Emphatic non-buttressation of ID
| November 11, 2008 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
The language in the following paper is hilarious. Basically the researchers are saying “We know this looks like an engineered feedback control loop. We analyzed it and found it statistically impossible to have come about through a stochastic processs. But we will strenuously object to anyone calling it evidence of design.” ROFLMAO
“Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins’ behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. By operating only at extremes, referred to in control theory as “bang-bang extremization,” the proteins were exhibiting behavior consistent with a system managing itself optimally under evolution.
“In this paper, we present what is ostensibly the first quantitative experimental evidence, since Wallace’s original proposal, that nature employs evolutionary control strategies to maximize the fitness of biological networks,” Chakrabarti said. “Control theory offers a direct explanation for an otherwise perplexing observation and indicates that evolution is operating according to principles that every engineer knows.”
The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.
Evolution’s new wrinkle: Proteins with cruise control provide new perspective
by Kitta MacPherson · Posted November 10, 2008; 10:00 a.m.
The rest of the paper is below the fold or at the link above.
A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.
The research, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on evolution, the scientists said.
The researchers — Raj Chakrabarti, Herschel Rabitz, Stacey Springs and George McLendon — made the discovery while carrying out experiments on proteins constituting the electron transport chain (ETC), a biochemical network essential for metabolism. A mathematical analysis of the experiments showed that the proteins themselves acted to correct any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations and restored the chain to working order.
“The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a ‘blind watchmaker’?” said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. “Our new theory extends Darwin’s model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness.”
The work also confirms an idea first floated in an 1858 essay by Alfred Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin co-discovered the theory of evolution. Wallace had suspected that certain systems undergoing natural selection can adjust their evolutionary course in a manner “exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident.” In Wallace’s time, the steam engine operating with a centrifugal governor was one of the only examples of what is now referred to as feedback control. Examples abound, however, in modern technology, including cruise control in autos and thermostats in homes and offices.
The research, published in a recent edition of Physical Review Letters, provides corroborating data, Rabitz said, for Wallace’s idea. “What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness,” said Rabitz, the Charles Phelps Smyth ’16 Professor of Chemistry. “The data just jumps off the page and implies we all have this wonderful piece of machinery inside that’s responding optimally to evolutionary pressure.”
The authors sought to identify the underlying cause for this self-correcting behavior in the observed protein chains. Standard evolutionary theory offered no clues. Applying the concepts of control theory, a body of knowledge that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems, the researchers concluded that this self-correcting behavior could only be possible if, during the early stages of evolution, the proteins had developed a self-regulating mechanism, analogous to a car’s cruise control or a home’s thermostat, allowing them to fine-tune and control their subsequent evolution. The scientists are working on formulating a new general theory based on this finding they are calling “evolutionary control.”
The work is likely to provoke a considerable amount of thinking, according to Charles Smith, a historian of science at Western Kentucky University. “Systems thinking in evolutionary studies perhaps began with Alfred Wallace’s likening of the action of natural selection to the governor on a steam engine — that is, as a mechanism for removing the unfit and thereby keeping populations ‘up to snuff’ as environmental actors,” Smith said. “Wallace never really came to grips with the positive feedback part of the cycle, however, and it is instructive that through optimal control theory Chakrabarti et al. can now suggest a coupling of causalities at the molecular level that extends Wallace’s systems-oriented approach to this arena.”
Evolution, the central theory of modern biology, is regarded as a gradual change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. It is a continuing process of change, forced by what Wallace and Darwin, his more famous colleague, called “natural selection.” In this process, species evolve because of random mutations and selection by environmental stresses. Unlike Darwin, Wallace conjectured that species themselves may develop the capacity to respond optimally to evolutionary stresses. Until this work, evidence for the conjecture was lacking.
The experiments, conducted in Princeton’s Frick Laboratory, focused on a complex of proteins located in the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell. A chain of proteins, forming a type of bucket brigade, ferries high-energy electrons across the mitrochondrial membrane. This metabolic process creates ATP, the energy currency of life.
Various researchers working over the past decade, including some at Princeton like George McClendon, now at Duke University, and Stacey Springs, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fleshed out the workings of these proteins, finding that they were often turned on to the “maximum” position, operating at full tilt, or at the lowest possible energy level.
Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins’ behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. By operating only at extremes, referred to in control theory as “bang-bang extremization,” the proteins were exhibiting behavior consistent with a system managing itself optimally under evolution.
“In this paper, we present what is ostensibly the first quantitative experimental evidence, since Wallace’s original proposal, that nature employs evolutionary control strategies to maximize the fitness of biological networks,” Chakrabarti said. “Control theory offers a direct explanation for an otherwise perplexing observation and indicates that evolution is operating according to principles that every engineer knows.”
The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.
Chakrabarti said that one of the aims of modern evolutionary theory is to identify principles of self-organization that can accelerate the generation of complex biological structures. “Such principles are fully consistent with the principles of natural selection. Biological change is always driven by random mutation and selection, but at certain pivotal junctures in evolutionary history, such random processes can create structures capable of steering subsequent evolution toward greater sophistication and complexity.”
