Nobody has managed to find anything with SETI either (so far). Does that make it "non-scientific"?
No, that makes it not yet successful. What they have going for them is that when a signal comes, they have hypothesis to test against. They run tests on the signal and thus far, the null hypothesis has reigned. The ID team has the DNA. They don't have any proposals as to what to do with it, though. If they come up with a testable proposal, I'll call it science. If they find something significant, I'll be right there supporting the call for the idea to get into schools. As it stands, letting ID into schools as science would be like letting the conclusion that we've already found ET life into schools before the SETI project even began, simply because it was theoretically possible to test the signals. Dembski and pals need to stop grandstanding and actually do something.
We could look for bitmaps, statistical anomalies (lots of one of the four bases), encodings of Pi, etc.
Then jump on it. What, specifically, do you suggest we look for? I'll grant that pi would be a very interesting result. How about X adenine molecules in a row? How do we know what value for X wouldn't be produced naturally but might be produced by a designer? The answer is, we really don't (or at least none of the ID camp has bothered to figure it out and make the proposal) because nobody has proposed anything about who the designer is. What were/are its mechanisms? Its goals? Its methods? If you want to propose a designer who tailor made DNA and had a fondness for pi, you have yourself a hypothesis to test. You've done more in one slashdot post than all of the "giants" of the ID movement have managed to pull off since they renamed creationism so many years ago.
True, we don't currently do this, but we don't broadcast lasers into space nor build Dyson Spheres, yet SETI or SETI-like programs have considered looking for those also. Thus, the "we do it now" criteria is excessive, or else we flunk those also.
The SETI people are looking for life like us. They ask themselves, "What do we do now and what might we do if we had the technology?" Those simple tests will find ET intelligence that thinks like we do and has similar communications methods. The key in all of this is that they've proposed properties for the ET life. That's what I was getting at with my "we do it now" criterion. They've characterized the system and they know what to look for. They have a description of the nature and the methods of what they're testing for. If the ID camp can simply do that, they'll be on the map in my opinion. Until then, they're just creationists under a different name who do no meaningful work beyond regurgitating old creationist canards and trying to get them into schools so they can dupe the next generation.
I do biometrics for a living. All of biometrics simply boils down to one thing: classification. We know what the genuine looks like and we know what the impostor looks like, and our goal is to build an algorithm that can classify an unknown as one or the other. SETI does a similar task. They know what naturally produced signals generally look like, and they know what signals that we might produce generally look like. They've build a classifier and they're running it. The ID crowd needs to define what they're looking for and look for it rather than expounding on how it's theoretically possible to build a classifier if you can simply calculate some nonsense quantity like "complex specified information" and not actually doing it. The key though, is to define what "designed" looks like and what "not designed" looks like and build a system for classification. That's what the rest of us have been doing for years, and that's why I'm not going to pat them on the back for pointing out that classification algorithms exist and might somehow be applied to the design of molecules.
A lot of Intelligent Design proponents believe in genetic front-loading. For example, the genes for my Labrador (friendliness, webbed feet, etc) were present originally in wolves. Same goes for Poodle genes. They just needed some reshuffling.
Yet in all of that, they ignore the fact that we know that mutations take place, and they give no explanation as to why to discard them as an explanation (in the face of significant evidence to the contrary) in favor of the "front loading" hypothesis.
The only things that should be classified are things like nuke launch codes, agent identities, troop movements/orders... Stuff that would directly put people in harms way. As it stands our government has a "classify everything first just in case there is a dirty little secret in there" mentality. That's not promoting national security. That's stuffing their skeletons in a closet. They found a way to "destroy" evidence without being held accountable.
I'm no fan of the "classify everything just in case" mode of operations (God knows I can think of some instances of that that make no sense whatsoever), but I think you're being too broad in your declassification. There's a whole class of information that, while it puts nobody directly in harm's way, would seriously jeopardize operations. For example, if one of our intelligence agencies had figured out how to tap into the electronic military communications of, say, North Korea, it has serious implications, even if disclosing the fact doesn't put any agents in direct harm (let's say we're just snarfing data out of the airwaves).
Should we declassify the fact that we caught them with their pants down and they're broadcasting a wealth of information on strategy and troop movements? Certainly not. Should we declassify some random, unimportant fact that comes from that intelligence source (let's say some general calls his mistress from his office and we leak the fact that the call was made)? I would argue against it. If enough innocuous (but supposedly secret) facts about North Korean military operations became known, it would tip them off to the fact that they're leaking information somehow. If they get the right set of information, it's not unlikely that they'd find the hole in their comms and plug it (or worse, start putting deliberate misinformation into it), leaving us in the dark. History is full of examples like that, and it's generally why intelligence agencies don't like letting data, however innocuous, slip out.
True, this is the only one out there that was able to slip by that is not in a ID-favorable publication.
Yes, "slip by" isn't a bad description of what happened in that case.
It will take time for the science to spread. It's in for a tough fight and unfortunately a political one - but grant money is on the line.
The first goal before "spreading" the science and getting published should be to produce some sort of results that aren't simply a critique of evolutionary theory (which is essentially what the paper in question does). If they produced some results (tests, calculations, etc.), it would be hard to deny them publication. If all they're doing is rehashing creationist anti-evolution talking points, it should be no surprise that they're not making any inroads.
