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ID and Gaia
| August 1, 2006 | Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design |
[From a colleague in the UK:] The current issue of the British Ecological Society Bulletin has a special feature on Gaia. It appears that James Lovelock was made an Honorary Member of the B.E.S. in 2005, and the Gaia hypothesis is his “most significant contribution to ecology”.Apparently, the Gaia hypothesis posits that the earth’s ecosystem has improbable stability, and this is increasingly being accepted as a fact by ecologists.In particular it points to processes like these:
- animals secrete nitrogenous waste as urea rather than nitrogen to help other species use the waste product;
- phytoplankton in the oceans secrete dimethysulphide, a costly gas which is important for cloud formation;
- the balance of photosynthesis releasing oxygen and taking in carbon dioxide, and respiration taking in oxygen and relaesing carbon dioxide;
- density-dependent regulation of populations.
Such processes, however, might make a better case for ID than for the Gaia hypothesis. One reason the Gaia hypothesis was rejected intially by the scientific community is that it appeared inconsistent with Darwinian evolution.Has anyone here interacted with the proponents of Gaia? Is there any mileage in an “irreducible ecosystems” argument for ID?
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> Is there any mileage in an “irreducible ecosystems†argument for ID?
Ecosystems are at the top of the hierarchy of ‘intelligent networks’
composing the Gaia network. They use anticipatory computations,
including creation of _internal model_ of their environment (which
contains sub-models of physical & chemical laws, of other networks
and of ‘self’, the self-actor), to optimize their ‘punishments/rewards’
i.e. to ‘pursue their happiness’. There are few earlier posts (with
links) on this perspective:
General links on computational formulation of ID:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ment-49652
Fractal structure of internal models & relation to ID:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ment-49928
Role of ‘mind stuff’:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ment-50138
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ment-50186
See also Sontag’s papers and in particular:
“Adaptation and regulation with signal detection implies internal modelâ€Â
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~s.....-scl03.pdf
Papers: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~sontag/papers.html
In relation to ‘irreducible complexity’ argument, once you show
the existence of an intelligent, anticipatory process which models
its future (by playing what-if game within its internal model),
then the actions & output of such process will by necessity
have markers of ‘specified complexity’. The internal model
itself is the principal example of ‘specified complexity’
and the generator of all its secondary manifestations
(in the output of the network, such as the examples of
‘irreducible complexity’ and weaker forms of ‘specified
complexity’).
I have no knowledge whatsoever about Gaia but this post strikes a chord with me as it is exactly at the ecological level that I have always found design to be most intuitively apparent.
The thread on the March Of The Penguins movie reminded me that last summer when I saw the movie I rushed home and wrote letters to various design websites that they needed to review the movie.
I know Behe does not allow for the use of his term IC beyond the molecular level, but that was all I could think of when I watched the movie. A single generation of penguins which couldn’t transfer the egg successfully, or in which the male hadn’t conserved a morsel of food for months in its throat pouch, or in which the female delayed a day or two longer before returning to her starving family etc., would have been the last generation.
Sure, I could concoct tales of exaptation, of features once valuable but not yet essential becoming so through environmental change, but they would be unsatisfying by their ad hoc nature.
If I can’t use Behe’s term, IC, then the ‘all-at-once’ term will have to do.
As this is getting too long, I will split it into two comments to fool you.
But more on topic:
For an ID view of the ecosystem(s) one might be interested in reading Dr. Henry Zuill on biodiversity.
http://www.grisda.org/georpts/2901.htm
or
http://dialogue.adventist.org/.....uill_e.htm
In the book In Six Days Zuill says:
Dr. Zuill is professor of biology at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. He holds a B.A. in biology from Atlantic Union College, an M.A. in biology from Loma Linda University and a Ph.D. in biology from Loma Linda University.
This is still too long, so for other angles one could head to Google and have a look at the absolute necessity of the million or so species of bacteria to all features of all other life on the planet.
Also, one should google the various biogeochemical cycles mentioned above – water, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and my favourite phosphorous (as I enjoy having DNA, RNA, ATP, bones and teeth) – and have a look at their complexity and interdependency.