The researchers are continuing their analysis, looking for parallel situations in other biological systems.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
41 Responses to Emphatic non-buttressation of ID
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Sal Gal,
I think you’re misinformed. On this very site I’ve seen buddhist conflicts with materialism highlighted in posts – even shinto, muslim, and other conflicts.
The ID movement at large may have a distinctly judaeo-christian aspect to it, but I’ve never seen any incident of ID obfuscating on the question of whether buddhism is a materialist worldview.
(With the exception of strange and explicitly Western-materialist ‘interpretations’ of buddhism, an extreme minority that traditional/eastern buddhists seem to regard with some horror.)
Also regardless of what they say it does buttress the case for intelligent design.
And ID does NOT posit the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.
IDists understand that complexity can arise without the aid of a designing agency.
Joseph said:
“…the researchers concluded that this self-correcting behavior could only be possible if, during the early stages of evolution, the proteins had developed a self-regulating mechanism…”
That’s a mighty big “if”. Or it could be that, like my car’s cruise control, it was intelligently designed.
In other words, you find it hard to believe that chance and chance alone could do it, but you stick with evolutionary theory because an Intelligent Designer (God), who is superior in intelligence, could not possibly have designed it or anything else.
Contrast that to Hebrews 3:4: ‘For every house is constructed by someone, but He that constructed all things is God.’
It isn’t just complexity. We know complexity can arise without an inteligent designer.
And all someone has to do is to demonstrate that a living organism (specified complexity) can arise without any agency involvement and ID falls.
And no one says that the designer came into being all on its own.
We don’t know anything about the designer except what we can learn by studying the design.
The bottom-line is we exist and there is only ONE reality behind that existence.
And just what do you think are the alternatives to ID?
I know of two- Special Creation and sheer-dumb-luck.
So you believe that we owe our existence to an accumulation of genetic mistakes?
Did you know that there isn’t any data which would demonstrate that the transformations required are even genetically obtainable?
IOW no one knows whether genetics can account for the diversity observed. The premise cannot even be objectively tested.
Did you also know we don’t even know what suite/ combination of genes are responsible for our vision system?
I don’t know what contest this was but let’s presume the odds were close to 1 in 10^8 (around the odds of Powerball). That’s a far cry from the Universal Probability Bound of 10^150 (or 500 informational bits).
But that’s only the Complexity, not the Specification, of CSI. Your friend would have to win a number of such contests in a row to qualify.
Keep in mind these are not the numbers for the entire evolutionary history of Earth. This is just for one information-based system!
We could start with just the Origin of Life:
Although Haldane’s comment is old, I find that interesting considering Koonin’s recent comments regard the unguided Origin Of Life (OOL) scenarios and as a conservative estimate he calculated 1 in 10^-1018 for the possibility that such a system could have arisen.
Also, keep in mind that the relatively “simple” minimal system created by JCVI is a 582970 base pair genome. (On a site note I was able to do some design detection in regards to this genome.) And even simpler viruses, which rely on hosts for survival, are composed of thousands of informational bits.
BTW, keep in mind that many ID proponents support Intelligent Evolution. That is, evolution did occur but intelligence was involved as well as none-foresighted mechanisms. There are multiple popular hypotheses as such. Some even believe that only intelligence was involved with the origin of LUCA and the system was “designed to evolve via non-foresighted mechanisms”.
Do you refer to your comments at http://www.uncommondescent.com.....challenge/
This is being discussed here:
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/.....ttle_deal/
Thought this comment was interesting. Can anyone respond to this?
“The authors are trying to explain this puzzle: They looked at cytochrome oxidiase c’ in 4 different species. In two of them, the active heme site had a very low redox potential, compared to the possible range found in 4-residue mutants. In the other two, it had a very high redox potential.
They then had 2 possible explanations:
1. For some reason we don’t yet know, a low redox potential for this protein is good in two of these species, but bad in the other two.
2. There is a magical force animating evolution, and this one study of one protein in 4 species overturns everything everybody thought they had learned about evolution over the past 150 years.
They chose the second.
The authors found that “redox potential” (just black-box that term and pretend we know what it means) of one protein was maximized in 2 organisms, and minimized in 2 other organisms.
They then reasoned:
We don’t know how redox potential affects the efficiency of ATP generation.
Therefore, we know that redox potential doesn’t affect ATP generation. (That’s the crucial leap-of-illogic.)
Therefore, the fact that this is minimized in 2 organisms, and maximized in 2 other organisms, may be because there is a general mechanism that has evolved that tries to set all properties of a protein at either a maximum or at a minimum, regardless of whether those properties are important.”
sparc,
Yes, and here is the quick use for the EF: did Musgrave purposely pull these sequences from the Venter sequences, an instance of design?
1. No law is known to be capable.
2. A minimum of 1920 informational bits seems to say so.
3. The specification is the marked overlap with the watermark along with Musgrave’s designation that the source of some of the information would be human. So using the EF we can be perfectly clear that Musgrave did intentionally pull from Venter.