I'm not capable of GENERATING actual probabilities myself but can cite a few that others have developed and are readily available to you - though I think you would only be interested in ones that are peer-reviewed themselves. Try Yockey's "Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology.
You might not be surprised to know that you're not the first person to cite Yockey's papers without reading them. The paper in question does not address common descent or evolutionary theory in general (note that evolutionary theory takes as axiomatic that life started somewhere and then uses that fact to explain the diversity of life now). It does address a common abiogenesis theory of its day. You might want to ask Dr. Yockey what he thinks intelligent design as science.
It also looks a lot like someone learning how to design lifeforms using common templates and revising them.
Are you sure? A key technique in all of this is not to look at commonalities in coding DNA but rather in non-coding DNA. Obviously, coding DNA should be similar for organisms with closely related physiologies whether or not they have common ancestry (and as far as I can tell, a huge number of creationists think that this is all that's used in these phylogeny calculations). There's no reason for non-coding DNA to be similar, though. The technique goes something like this:
1) At t=0, two descendants of an organism are born. They share some regions of DNA that are 100% identical (not surprisingly). This includes the DNA that codes for proteins and the DNA in between those regions.
2) Every generation, more and more mutations happen to the non-coding DNA. Since it's non-coding, this is generally not a big deal, so the stuff goes along for a ride.
3) Generations down the line, the coding regions are very similar, but the non-coding regions have decayed somewhat. By looking at homologous non-coding regions, it's possible to estimate how far back their common ancestor went.
As it turns out, we share a lot of DNA markers like that with other primates. We share fewer with dogs and cats and fewer still with worms. This observation is 100% in sync with common descent (and extensive computer modeling bears this out). How does ID explain it? Does the designer copy over non-coding DNA from design to design and then mutate it according to a fixed pattern that just happens to correlate with our taxonomic and phylogenetic trees? If so, why? Aesthetics? Errors in methodology? DNA rotting on the shelf? Without putting out some sort of concrete description of how the designer operates, those questions will never be answered.
I reviewed teh Robertsonian Translocation you link to. I'm not sure that it is much more of an argument for DE than the vast amount of common DNA between humans and chimps to begin with.
It's a prediction that would have devastated the theory of evolution had it not been true as it would have completely disrupted the twin nested hierarchy that it relies on. One might ask why an intelligent designer would fuse the chromosomes in such a way only for humans (or even ask why the chromosomes map in such a similar way at all), but given that ID makes no suggestion as to the nature of the designer, asking those questions would be pointless.
However, here's something else to consider. The fusion of chromosomes - let's presume that humans are a result of the fusion in a predecessor race's DNA template. How did that happen exactly? In a completely random way? How did speciation occur? Did a male and female chimp have to have it occur at exactly the same time in the same place so they could mate? Because the 46chromo and the 48chromo cannot reproduce together.
It's pretty clear to me that you didn't read the whole piece I posted. It answers these questions and flatly contradicts your claim. It happens in about in in every 900 people. In the case of this type of fusion, they can reproduce together. Half of the offspring will have the fusion and half will not. Reread the article. It explains the whole thing.
Given that we know that - it seems to make a very good argument for ID - I can tell you I've seen it happen - in human run genetic engineering where chromosomes are fused all the time - in a petry dish.
As I pointed out, we don't "know that" because the statement is false. It doesn't make the case for ID in any sensible way for one simple reason: ID would be equally probable if it were not true. Of course, if you're suggesting something about the nature of the designer, maybe we can work with that. Are you proposing that the designer accidentally fuses chromosomes, and from that we might be able to deduce something about its mechanisms? If so, I think you're coming closer to formulating a meaningful hypothesis than anybody else in ID has so far.
Two points: One, we don't have to give away our competitive advantages just for a short term financial gain. This *will* bite us in the end.
I'd argue that we're already well past that point. I'm not necessarily talking about competing with countries that don't have environmental regulations or labor laws. I'm talking about the fact that there's no rational reason for, say, an engineer in the US to make so much more money than an engineer in any other country doing the same thing. Quite simply, our standard of living has gone well beyond what we can justify (or, at least, the standards of living of those in developing nations have not yet caught up to what their work justifies). We've borrowed and spent and taken advantage of an unreasonably strong currency for a long time, and we were nuts to think that it would last forever. Sure, we're not totally to blame as this is largely an artifact of developing economies "catching up" to us in terms of industrialization and services, but if you want to stay out front, you have to do something to stay there.
You idea of going free trade works, if and only if, you convince *all* of our trading partners to also go the free trade route. Otherwise, again, we are just giving it away...
My original point centered around currency and the overall relative strength of economies and why it's stupid for people to act like the dollar has some sort of divinely inspired value, but you're right, I did touch on the fact that protectionism doesn't fix the problem. The key point to remember is that we simply can't pay foreigners to do things for us forever without having something to justify the money we're giving to them. The problem will only really fix itself if standards of living reach some reasonable semblance of parity or if we once again start producing things that only we can produce (or at least, at a cost that only we can produce them at). As I see it, the latter isn't really much of an option.
