Comment #83 was eebroms.

visit teleological.org and post a SHORT comment there, and if I have time, I’ll try to respond.

Thanks for your participation.

Salvador

But, if standard scientific inference using induction cannot possibly “prove” anything, then the logical elimination of natural causes is quite literally excluded as a logical operation. In other words, just because one cannot provide a naturalistic explanation for the origin of something today is literally no guarantee that such information cannot eventually be discovered and applied in a naturalistic explanation. Therefore, applying the ID concepts of IC and CSI should only be done as a last resort (once all possible naturalistic explanations have been tested and invalidated), as they depend fundamentally on the kind of comprehensive logical elimination that inductive reasoning absolutely prohibits.

eebrom, using “argument by conservation of right-handed parity” writes (;-))…

But, if standard scientific inference using induction cannot possibly “prove” anything, then the logical elimination of intelligent-design is quite literally excluded as a logical operation. In other words, just because one cannot provide intelligent-design explanation for the origin of something today is literally no guarantee that such information cannot eventually be discovered and applied in an intelligent-design explanation. Therefore, applying the naturalistic concepts to IC and CSI should only be done as a last resort (once all possible intelligent design explanations have been tested and invalidated), as they depend fundamentally on the kind of comprehensive logical elimination that inductive reasoning absolutely prohibits.

Regarding pure deterministic laws, even a deterministic pseudo-random number generator cannot infuse life with information apart from a coupling mechanism (a boundary condition). Thus deterministic laws by themselves are impotent to infuses biology with information, not matter how information rich the laws are (and the known ones are actually very information poor according to the work of Gregory Chaitin). This is consistent with Trevors paper. I think Trevors claims hold and are mathematically irrefutable by definition.

Moving one to purely stochastic “laws” or chance processes. These process can only be described by simple general specifications. That is, like deterministic laws used in physics, they are usually poor in information content. When we say a concept is simple and elegant, mathematically speaking it is information poor. F=ma is simple and elegant, but information poor in terms of bits….

Stochastic laws are in a similar way information poor, but in ways less obvious. A stochastic law is usually described with a simple distribution and a few parameters. For example the normal distribution can be described by a simple equation, a mean, and a standard deviation, and nothing else. It is information poor in it’s description.

Consider an illustration where 500 coins are subject to non-specific boundary conditions (like being shaken in a box). This process can be described by a stochastic process where a fair coin has a probability of being heads 50% of the time. A stochastic process is an appropriate model given the absence of specific boundary conditions (like precise specification of the initial conditions and forces acting on the coin).

For example, given that each coin has a probability of being heads about 50% of the time, it is highly unlikely all 500 coins will be heads apart from specific boundary conditions. That is a predicted, easily seen macroscopic property. We see such a stochastic process can’t reasonably be expected to make all coins heads, but rather most outcomes will be such that about 50% of the coins will be heads.

But there are exceptions. Letting H represent heads and T represent tails, the following pattern would be superficially consistent with the idea that 50% of the coins are heads, yet the pattern resists stochastic explanation:

H T H T H T …….. H T

Surprisingly one could progressively make the patterns more intricate until the pattern is Kolmogorov Complex and there would still be problems. It is this claim that is perhaps not so obvious. All coins heads being improbable is obvious, but a Kolmogorov complex pattern being improbable is not so obvious.

The problem is when we begin looking to purely stochastic process to create highly a specific outcome (for a given trial), we get into trouble. As long as the the outcomes are described in generalities (like 50% heads) versus specifities (like a very exact patterns, even Kolmogorov Complex patterns) we avoid getting into trouble. Doing otherwise would be like asking a stochastic process to tell me what your passwords are. It simply is illogical.

That is why I said, if a stochastic process is called upon to give highly specific outcome (for a given trial), it ceases to be a stochastic process by definition. Highly specific outcomes (or specified outcomes) for a given trial do not come about through stochastic processes. This obvious fact has been pounded by Dembski, and it is so obvious, I’m at a loss that it is not clearly seen.

Purely deterministic and purely stochastic processes (in an of themselves) have been shown to be inadequate generators of specific biological information. But what of combinations of deterministic and stochastic processes? That is the subject of my upcoming thread on the Displacement Theorem.

I will also post on Dave Thomas’s evolutionary algorithms, but in brief, his disproof can be illustrated by this fictional scenario:

PZ Myers finds DaveScot in the park one day, walks up with a paint ball gun and shoots DaveScot in the chest. Ouch!

