classification of life has been claimed as compelling evidence for universal common ancestry. However, research has uncovered much data which is not congruent with the hierarchical pattern. Nevertheless, biological data resembles a nested hierarchy sufficiently well to require an explanation. While many defenders of intelligent design dispute common descent, no alternative account of the approximate nested hierarchy pattern has been widely adopted. We present the dependency graph hypothesis as an alternative explanation, based on the technique used by software developers to reuse code among different software projects. This hypothesis postulates that different biological species share modules related by a dependency graph. We evaluate several predictions made by this model about both biological and synthetic data, finding them to be fulfilled.
This is the first actual design model since Walter ReMines’ Biotic Message I’ve seen arise. That is important to acknowledge and respect. Without commenting whether this is a good explanation or not, the mere attempt to do the work of building and testing a mathematical model is to be commended.
A few initial thoughts:
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It will take time to process and think about what is being proposed here. It is possible that this gives a reasonable account of part of the data (nested clades).
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It is clear that this study has also entirely ignored much stronger evidence for common descent, which is not nested clades at all (see, for example, Common Descent: Humans and Chimps / Mice and Rats).
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Superficially, this seems to parallel some (on the surface) developments in population genetics. I’ll explain later, but just say it would be really interesting to see the results of their model on a negative control, human variation data.
Looking forward to seeing how this develops. For the ID advocates listening, I will do my best to be fair. Even if this only solves part of the problem from them (#1), the evidence for common descent remains very strong (#2), but this would still be an important advance for them. As I’ve said, I think #3 is an important control experiment. If the results for this could be shared, I would be very interested to see it. Scientific work is hard too, you do not expect to solve all the problems in one swoop. So, for that reason, I’m willing to see how this goes.
@pnelson, I saw you were acknowledged in this paper. This is one of the best contributions I’ve seen come out of ID (whether it holds up or not). I’ll be looking at this closely. I hope that Winston and you can engage with us here. Peace.
More later…