My fundamental point is that all this necessarily means that the dollar's value should drop against currencies of the developing countries we're paying to do our work for us. Our trade deficit will stop when one of two things happens: 1) We institute some sort of protectionist measures to stop importing goods and labor, driving up cost for everybody. 2) We let it happen, and eventually exchange rates and costs of living will be such that the pressure eases. Either one has serious consequences, and the idea that going with one over the other is somehow the universally correct solution is nonsense that politicians try to sell to get their bases whipped up into a frenzy. Either way things go , there are going to be a lot of sad faces. Unfortunately, it's hard to make these landings soft for everybody.
In the long run, I'm not worried. There was a time when everybody was sure that the fact that the Japanese were "catching up" to us and starting to compete with us in our bread and butter fields was going to turn us all into subsistence farmers. Japan finished its transformation into an advanced industrialized economy and now they're just another player and trading partner. Sure, some industries had their lunches eaten, but that's the way it is in a competitive world. We could have "saved" those industries with protectionist policies at the cost of a lot of really worthwhile goods that helped to drive our economy, but those sorts of policies are really only a transfer of suffering from one segment of a population to another.
I'm not an economist, but I at least am informed enough to look deeper into the subject than reading Ann Rand novels.
I'm not an economist either, but what I do know about economics came from getting a BS in economics and not from Ayn Rand novels. I'm not the pure free-trader you seem to think I am, but it is important to remember that while it may be tempting to go the protectionist route, it has severe costs, just as total trade anarchy does. We have some serious imbalances do deal with, and suggesting easy solutions to what amounts to an inevitable problem does us no favors.
And if you don't know what bash and cron are for, GTFO, go back to OS 9.
I might add that if you didn't notice that resource forks completely hosed most useful UNIX utilities in OS X (I'm including you, Apple engineers), you should probably go on that list as well. I congratulate Apple for noticing that abysmal failure well after the rest of us did. Oh wait, this is supposed to be a "Yay! OS X is UNIX!" cheer fest. My bad.
Wow. I totally deserve to be modded down for this. At least I'll de-apply the karma bonus.
But one could look for paterns familiar to humans also in life, such as math in DNA. You are not saying that SETI aliens *must* use human-like technology/patterns, but merely that SETI is searching for only those patterns (as if they had a choice). One could filter for low-hanging-fruit (stuff humans recognize) either way.
No, it's simpler than that. The various SETI-like projects all look for RF communications like the ones we create. They're not straying far from the types of communications we do. DNA is a totally different thing that doesn't look at all like something humans designed except in that it stores data digitally. Much noise has been made about doing math on DNA to figure out if it is intelligently designed, but nobody has managed to pull it off. It's not hard to figure out why that is. We don't have anything to compare it to. What would intelligently designed DNA look like? We know what intelligently designed radio signals look like because we make them.
No, that is not necessarily part of the assumptions. Perhaps some brands of ID have that as a base assumption, but it is not necessary to test for intelligent *intervention* (regardless of original) in Earth life.
You keep using words like "test" when describing ID. Can you describe what such a test might be?
Thank you! If I could have slapped Huxley in the face to keep the word "agnostic" from ever coming into existence, I would have. The idea of the atheist who simply could not ever believe in a god and is 100% certain and immovable is essentially a fabrication. No reasonable person holds a belief that extreme. Atheists don't drink blood or sacrifice babies either. They just don't think that gods exist.
The problem I have with the word agnostic is that it takes the perfectly rational position of atheism and falsely paints it as some sort of nutty dogma. "Oh no, I'm an agnostic! I'm not crazy like those dogmatic atheists!" If you enumerate the list of everything you believe to be true, and no gods of any sort end up on that list, you're an atheist.
You are not familiar with ID. The peer reviewed journal articles on it do not discuss dieties.
Please cite a few.
Given rediculous odds involved in DE having occured, it seems only someone with a lot of faith could buy into it.
SHOW YOUR WORK. Like so many others, you're making easily demonstrable mathematical claims into vague statements that can't be defended against. I could very well stay that the odds of ID being correct are ridiculous, so I win, but you might sensibly point out that I'm just blowing smoke.
And I'm pretty skeptical of fossil records minus DNA for analysis.
You may be interested in the field of molecular phylogeny. There's a lot of relevant work there that covers how far back the most recent common ancestor of a pair of organisms go. Not surprisingly, the results strongly support the nested hierarchy assembled from the fossil record.
...that prove the theory of evolution (macro, not micro.) That's all--just three things.
I'm talking about repeatable, observable facts that provide incontrovertible proof.
By that standard, I challenge you to prove any empirical claim at all, especially if one considers magic a viable alternative explanation of any data. Would you settle for three thousand things that strongly suggest that the theory of evolution is true?
That's a good question. The key with SETI is that they're looking for things that don't look like stuff we know is produced naturally. They're especially biased toward things that look like signals that we produce. Essentially, they're looking for life forms whose behaviors mimic (at least, very loosely) our own. The world of intelligent design is populated by a designer whose properties and mechanisms are completely unknown, so there's no meaningful way to test for them.
The issue with ID is that we don't have any reasonable basis to work from. If they were to suggest some mechanisms and properties of the designer, maybe they'd have something to work with (or at least look for). Until then, they're stuck. The best they've managed to do is the following gross generalization: 1) Life looks like a machine (I think that this is idiotic, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument). 2) People make machines. 3) People are intelligent. 4) All machines we've seen are made by intelligent people, so life must be made by something intelligent.