Predictably a Darwinist will say “of course all of this is necessary for life … life evolved here where all of this exists”.
By their reasoning, wherever there are conditions of any sort there should be life of some sort.
After reading the long post on the complexity of the ecology above, here is a thought that I have had when the Darwinists would point to flaws in various species as indicating the designer was producing inferior designs. They indicated that flawed designs meant the creatures were probably not designed but developed randomly. My reaction has been that the species have to be optimized for an ecology and not for themselves. If one species is too dominant or efficient then it may eliminate others in the environment and may in the long run eliminate necessary elements of the ecology. For example, Darwinists have often said the eye is not designed correctly if you wanted optimum eye design. But suppose an optimum eye would make the species too efficient which would then enable this species to eliminate essential elements of the ecology.
I am not proposing this because I believe this but only as one plausible scenario. It may have many obvious flaws. Otherwise I would be just like the Darwinists who would then point to it as evidence for their beliefs. But it is more ID friendly because according to Darwinian theory organisms should continue to perfect themselves because they are only interested in the reproduction of their own genes, not those of others. So lack of perfection in species and stasis in an ecology may be an indication of design, not neo Darwinism. Maybe it can be tested.
Go here for an interesting series of quotations from Rupert Sheldrake regarding his own hypothesis of morphogenic fields in evolution and Gaia:
http://www.natur.cuni.cz/~vpetr/Sheldrake.html
shoot. I apologize about the above sheldrake link. It brings up a foreign language thingy. Easier to do would be to simply google the words “Gaia Rupert Sheldrake” and get some interesting perspectives.
Here are some interesting excerpts which might intrigue IDers (again, from Sheldrake’s work)
——————————————————————————–
“The evangelists of neo-Darwinism usually present their theory as if it were an established scientific fact that any rational person is bound to accept, whether he or she likes it or not. However, this is far from being the case…”
“…Indeed, behind its scientific facade, it [the neo-Darwinian theory] appears to have become for many of its followers remarkably like a religion. This seems to be the reason why they propagate their dogmas so zealously, guard against heresies so vigilantly, and deny the truth of all other faiths so vehemently.”
——————————————————————————–
“Darwin and his followers prefer the idea of gradual changes because they wish to avoid anything that might seem miraculous… But this is nothing more than intellectual prejudice, and armchair speculations about hypothetical missing links do not prove anything one way or another.”
——————————————————————————–
“In the plant kingdom, for example, species with many different kinds of leaves and flowers seem to survive equally well in the same environment; so how could similar selection pressures have given rise to such widely different forms?”
——————————————————————————–
“…most biologists reject the existence of telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, and indeed the whole range of the so-called paranormal. This refusal is not based on an examination of the facts, but merely on the grounds that because these things cannot at present be explained, they cannot possibly happen.”
——————————————————————————–
“Imagine an intelligent and curious person who knows nothing about electricity or electromagnetic radiation. He is shown a television set for the first time. He might at first suppose that the set actually contained little people, whose images he saw on the screen. But when he looked inside and found only wires, condensers, transistors, and so on, he might adopt the more sophisticated theory that the screen images somehow arose from complicated interactions among the components of the set. This hypothesis would seem particularly plausible when he found that the images became distorted or disappeared completely when components were removed, and that the images were restored to normal when these components were put back in their proper places.”
——————————————————————————–
“In Australia… there were until recent times no placental mammals. Instead, the marsupials evolve to produce a range of species that duplicated in remarkable ways the characteristics of [placental] mammals elsewhere in the world. There were pouched versions of the wolves, cats, ant-eaters, moles, flying squirrels, and so on. Coneivably, these marsupials somehow ‘tuned in’ to the morphogenetic fields of comparable mammals living on other continents.”
——————————————————————————–
“…accepts the reality of matter, as materialism does; it accepts the reality of the mind, as interactionism does; and it also accepts the existence of an inherent creativity in nature, as pantheism does. But it goes further in that it suggests the existence of a creative consciousness that transcends the Universe, and that is the source of its existence and of the laws that govern it. This divine consciousness also constitutes the goal towards which the evolutionary process is drawn in a ever more conscious manner.”