Shortly before DaveScot confers a little retribution for this act, PZ pleads, “Don’t be mad Dave, you were not the target of my gun. Honest, I was aiming at the shirt you happen to be wearing, not at you specifically, only your shirt.”

Salvador

Thank you for your post. It’s is of value knowing where you think IDers need to focus their efforts.

However, I think ID will be accepted by next generation scientists, doctors, and engineers through outside literature, not peer-reviewed literature because of the institutional barriers. Dean Kenyon and Michael Behe and others were persuaded with popular literature outside mainstream peer-review. Curiously, they were actually well-qualified to be peer-reviewers of such popular literature (especially Kenyon when he read the works of A.E. Wilder Smith!).

There will be heretical ideas circulated outside the blessings of “the powers that be” even amongst practicing scientists. I expect these alternative, informal research networks will be where ideas are developed, even annonymously. This is possible now because of the internet.

Any literature for main-stream publication will have to diplomatically avoid references to the fact it is favorable or could be interpreted as favorable to intelligent design.

I expect very little empirical research to be devoted by IDers to moving naturalistic evolutionary theories or OOL theories forward since it is largely viewed as a hopeless quest in their eyes, especially OOL.

Given that, ID theory may not ever meet the criteria you would expect, and I respect that.

However, if you find value in the work of Jack Trevors (who is not an IDer) or Richard Sternberg or even John Sanford, I would consider that progress, as I think from a scholarly standpoint, their ideas make a valuable contribution to critical thinking with respect to prevailing theories.

Salvador

Thank you for the information! That entire article on Trevors is worth reading.

Take that question about the origins of life. It’s hardly a new line of inquiry for Trevors, who was about 10 when he began wondering about the existence of God. He’s still wondering. Indeed, it’s a question that has consumed a fair amount of his own life recently, albeit now voiced in the language of a professional scientist: Where and how did the genetic code and its instructions arise?

No small question. “The origin of genetic instructions in the DNA is the most pressing question in science,” he says. “Genetic instructions don’t write themselves, any more than a software program writes itself.”

He adds that the issue goes far beyond deciphering the recipes for making proteins. Given that our genetic material constitutes the stuff of our own identity, “it’s the search for ourselves, our origins,” he says.

I respect Trevors open mind on the issue, and I’m glad the scientific community accepted publication of his thought process.

Salvador

Discovered this for Trevors:

Call it looking for God in our DNA — or at least that’s how a person of faith might phrase it. Trevors, a self-proclaimed atheist, is more circumspect. “If you’re a religious person, you say God. If you’re an evolutionist, you say evolution.”

He notes, however, that not even evolution deigns to tell us where or how life itself first came about or how DNA’s instructions came to be. Perhaps the birthplace of those instructions — like the very creation of the universe itself — is, in Trevors’ words, both “unknowable and ‘undecidable’ at this point in time.”

From “Inquiring Minds Want to Know” by Andrew Vowles ( http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelp.....file.shtml ).

Thanks for the post (#77). And I agree, unless one is clear on the determined/undetermined question, everything else is pointless. Let me be clear right off the bat that I am firmly in the undetermined camp. This, of course, puts me at odds with many in the “pro-evolution/anti-ID” camp, who are what I sometimes refer to as “relentless determinists.” My good friend and mentor, Will Provine, often makes statements that seem to me to be “pan-determinist”, and with which I therefore disagree (and, surprise, we still remain the best of friends).

This problem is paralleled by what I call the problem of “pan-adaptationism.” As most clearly articulated by Lewontin and Gould in their “spandrels” paper, this metaphysical position (and it is IMO metaphysical, not empirical) assumes that virtually no characteristic of any living organism is “accidental” – that is, everything is an adaptation. There are historical reasons why many supporters of the “modern synthesis” (i.e. what the ID camp likes to call “neo-darwinists”…odd, many of us used to like that moniker) take this position, beginning with R. A. Fisher’s assertion that individual fitness is summed over the entire genotype, and can therefore be considered to focus on a single “crucial” character/allele that is the entire subject of selection. Fisher asserted this because he couldn’t model selection mathematically without doing so, but it set the stage for (or at least didn’t discourage) the “pan-adaptationism” that Lewontin and Gould decry.