The problem here is that if you grant life the position of being "like a machine" life still makes up the vast majority of "machines" on this planet. Intelligent agency would be known to produce only a small fraction of the complexity around here, so how on Earth can you come up with a rule like "all complex outputs require an intelligent creator"?
The theory of evolution requires that information is added to the genetic structure of living things. Where does this added information come from?
Mutations.
Information cannot be added to DNA unless it's added by some outside intelligence.
You made that up.
Many ID proponents do not believe that this information is added, but that it was there the whole time and simply manifests itself through natural selection--those most suitable for their environment will survive and their characteristics will be passed to their offspring; those that aren't, won't.
The problem is that they never give a useful definition of "information" to work with, as they're obviously completely dissatisfied with information theory as it stands today. They make up a fantasy definition of information and then invent arbitrary rules about where it can come from. They essentially define themselves into correctness.
Your problem, then, is with the fact that we have public education at all. That's fine, and it's a common libertarian position (one I totally disagree with, but that's not really the topic). The issue at hand is just a natural consequence of the reality that we do have public education, and as such the people in charge need to make decisions as to what goes into the curriculum. I'd certainly rather see a panel of subject matter experts have the final say in the matter rather than politicians advised by experts, but somebody has to make the call, and at least most school boards are doing a reasonably good job of making an informed decision with input from experts.
You should be lamenting the fact that the decision had to be made, not the fact that it was made.
I can postulate a response, though. It's possible that the designer fused the DNA themselves.
That's the problem with ID. Any observation at all is completely consistent with an unknown, nearly (or completely) omnipotent being doing arbitrary stuff. "I hereby fuse your chromosomes for my personal amusement!" is not as satisfying an answer as, "Look! A well known and understood chromosomal fusion that happens to be 100% consistent with the idea of common descent!"
Speciation in mammals is a much harder sell than it is in bacteria due to the complexity of the organism. mutated humans are typically unable to reproduce - much less find a whole colony who suddenly have a mutation at the same time and then reproduce with each other over a thousand years.
Is it too much to ask that you'd read about the mutation?? The link is a biology professor whupping on an ID apologist for his explanation of the chromosomal fusion. The nub of it is, if you have the fusion, you can still produce viable offspring. The result can be a population that is more likely to produce viable offspring if both partners have the fusion. This is a *big deal* in genetics. It's well understood (we observe this type of fusion regularly) and it fits with common descent like a glove. In fact, I would say it fits common descent even better than it fits the idea of a deity that finds chromosomal fusion aesthetically appealing.
I don't see any fossil record of that just like you don't see a 'God' in the sky.
Exactly how much of the fossil record have you looked at?
No, if you did find fossils of that you would simply adjust the theory of Evolution because you can't BUY that there was any other possibile explanation.
Wow, way to indict people for something they haven't done yet. It would be interesting for you to suggest the possible alteration to evolutionary theory that would keep it alive in any recognizable way after that particular observation.
Just like you said.
I predict there are fossils all over the place demonstating the gradual change from pre-human to human. Oh - that prediction failed? Hello punctuated equalibrium.
You are aware that the fossils do show a relatively "gradual" change over time, yes? Just not uniform change, which is what punctuated equilibrium deals with. If you think about it in terms of the stability of a system, it actually makes quite a lot of sense.
So how does it take more faith to believe the world exists without being created than to believe god created it?
The question isn't whether it takes more "faith" to believe something. The question is, why would you believe it? You appear to be trying to solve the problem "Things that exist must be created at some point in time." Solving the problem by assuming an entity that doesn't follow this rule doesn't really solve the problem. Why not just do away with the rule since there really isn't any good reason to believe that it always holds true?
So let's look at how humans should behave according to darwin... they should be trying to steal and kill from eachother... and we all know what that leads to. That attitude does indeed exist, but it destroys economies, and creates misery beyond belief, especially for the people that should have gotten stronger, according to darwin.
I don't think that Darwin ever suggested that.
However Darwin predicts the reverse. It should create happiness, "better" humans, etc. If WOII (or Somalia, or one of the many revolutions in South America, or the general state of the muslim world, or... take your pick) proved anything, it's that apparently there's a little problem here.
You're defining "better" in a way that's not particularly relevant to biological evolution.
I can't figure out why people want to use evolution as a theory that describes how we should behave rather than how we got here. Nobody claims that we should drop bags of hammers on people because gravity causes them to fall and they "should" be allowed to fall.
I didn't say that a complicated entity didn't come from something complicated. I'm talking about life on this earth, only.
That's more or less the mainstream ID position.
Be it organic life or artificial life (Deep Blue), man has been 'creating' for much of the last century. Why is it so hard to consider that a lot of life on this planet may have originated in a similar way?
It's not hard to consider. It's hard to find any meaningful evidence for it, and it's certainly hard to support as science. Look, human intelligence has produced some things that you might refer to as "artificial life" depending on your definition. If you count the number of life forms on this planet and count Deep Blue etc. among them, you'll find that human intelligence is known to have created a minuscule fraction of a percent of overall complex life here. Saying something to the effect of, "Intelligent agency explains all of the origins of life for which we know the origins, so we can extrapolate that intelligent agency is required" is a hell of a jump, especially when you consider how different organic life is from computers.