——————————————————————————–
“In fact, there is surprisingly little conflict between modern scientific theories of the development of the Universe and the sequence of events described in the first chapter of Genesis.”
——————————————————————————–
I remember reading about the Gaia hypothesis and the fine-tuning of the biosphere a good few years ago and to me it seems a natural fit with ID (“ecological ID�). I would be cautious about describing it as “irreducible†as I am sure it easy to imagine a step-by-step process as to how it arose. Nevertheless, it could be looked at from the “fine-tuning†perspective as this body of evidence cries out for a deeper explanation.
From what I can tell, Gaia has long been embraced by the new-age community – in a way it parallels ID and evangelical Christianity – both observing teleological reality in nature, but drawing different conclusions. I have always assumed ID scholars would be well versed in the Gaia hypothesis with its parallels to ID on the ecological level as opposed to the cellular or cosmological level. IMHO a dialogue between ID and Gaia proponents could bear much fruit in finding common ground across the metaphysical spectrum.
Finally, I have read parts of James Lovelock’s recent book ‘The Revenge of Gaia’. In it he recounts his difficulties of getting Gaia to be taken seriously by the scientific mainstream. The key problem in his own words, was that Richard Dawkins resisted it and would not back it unless it could be shown how it could arise by natural selection. And so we get a glimpse of how science works in reality – it does not matter if you have a vast array of empirical facts to support your hypothesis, all that matters is that it is compatible with natural selection. ID does not have a hope!
I think this begs the question of just how much benefit selection requires to select for a particular trait. Another term we can use to describe the question is “signal to noise ratio.” How much louder than the noise must the signal be for natural selection to latch on to it.
We see this question rising in a lot of areas. With questions of redundant genes and error correction codes, what percentage of organisms must benefit by the improvement in the duplication technology. We must remember that most of the time, any particular gene is duplicated perfectly without the new technology. Then there’s the question of migration. You’ve got to travel at least 500 miles south along the coast to gain more advantage than you gain by just traveling to the nearby sheltered cove. Now this topic suggests that organisms have developed exhautic systems whose function is to maintain the balance of the ecosystem. Yet it would take countless (well not quite) generations for this function to distinguish itself from a lack of the function. It just doesn’t seem evolvable, it doesn’t seem that there is anywhere near enough signal for natural selection to latch on to. It seems that all “just so stories” must demonstrate not that each step in the story has some apparent “function,” but that the proposed function be sufficient for natural selection to realisticly select for.
(Charlie, “I know Behe does not allow for the use of his term IC beyond the molecular level.” Wow, I would like to know who his intellectual property attourney is!)
Here’s another great article about Sheldrake’s hypothesis (one which, BTW, is also anti-ID, or at least anti-”special creation”) It also brings up the fact that “Neo Darwinism” has very little to do with Darwin’s original theory:
http://www.skepticalinvestigat.....lution.htm
great article, jimbo. Thanks for the link. It is so interesting to me that the link between Lamarck and Darwin (that darwin was a Lamarckian essentially) is forgotten in the modern synthesis. I want to say, however, that “God the Mechanic”, which is how ID is portrayed in the article, is only a potential version of ID, not a necessary or exclusive one. Also, being anti-special creation is NOT the same as being anti-ID.
Interesting article ,jimbe. Is it me or does this articles have a “mind over matter” feel to it. I couldn’t help but to think about the Star Wars phrase “May the force be with you” “Can you feel the force Luke Skywalker?” Isn’t Gaia close to the SW idea of the force also?
Since this thread seems to be idling it’s probably safe to add another comment.
However, I’ll spare you the lengthy post I keep contemplating on bacteria and why I think that they are evidence of the irreducibility and design of the ecosystem.
Instead I’ll just point the way to this timely little blurb:
http://creationsafaris.com/cre.....#20060802b
There is an interesting parallel provided by ecologcal succession with respect to both ontogeny and phylogeny. All three are self-limiting, irreversible and apparently “prescribed.”
“A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution, undemonstrable.”
John A. Davison