tnf, etc.. New Yorker piece on Intelligent Design

[[xeno]Julios]

Haven't yet read it, but you can't go wrong with The New Yorker (one of my fav mags since recently discovering it)

Here's the title:

DEVOLUTION

by H. ALLEN ORR

Why intelligent design isn’t.

:lol:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/a ... 530fa_fact

[[xeno]Julios]

hehe - Richard Dawkins a few days ago:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFrien ... 64,00.html

and a response to the new yorker:

http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/sh ... hp/id/1345

man i love the net - you can follow controversies on a much smaller timescale than that permitted by newsprint

[tnf]

Nice...trying not to get too pissed as I read some if it...the sarcasm helps.

Going to email Senator Rick “intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes.” Santorum with a link to it, as well as a membership card to the flat earth society.

[[xeno]Julios]

lol that oxycodone brings out the mischievous monkey in you

[tnf]

Heh...and there's Steven Meyer's name...uggh.

[tnf]

http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/
lol

[[xeno]Julios]

Heh...and there's Steven Meyer's name...uggh.

this is the dude that told you the archangels made a few errors in their period of babysitting...

I still can't believe that - any transcript/recording of that lecture?

[tnf]

No, unfortunately not. And, tbh, I haven't found much published on it...but I am not surprised. The question was asked at the end of the discussion - nobody had a chance to respond to his answer.
I don't think it is odd that you won't find this answer written anywhere, though. ID theorists are notorious for not publishing answers to those types of issues in any direct fashion - the most you will get out of them is that 'those areas are still being researched.'

That was in 1997. Their stance may have even changed by now. People have told me that I must have mis-heard the statement, or that over the years it must have been 'jumbled' in my mind, but a comment like that has a way of etching itself forever into your brain. I remember everything about it...the tone of his voice, the uncomfortable looks on the faces of the students who were ID fanboys.

I really wish I'd have had a small tape recorder with me for it. That would have been an infamous sound byte...

My old advisor and him really got into it a number of times. My advisor was an absolutely brilliant microbiologist - a walking encyclopedia and a very talented artist whose watercolors were used on textbook covers and displayed in galleries and whatnot. When the two would debate, Meyer was outclassed in every sense of the word - but it didn't matter, because when you are on the side of either creation or ID (or the messed up hybrids of the two that linger out there) you really can't 'lose' a scientific debate because you approach it from a philosophical point of view, always going back to the Bible. They all know there are no scientific merits to their argument - even the probability nonsense and the "No Free Lunch" algorithm bullshit of Dembski. The article did a good job showing the key flaws in his and Behe's arguments and how they backtrack from their initial statements after they are exposed. I had a student attempt to use some Dembski-ish probability stuff last month during our evolution talk...it was obvious the student had been coached by a parent to go stump the science teacher with the probability argument. My counter was almost exactly what the article described...

Anyhow, I've rambled enough about this. Getting too tired...meeting at 6:30 am tomorrow and I still need to play Jade Empire and then grade some tests...ah, fuck the tests...I need to get my flyer working again.

[Massive Quasars]

Thanks julios. I read and enjoyed the first article, I'll get to the last two after this post.

The influence of the design argument isn't limited to biology apparently. While I obviously don't think it's pervasive, such thought seems to have arisen in physics.

[Massive Quasars]

http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/
lol

heh

tnf, what do you think of the IDEA center website?

[corsair]

would that be Harry Allen?

[Pext]

nice read :icon14:

[Doombrain]

boring

[Shmee]

The way I see it - the argument of the ID morons is this:

The super-complexity of life at the molecular level is too much for us to understand (because science is hard). Therefore - someone much smarter than us must have just thought it into being.

-----------------------------------------------------

This is the most flawed "reasoning" I've ever encountered, and it only re-affirms my beleif in the inherant stupidity of the human race at large.

[Ryoki]

That's exactly right, Shmee.

[werldhed]

I was about to say almost the same thing Schmee did. By ID logic, just because we don't know difinitively how something works, it's too complex to happen by chance. It's like saying since we don't have a cure for cancer yet, it must be a punishment from God.

Thanks for the link, Julios. I like the way he pointed out the fallacy of Dembski's "specified complexity."

@tnf: I'm curious, what method do you use to argue against students who bring up arguments like Dembski's? I suspect I'll have to deal with such questions soon enough. Personally, I find one point ID propentents have a hard time grasping is that there is no statistical probability that shows it's very unlikely humans could evolve. We are not a "goal." It's like picking biological outcomes from a hat. What are the chances you'll pick all the right mutations to arrive at where we are today? The probability is 1 -- we ended up this way because that's what happened. if you picked a different set of mutations that gave us all tentacles, the ID people would just be asking, "What are the chances all the correct mutations would happen to give us tentacles?" The chances are all exactly the same. It's like asking, "If you drive around randomly, what are the chances you'll end up where you end up?" It's a pointless question because you don't have a destination.

