Ockham’s Razor is a Modern Myth
| July 1, 2009 | Posted by Alfred Russel under Intelligent Design |
I realize this is slightly off-topic, but it is related to the spirit of Uncommon Descent. It turns out that Ockham’s Razor is nothing more than a modern myth, and this was proven by William Thornburn in a brilliant and devastating paper he published in Mind 27 (1918), pp345-353.
Ockham’s Razor states that “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, which is often translated as “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”. In other words, do not invent more things to fit the facts than are needed. William of Ockham (c. 1288 – c. 1348) himself was a medieval logician, known as the “Singular and Invincible Doctor” (many medieval logicians had street names like this). He was very famous in his own time. “If the Gods used Logic”, said his editor, Mark of Beneventum, “it would be the Logic of Ockham”.
But Ockham never invented Ockham’s Razor. Thornburn appears to have meticulously gone through a vast amount of material, and found that the phrase “Ockham’s Razor” comes from the writings of Sir William Hamilton in the 19th Century. The phase “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, can be found no earlier than 1639, in the writings of John Ponce of Cork. More importantly, neither similar phrases, nor anything that really resembles the concept they are expressing, can be found in the writings of Ockham.
Thornburn’s paper has never been challenged, but the myth remains. If myths can persist in philosophy, why not in science? If unchallenged scholarship can simply be ignored, should it surprise us that science supporting ID is also ignored? How many other scholarly and scientific myths are there out there?
46 Responses to Ockham’s Razor is a Modern Myth
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Lars, try this:
Character X was useful for something.
Then, a new system evolved that was utterly dependent on X. This system makes use of X but it does not do the same exact thing as X. If you knock out X, that system falls apart, and it is that system, as a whole, that is IC. If the organism as a whole depended on that system, which is almost certainly the case, it’s likely screwed whether or not X could still be useful on its own or not. X is, in roughly analogous terms, like a foundation: it’s not a skyscraper, but a skyscraper has to have one. Damage the foundation, and the whole thing comes crashing down. And yet, during initial construction, the foundation wasn’t being used to hold up a building.
Don’t take the foundation thing too literally though, as evolution is rarely so simplistic, nor is it pre-planned. Rather just see the general point: you can produce systems that are IC, even if an individual component is not.
Another decent analogy from architecture, illustrating a slightly different form of IC, is the arch: it stands on it’s own, and yet it required external support until the keystone was placed. That scaffolding was utterly necessary, but ultimately discardable. But, if you grab a sledgehammer and knock out a single stone, the very functional arch will become a pile rubble (and likely anything the arch supports will too).
Echidna-Levy,
That’s the whole point now, isn’t it?
Neither ND nor ID has ‘proven’ anything. We are on the same playing field. Yet NDists deny ID is science. If so, then neither is ND science.
Furthermore, ID is more likely to get the closest to ‘proving’ anything, since it is a positive claim, whereas ND, claiming spontaneity as a core idea, could never explain anything. How does ND prove a negative?
So the advantage goes to ID. It predicts we will find more and more evidence of just how molecules become animated? And ID predicts (IMO) that science will discover that the fundamental forces of nature are embedded with information vis-a-vis their multiplicative division, which gives rise to light, which clumps in different degrees, which in turn creates matter, energy, life.
By the time we get all that wrapped around our brains, we will all be in Heaven ‘looking’ at those united forces, which have names and personalities like
Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit.
For mereologist:
Page 203,4, Darwin’s Black Box:
The design inference requires specific criteria.
If that criteria isn’t met then the design inference isn’t warranted.
That criteria is the positive evidence.
And if you want to say “it evolved” it is up to YOU to demonstrate it is even possible.
However scientists have no clue what makes organisms what they are.
Dear dbthomas: Thanks for the spelling correction. I am quite happy to withdraw my point about similar phrases and concepts too. Even so, Ockham’s Razor remains a modern myth. And if such a thing is a myth, one wonders what else in the realm of science and scholarship might also be.
mereologist/dbthomas, thanks for the explanations of Muller and interlocking complexity. What is Behe’s reaction to Muller?
lars,
Good question.