The next question to answer is why life on this planet appears to require intelligent agency but life from another planet that acts as an intelligent agent is an exception to this rule. Why suggest the rule at all?
Absence of PROOF has never stopped DE.
Well, you'll hardly find irrefutable proof of any empirical claim. There's been no problem finding huge piles of evidence, though. I'm guessing you haven't looked at the Robertsonian translocation yet have you?
What do you mean "what does it solve"? It would be -knowledge-. What do you think science is -for-?
Typically when one suggests a hypothesis, it explains some phenomenon we're observing. The ID crowd usually claims to be explaining the origins of complex life because (they claim) that evolutionary theory is inadequate to explain the complexity. My point is that positing a complex life form to explain complex life doesn't exactly get you anywhere with respect to the problem you're creating. Claiming that complex life requires a creator and then positing a complex life form that isn't bound by the rules is just special pleading. Why bother in the first place, especially when you can't test your hypothesis?
We aren't going to pursue any given hypothesis is the hypothesis is not allowed to be posited.
Posit away, but you actually have to do some work to support the hypothesis. So far, all the ID crowd has done is publish a few books in the popular press and complain that they're not famous yet. They certainly haven't done enough to be considered good science in the UK public schools. Positing an untestable entity does tend to squelch your chances of producing good research, though.
Yes, we will fully be able to "test" the hypothesis by crunching the numbers to determine probability of the required chains of mutations occurring across the given population over the given time.
Crunch away. All I've seen in the way of calculations are some depressingly bad ones that assume all sorts of independence and an artificially limited selection landscape. If the ID crowd could actually show some work, it would be impressive. As it stands, Dembski is as close as it gets, and you can't even get Dembski to calculate the amount of CSI in a short string of text, let alone a nest of owls.
That you characterize the question as "magical turtles" doesn't add anything but revealing your inordinately absurd bias.
Believe me, I've been watching the ID crowd with horrified fascination for years. It's not that I haven't looked at their claims. It's that they've made no claims of any substance beyond complaining about the problem of complexity and then engaging in special pleading for their non-theory to get around said problem. As I posted elsewhere, the claim is basically this: There's a form of complexity/information that can't be measured using our current measures of information. We can't fully describe it or calculate how much of it is in any complex structure, but evolution's inability to explain the obvious abundance of it [Editor's note--WTF??] is its failing. To solve this problem, we posit an entity that has no measurable or testable properties that isn't subject to this limitation that somehow, at some point along the line, fixed the problem (or is maybe still working on it now).
It's not exactly an auspicious starting point. If they can do what the rest of the scientific community is doing and actually perform some research (say, by suggesting some testable properties or mechanisms for the designer and testing them) instead of getting fat off of the popular press and trying to skirt the peer review process by dumping their ideas straight into schools, then they'll have something to talk about.
To be fair, let's go back 2100 years or so. Nobody believed in Jesus Christ. If the whole thing is driven by some religious conspiracy, exactly how did it get started? How did the theory make inroads against conventional wisdom and extreme persecution to revolutionize society? Clearly there's something to it other than the massive conspiracy of the religious establishment/Jews/Baptists/Catholics.
Well, there is something to those beliefs other than a massive conspiracy. That doesn't mean they're true. It does mean that there was something about them that appealed and they caught on. My question is, what is that something for the theory of evolution? I ask it because it's always fun to see creationists answer as if the Victorian era was somehow a time when everybody suddenly rejected religion and they were looking for an excuse for atheism. The reality is that the theory caught on because there was evidence to support it, and no appeals to the vast scientific conspiracy (which, for some reason, just desperately wants to be wrong forever) can really change that.
Isn't anyone here the least bit concerned about the whole government-declaring-what-is-or-isn't-science thing? I thought there were more libertarians here. But I guess most everyone supports giving the government more authority as long as it is pushing through their preferred policy positions.
Well, they could just choose things willy-nilly to toss into science classes. A recipe for awesome guacamole here, some trivia about Ben Stiller there, and maybe a little shot of Civil War reenactments with period dress.
Seriously, though, this sort of thing should be important to libertarians. People keep trying to get ID into classrooms, and because it's basically dressed up religious apologetics, they are (rightly) taken to court (or at least challenged in the policy making body) over it. They defend their idea by saying, "It's not (just) religion! It's also science! Lookie here at this book that used to be a creationism tract but now has the words 'Intelligent Design' in it!" An argument ensues over whether it's really being introduced based on scientific merit or whether it's just a lame trick. Typically, ID is (rightly) tossed on its ass. Libertarians should not be afraid of this process because the alternative is the slow decay of science education brought about by people who would rather have their preferred deity pushed by the government than confined to churches and private life.
Consider an old, weathered rock in the desert and a wheelbarrow in the yard. The wheelbarrow exhibits properties of intelligent design while the rock does not. There are properties of each that allow us to classify them as "intelligently" designed or not--along the lines of "I know it when I see it." I think that a cogent philosophical/scientific exploration of these properties would be useful to science. Such an exploration might help us to decide whether a certain physical phenomenon is the result of some intelligence acting or simply an unguided application of physical laws.
It would be fascinating if they could pull it off, but they really haven't done it yet. Most people would see a rusty wheelbarrow and figure it was made by people because it looks like something they've seen people make. We have no insight into what the "intelligent designer" might make, and any comparisons to human invention and machinery fail for one simple reason: Human invention makes up only a tiny portion of the complexity on the planet, so it's an extraordinarily hasty generalization to assume that because a small percentage of complex things were designed by intelligent agents, all of them must be.