[Shmee]

In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe maintained that irreducible complexity presents Darwinism with “unbridgeable chasms.” How, after all, could a gradual process of incremental improvement build something like a flagellum, which needs all its parts in order to work? Scientists, he argued, must face up to the fact that “many biochemical systems cannot be built by natural selection working on mutations.” In the end, Behe concluded that irreducibly complex cells arise the same way as irreducibly complex mousetraps—someone designs them. As he put it in a recent Times Op-Ed piece: “If it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it’s a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it’s so obvious.” In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe speculated that the designer might have assembled the first cell, essentially solving the problem of irreducible complexity, after which evolution might well have proceeded by more or less conventional means. Under Behe’s brand of creationism, you might still be an ape that evolved on the African savanna; it’s just that your cells harbor micro-machines engineered by an unnamed intelligence some four billion years ago.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The core of this guy's ideas seems to be sound thinking, but the reason it's such a hot-button issue is that it leads into unscientific territory. Evolution does not pretend to explain how life STARTED, but this theory does. That's the reason evolution is acceptable to teach in schools and ID is not.

[Shmee]

Fascinating read btw Jules - thanks!

[werldhed]

The core of this guy's ideas seems to be sound thinking, but the reason it's such a hot-button issue is that it leads into unscientific territory. Evolution does not pretend to explain how life STARTED, but this theory does. That's the reason evolution is acceptable to teach in schools and ID is not.

It's kind of sound thinking. Irreducible complexity would make an interesting argument, but Behe does a considerably poor job of defending it. "Darwins Black Box" is not much more than a collection of descriptions of biochemical mechanisms in nature that are really complicated. His arguments don't really go anywhere, though. It also is still little more than "absence of evidence." He's basically saying that we don't know how they evolved, so clearly they didn't.

[Shmee]

Yeah you're right - it's still really bad :icon19:

[Shmee]

For Dembski, it’s telling that the sophisticated machines we find in organisms match up in astonishingly precise ways with recognizable human technologies. The eye, for example, has a familiar, cameralike design, with recognizable parts—a pinhole opening for light, a lens, and a surface on which to project an image—all arranged just as a human engineer would arrange them. And the flagellum has a motor design, one that features recognizable O-rings, a rotor, and a drive shaft. Specified complexity, he says, is there for all to see.

-----------------------------------------------------

Now THIS guy is just plain ridiculous. He's arguing in reverse. Nature doesn't mimick man, man mimicks nature. The reason a camera is similar to an eye is that it's a fantastic, simple mechanism that works well. They can't escape the fact, no matter how they word it or what examples they give, that their entire argument is that something so complex is too hard to understand and therefor must have been specifically designed. It's a fool's proof, and a mathematician of all people should recognize it...

[Nightshade]

In 2002, Dembski triumphantly proclaimed, “The No Free Lunch theorems dash any hope of generating specified complexity via evolutionary algorithms.” Now he says, “I certainly never argued that the N.F.L. theorems provide a direct refutation of Darwinism.”

:lol:

[Billy Bellend]

i believe a brillant person can wrap any "known facts" around thier ideals to suit them

imo

[[xeno]Julios]

I would add, to the criticism of Dembski, that even if there was only one specified blueprint, then specified complexity would probably emerge in a constrained environment.

Hence the uncanny morphological similarities between the dolphin and the Ichthyosaurus.



Here one could label, as specified complexity, the shape of the organism.


I think Dembski would say this has something to do with the "displacement problem", but the new yorker piece didn't really clarify that.


I find Dembski troubling - an extraordinarily educated thinker, yet he seems to be missing something fundamentally obvious - the very idea of natural fucking selection means that complexity emerges. The fact that there are environmental constraints means that the complexity that survives will be of a constrained type.

Hence, it seems, and may indeed be, FUCKING SPECIFIED.

[werldhed]

Now THIS guy is just plain ridiculous. He's arguing in reverse. Nature doesn't mimick man, man mimicks nature. The reason a camera is similar to an eye is that it's a fantastic, simple mechanism that works well. They can't escape the fact, no matter how they word it or what examples they give, that their entire argument is that something so complex is too hard to understand and therefor must have been specifically designed. It's a fool's proof, and a mathematician of all people should recognize it...

I'd suggest reading more of Dembski's writings, but I don't want to recommend it as he's incredibly self-serving and long-winded. However, most of his arguments are along the same stupid logic. For instance, he claims the argument "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is not valid by equating it to believing in leprechauns. He also says scientific explanations are useless unless they provide "causal adequacy." Darwinism isn't "causally adequate" enough to explain irreducible complexity, but intellegent design is. Therefore, ID is the better theory.

Completely unscientific.