To the best of my knowledge, Behe has never acknowledged Muller’s work on interlocking complexity or responded to it.
I don’t remember seeing Muller mentioned in Darwin’s Black Box or The Edge of Evolution, and he doesn’t appear in the index of either book.
A Google search on “Behe Muller” comes up with hundreds of pages that are critical of Behe, but I can’t find anything written by Behe himself on the subject.
Is anyone else aware of anything Behe has written on Muller?
mereologist:
What work?
Did Muller even understand the internal workings of the cell? No.
So what work should Behe respond to?
Behe recently responded to people who ascribe a definition of irreducible complexity to him that he does not hold.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/....._blog_blog
Behe’s definition should be used in any discussions of IC. His ideas on this have been misused a lot both on this site and elsewhere.
Apparaently what Muller was discussing isn’t even rel;evant to what Behe is saying:
MikeGeene:
Joseph,
Muller was talking about organisms, but the idea he described is just as applicable to individual biochemical systems.
Here is how Allen Orr explains it:
The upshot is that Muller refuted Behe before Behe was even born.
“The upshot is that Muller refuted Behe before Behe was even born.”
Behe has never been refuted. What has happened is that some people play make believe and then use their “make believe” as evidence. Orr’s scenario should be visible in the genomic structure someplace. If it isn’t then it is just a “just told story.” If it is, then it is an interesting structure to study.
Mereologist,
Allen Orr’s explanation is nothing but guesswork. It is a rumination on what is perecieved to be possible, not what has been observed to actually take place.
You guys are always in conjecture mode, never in empirical mode.
Can you tell us when will be able to make the switch?
mereologist:
How can that be when Muller didn’t even know the inside of the cell?
Now if Orr can take what he says on paper and actually demonstrate it he may have something.
Until then all you have is a bunch of hot air without a balloon to put it in.
mereologist wrote,
@jerry,
Hear, hear.
Does this affect the question of Muller’s having “refuted” Behe? As far as I can see, Theobald uses an inaccurate definition of IC according to Behe’s Amazon blog post (although it is apparently the definition Behe gave in DBB p. 39: “wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning”; yet we should use his most up-to-date definition).
Yet I think Muller’s/Orr’s point still applies in theory, that a system’s being IC (by the most refined definition) is not a 100% barrier to its arising via RM+NS, because an IC system can be built by “slight, successive modifications“, not just additions. Can anyone more knowledgeable comment on that?
On the other hand, as others have already pointed out, all this gives evolutionists is a loophole to wriggle out of one point of logical impossibility. It does not give a very robust theoretically possibility, let alone a workable theory of how an IC system could arise via NDE. It’s interesting that the examples given of Mullerian interlockingly complex (MIC) systems, a bridge and an arch, (a) are both intelligently designed systems; and (b) lack any suggestion of how they could arise “(by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system”.
In the case of the bridge, for example, the addition of the top stone does not seem to improve the bridge’s function. Theobald dismisses this shortcoming, saying “Whether this improves the functionality of the bridge is irrelevant — it may or may not, the bridge still functions.” But how can a mutation that does not improve function become established in the population, so that a successive mutation can build upon it? Theobald says “Orr has emphasized the adaptive possibilities in the Mullerian two-step (i.e. improvement of function at each step).” But I have not looked to see whether Orr offers examples, nor have I digested the examples in nature that Theobald links to. Regardless, the bridge and arch examples do not refute Behe’s claims about IC systems because Behe claimed IC systems “cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function…)”.
Would it be accurate to say then that MIC shows a logical loophole in Behe’s IC claim, but the examples examined so far fail to show IC systems that really could arise via evolution (defined as requiring continuous improvement)?
Incidentally, I’ve been following ID for several years now, and thought I was mostly down to hearing the same points over and over. But I hadn’t heard about MIC till this post.
Note too that Theobald’s claim “standard genetic processes easily produce these [IC] structures” is completely unsupported by empirical evidence. He might have been able to claim that standard genetic processes could in theory be able to produce these structures.
When you see scaffolding at work, you see design at work.
One precedes the other.