If the ID camp can come up with a testable way of figuring out whether a thing had intelligent input to make it or some meaningful way of quantifying complexity, it would be fascinating stuff. Shannon and Kolmogorov, Chaitin, and others have worked with meaningful, useful definitions of information and complexity that are applicable in the real world. So far, all the ID camp has done is publish books in the popular press and whine about the fact that they're not being received as the saviors of modern scientific thought. So far, the best ID argument seems to be that there is an undescribed, unquantifiable form of information/complexity out there, and while nobody knows how much of it there is in a given life form, natural selection's failure to explain the obvious abundance(??!!) of it means that an intelligent agent did it. None too impressive.
as to limiting scholarly inquiry, I have found that ID is being discriminated against due to academia's perception of it as "creationism."
Make a meaningful prediction. Just one. Get it published. If it gets shut out, post the article and the response you got on the Internet and we'll see how good it is. Until then, complaints of the vast scientific conspiracy will (and should) be ignored.
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Then jump on it. What, specifically, do you suggest we look for? I'll grant that pi would be a very interesting result. How about X adenine molecules in a row? How do we know what value for X wouldn't be produced naturally but might be produced by a designer? The answer is, we really don't (or at least none of the ID camp has bothered to figure it out and make the proposal) because nobody has proposed anything about who the designer is. What were/are its mechanisms? Its goals? Its methods? If you want to propose a designer who tailor made DNA and had a fondness for pi, you have yourself a hypothesis to test. You've done more in one slashdot post than all of the "giants" of the ID movement have managed to pull off since they renamed creationism so many years ago.
The SETI people are looking for life like us. They ask themselves, "What do we do now and what might we do if we had the technology?" Those simple tests will find ET intelligence that thinks like we do and has similar communications methods. The key in all of this is that they've proposed properties for the ET life. That's what I was getting at with my "we do it now" criterion. They've characterized the system and they know what to look for. They have a description of the nature and the methods of what they're testing for. If the ID camp can simply do that, they'll be on the map in my opinion. Until then, they're just creationists under a different name who do no meaningful work beyond regurgitating old creationist canards and trying to get them into schools so they can dupe the next generation.
I do biometrics for a living. All of biometrics simply boils down to one thing: classification. We know what the genuine looks like and we know what the impostor looks like, and our goal is to build an algorithm that can classify an unknown as one or the other. SETI does a similar task. They know what naturally produced signals generally look like, and they know what signals that we might produce generally look like. They've build a classifier and they're running it. The ID crowd needs to define what they're looking for and look for it rather than expounding on how it's theoretically possible to build a classifier if you can simply calculate some nonsense quantity like "complex specified information" and not actually doing it. The key though, is to define what "designed" looks like and what "not designed" looks like and build a system for classification. That's what the rest of us have been doing for years, and that's why I'm not going to pat them on the back for pointing out that classification algorithms exist and might somehow be applied to the design of molecules.
Should we declassify the fact that we caught them with their pants down and they're broadcasting a wealth of information on strategy and troop movements? Certainly not. Should we declassify some random, unimportant fact that comes from that intelligence source (let's say some general calls his mistress from his office and we leak the fact that the call was made)? I would argue against it. If enough innocuous (but supposedly secret) facts about North Korean military operations became known, it would tip them off to the fact that they're leaking information somehow. If they get the right set of information, it's not unlikely that they'd find the hole in their comms and plug it (or worse, start putting deliberate misinformation into it), leaving us in the dark. History is full of examples like that, and it's generally why intelligence agencies don't like letting data, however innocuous, slip out.
The first goal before "spreading" the science and getting published should be to produce some sort of results that aren't simply a critique of evolutionary theory (which is essentially what the paper in question does). If they produced some results (tests, calculations, etc.), it would be hard to deny them publication. If all they're doing is rehashing creationist anti-evolution talking points, it should be no surprise that they're not making any inroads.
You might not be surprised to know that you're not the first person to cite Yockey's papers without reading them. The paper in question does not address common descent or evolutionary theory in general (note that evolutionary theory takes as axiomatic that life started somewhere and then uses that fact to explain the diversity of life now). It does address a common abiogenesis theory of its day. You might want to ask Dr. Yockey what he thinks intelligent design as science.
Are you sure? A key technique in all of this is not to look at commonalities in coding DNA but rather in non-coding DNA. Obviously, coding DNA should be similar for organisms with closely related physiologies whether or not they have common ancestry (and as far as I can tell, a huge number of creationists think that this is all that's used in these phylogeny calculations). There's no reason for non-coding DNA to be similar, though. The technique goes something like this:
1) At t=0, two descendants of an organism are born. They share some regions of DNA that are 100% identical (not surprisingly). This includes the DNA that codes for proteins and the DNA in between those regions.
2) Every generation, more and more mutations happen to the non-coding DNA. Since it's non-coding, this is generally not a big deal, so the stuff goes along for a ride.
3) Generations down the line, the coding regions are very similar, but the non-coding regions have decayed somewhat. By looking at homologous non-coding regions, it's possible to estimate how far back their common ancestor went.
As it turns out, we share a lot of DNA markers like that with other primates. We share fewer with dogs and cats and fewer still with worms. This observation is 100% in sync with common descent (and extensive computer modeling bears this out). How does ID explain it? Does the designer copy over non-coding DNA from design to design and then mutate it according to a fixed pattern that just happens to correlate with our taxonomic and phylogenetic trees? If so, why? Aesthetics? Errors in methodology? DNA rotting on the shelf? Without putting out some sort of concrete description of how the designer operates, those questions will never be answered.
It's pretty clear to me that you didn't read the whole piece I posted. It answers these questions and flatly contradicts your claim. It happens in about in in every 900 people. In the case of this type of fusion, they can reproduce together. Half of the offspring will have the fusion and half will not. Reread the article. It explains the whole thing.
As I pointed out, we don't "know that" because the statement is false. It doesn't make the case for ID in any sensible way for one simple reason: ID would be equally probable if it were not true. Of course, if you're suggesting something about the nature of the designer, maybe we can work with that. Are you proposing that the designer accidentally fuses chromosomes, and from that we might be able to deduce something about its mechanisms? If so, I think you're coming closer to formulating a meaningful hypothesis than anybody else in ID has so far.
My original point centered around currency and the overall relative strength of economies and why it's stupid for people to act like the dollar has some sort of divinely inspired value, but you're right, I did touch on the fact that protectionism doesn't fix the problem. The key point to remember is that we simply can't pay foreigners to do things for us forever without having something to justify the money we're giving to them. The problem will only really fix itself if standards of living reach some reasonable semblance of parity or if we once again start producing things that only we can produce (or at least, at a cost that only we can produce them at). As I see it, the latter isn't really much of an option.
My fundamental point is that all this necessarily means that the dollar's value should drop against currencies of the developing countries we're paying to do our work for us. Our trade deficit will stop when one of two things happens: 1) We institute some sort of protectionist measures to stop importing goods and labor, driving up cost for everybody. 2) We let it happen, and eventually exchange rates and costs of living will be such that the pressure eases. Either one has serious consequences, and the idea that going with one over the other is somehow the universally correct solution is nonsense that politicians try to sell to get their bases whipped up into a frenzy. Either way things go , there are going to be a lot of sad faces. Unfortunately, it's hard to make these landings soft for everybody.
In the long run, I'm not worried. There was a time when everybody was sure that the fact that the Japanese were "catching up" to us and starting to compete with us in our bread and butter fields was going to turn us all into subsistence farmers. Japan finished its transformation into an advanced industrialized economy and now they're just another player and trading partner. Sure, some industries had their lunches eaten, but that's the way it is in a competitive world. We could have "saved" those industries with protectionist policies at the cost of a lot of really worthwhile goods that helped to drive our economy, but those sorts of policies are really only a transfer of suffering from one segment of a population to another.
I'm not an economist either, but what I do know about economics came from getting a BS in economics and not from Ayn Rand novels. I'm not the pure free-trader you seem to think I am, but it is important to remember that while it may be tempting to go the protectionist route, it has severe costs, just as total trade anarchy does. We have some serious imbalances do deal with, and suggesting easy solutions to what amounts to an inevitable problem does us no favors.
Wow. I totally deserve to be modded down for this. At least I'll de-apply the karma bonus.
You keep using words like "test" when describing ID. Can you describe what such a test might be?
Thank you! If I could have slapped Huxley in the face to keep the word "agnostic" from ever coming into existence, I would have. The idea of the atheist who simply could not ever believe in a god and is 100% certain and immovable is essentially a fabrication. No reasonable person holds a belief that extreme. Atheists don't drink blood or sacrifice babies either. They just don't think that gods exist.
The problem I have with the word agnostic is that it takes the perfectly rational position of atheism and falsely paints it as some sort of nutty dogma. "Oh no, I'm an agnostic! I'm not crazy like those dogmatic atheists!" If you enumerate the list of everything you believe to be true, and no gods of any sort end up on that list, you're an atheist.
SHOW YOUR WORK. Like so many others, you're making easily demonstrable mathematical claims into vague statements that can't be defended against. I could very well stay that the odds of ID being correct are ridiculous, so I win, but you might sensibly point out that I'm just blowing smoke.
You may be interested in the field of molecular phylogeny. There's a lot of relevant work there that covers how far back the most recent common ancestor of a pair of organisms go. Not surprisingly, the results strongly support the nested hierarchy assembled from the fossil record.
The issue with ID is that we don't have any reasonable basis to work from. If they were to suggest some mechanisms and properties of the designer, maybe they'd have something to work with (or at least look for). Until then, they're stuck. The best they've managed to do is the following gross generalization: 1) Life looks like a machine (I think that this is idiotic, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument). 2) People make machines. 3) People are intelligent. 4) All machines we've seen are made by intelligent people, so life must be made by something intelligent.
The problem here is that if you grant life the position of being "like a machine" life still makes up the vast majority of "machines" on this planet. Intelligent agency would be known to produce only a small fraction of the complexity around here, so how on Earth can you come up with a rule like "all complex outputs require an intelligent creator"?
You made that up.
The problem is that they never give a useful definition of "information" to work with, as they're obviously completely dissatisfied with information theory as it stands today. They make up a fantasy definition of information and then invent arbitrary rules about where it can come from. They essentially define themselves into correctness.
Your problem, then, is with the fact that we have public education at all. That's fine, and it's a common libertarian position (one I totally disagree with, but that's not really the topic). The issue at hand is just a natural consequence of the reality that we do have public education, and as such the people in charge need to make decisions as to what goes into the curriculum. I'd certainly rather see a panel of subject matter experts have the final say in the matter rather than politicians advised by experts, but somebody has to make the call, and at least most school boards are doing a reasonably good job of making an informed decision with input from experts.
You should be lamenting the fact that the decision had to be made, not the fact that it was made.
Is it too much to ask that you'd read about the mutation?? The link is a biology professor whupping on an ID apologist for his explanation of the chromosomal fusion. The nub of it is, if you have the fusion, you can still produce viable offspring. The result can be a population that is more likely to produce viable offspring if both partners have the fusion. This is a *big deal* in genetics. It's well understood (we observe this type of fusion regularly) and it fits with common descent like a glove. In fact, I would say it fits common descent even better than it fits the idea of a deity that finds chromosomal fusion aesthetically appealing.
Exactly how much of the fossil record have you looked at?
You are aware that the fossils do show a relatively "gradual" change over time, yes? Just not uniform change, which is what punctuated equilibrium deals with. If you think about it in terms of the stability of a system, it actually makes quite a lot of sense.
You're defining "better" in a way that's not particularly relevant to biological evolution.
I can't figure out why people want to use evolution as a theory that describes how we should behave rather than how we got here. Nobody claims that we should drop bags of hammers on people because gravity causes them to fall and they "should" be allowed to fall.
It's not hard to consider. It's hard to find any meaningful evidence for it, and it's certainly hard to support as science. Look, human intelligence has produced some things that you might refer to as "artificial life" depending on your definition. If you count the number of life forms on this planet and count Deep Blue etc. among them, you'll find that human intelligence is known to have created a minuscule fraction of a percent of overall complex life here. Saying something to the effect of, "Intelligent agency explains all of the origins of life for which we know the origins, so we can extrapolate that intelligent agency is required" is a hell of a jump, especially when you consider how different organic life is from computers.
The next question to answer is why life on this planet appears to require intelligent agency but life from another planet that acts as an intelligent agent is an exception to this rule. Why suggest the rule at all?
Well, you'll hardly find irrefutable proof of any empirical claim. There's been no problem finding huge piles of evidence, though. I'm guessing you haven't looked at the Robertsonian translocation yet have you?
Posit away, but you actually have to do some work to support the hypothesis. So far, all the ID crowd has done is publish a few books in the popular press and complain that they're not famous yet. They certainly haven't done enough to be considered good science in the UK public schools. Positing an untestable entity does tend to squelch your chances of producing good research, though.
Crunch away. All I've seen in the way of calculations are some depressingly bad ones that assume all sorts of independence and an artificially limited selection landscape. If the ID crowd could actually show some work, it would be impressive. As it stands, Dembski is as close as it gets, and you can't even get Dembski to calculate the amount of CSI in a short string of text, let alone a nest of owls.
Believe me, I've been watching the ID crowd with horrified fascination for years. It's not that I haven't looked at their claims. It's that they've made no claims of any substance beyond complaining about the problem of complexity and then engaging in special pleading for their non-theory to get around said problem. As I posted elsewhere, the claim is basically this: There's a form of complexity/information that can't be measured using our current measures of information. We can't fully describe it or calculate how much of it is in any complex structure, but evolution's inability to explain the obvious abundance of it [Editor's note--WTF??] is its failing. To solve this problem, we posit an entity that has no measurable or testable properties that isn't subject to this limitation that somehow, at some point along the line, fixed the problem (or is maybe still working on it now).
It's not exactly an auspicious starting point. If they can do what the rest of the scientific community is doing and actually perform some research (say, by suggesting some testable properties or mechanisms for the designer and testing them) instead of getting fat off of the popular press and trying to skirt the peer review process by dumping their ideas straight into schools, then they'll have something to talk about.
Seriously, though, this sort of thing should be important to libertarians. People keep trying to get ID into classrooms, and because it's basically dressed up religious apologetics, they are (rightly) taken to court (or at least challenged in the policy making body) over it. They defend their idea by saying, "It's not (just) religion! It's also science! Lookie here at this book that used to be a creationism tract but now has the words 'Intelligent Design' in it!" An argument ensues over whether it's really being introduced based on scientific merit or whether it's just a lame trick. Typically, ID is (rightly) tossed on its ass. Libertarians should not be afraid of this process because the alternative is the slow decay of science education brought about by people who would rather have their preferred deity pushed by the government than confined to churches and private life.
If the ID camp can come up with a testable way of figuring out whether a thing had intelligent input to make it or some meaningful way of quantifying complexity, it would be fascinating stuff. Shannon and Kolmogorov, Chaitin, and others have worked with meaningful, useful definitions of information and complexity that are applicable in the real world. So far, all the ID camp has done is publish books in the popular press and whine about the fact that they're not being received as the saviors of modern scientific thought. So far, the best ID argument seems to be that there is an undescribed, unquantifiable form of information/complexity out there, and while nobody knows how much of it there is in a given life form, natural selection's failure to explain the obvious abundance(??!!) of it means that an intelligent agent did it. None too impressive.