Indeed, as I am currently working up in an essay (which will, in the fullness of time, become a book), a fully determined universe is a “closed” universe, and therefore everything in it will perforce be “closed” as well, including society and our own minds (i.e. neither “free will” nor anything like it can possibly exist). I’m on the side of Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, and therefore rush in (where some others fear to tread) and assert that both the universe and everyting in it are (at some level) undetermined (or, at least, not fully determined). IOW, as Democritus said, “all things are the fruit of chance and necessity” not just necessity.

Does this mean that I might entertain the idea of ID? Of course is does, but as a fully committed empiricist, I won’t change my mind until IDers do the same things to verify their theory that we neo-evos do: propose some testable hypotheses, formulate some predictions that can be empirically (i.e. not just theoretically) tested, then do the tests (i.e. get your hands dirty), analyze the results (preferably using generally accepted statistical methods), and then publish the results in peer-reviewed journals. I know, there have been some peer-reviewed pro-ID articles (some are referenced above), but I haven’t seen any (yet) that use real organisms in natural environments to validate or falsify testable hypotheses. If this can be done, and the results look good, then it’s time to break out the bubbly. Doing so before you’ve jumped through the hoops is not only premature, it makes you look like a deluded, self-agrandizing idiot to the people who have spent their lives getting their hands dirty. And nobody wants to look like a deluded, self-agrandizing idiot…

…not me, anyway.

Why should we be held to a higher standard than you? There is no empirical evidence using real organisms in natural environments in support of the claim that random mutation plus natural selection can create novel cell types, tissue types, organs, and body plans. Physician, heal thyself. -ds

This is the crux of the matter. If by sifting thru many terabytes of data I run across the ASCII codes for the text of War and Peace, then by any coherent (and I might add, meaningful and useful) definition of stochasm and information, we have encountered information.

GIGO, baby, GIGO. All first year computer science majors learn that. When the input garbage is shaped into non-garbage output, something specific is at work in the “shaper.” If the input is stocastic and if the output consists of even stocastic numbers, an algorithm is obviously at work.

If the entire universe is taken as a whole, any events leading to specific patterns must have been processed by preexisting conditions. (Obviously.) How did the universe come to the state it is presently?

Wheneven I talk to an anti-ID person, I always try to get the metaphysical philosophy cleared up first, what they really believe about the nature of the universe. Does any sort of true randomness exist or not? Not just random or “stochastic” from our viewpoint, but truly random from any viewpoint- genuinely undetermined events, events where the result is undetermined by the cause? The answer tells me a lot about how a person thinks. Other than just *saying* the words “an undetermined event”, I find the concept to be utterly meaningless.

If a person believes in a strict determinism, then everything that exists was set in stone, so to speak, from the first unit of Planck’s time. Beyond that point, no rational inquiry can exist. A logical dead end. (Yes, I know about multiverses, or explanding and contracting universe, and so forth, but like the question of God’s existence, a multiverse or a repeating universe, doesn’t explain the meta concept of its existence in the first place, or anything about how our universe got the specific ordering that it has.)

If a person accepts that undetermined events truly occur, and that THESE are the source of the biological complexity on Earth, then in effect, they are simply taking the “I don’t know” position using different words. However, I believe it is fundamentally weaker than pure determinism since pure determinism only requires a single logical dead end, and this view requires two logical dead ends. Either one may be correct, who is to say. But I should think one gap would be preferable over two gaps to any scientist. And who knows? When you let open the “back door” to reason by allowing undetermined “I dont know” events to occur presently, why then, ANYTHING could happen. Induction may make us feel better, but it is hardly “true.” Moreover, the idea of undetermined events is simply nonsense. (Quantum Mechanics deals basically with statistical probabilities of events, and relegates certain subatomic events to the “I dont know” category. However, QM strictly speaking is incomplete in how it deals with these undetermined events. There are schools of thought on what is going on “down there” (many worlds, Copenhagen, etc) but these interpretations are not QM itself. Something unknown “shapes” the individual undetermined events into statistically accurate outcomes overall, so they either cannot be so undetermined after all. String theory attempts to explain it but lacks empirical verification thus far, and ST is a pure deterministic system. Point is, nobody knows why undetermined events occur the way they do according to QM, or if they are genuinely undetermined. It’s an open question.)

At any rate, whether or not undetermined events actually exist or not is irrelevant. Either view poses serious questions to the anti-ID mindset. In the universe, every event is shaped by the state of the entire system that came before. There’s no getting around that. And the universe’s “shaping mechanism” led to intelligent beings with insight, foresight, and the ability to deeply probe itself.

How could it have been any other way?

Thanks for reading.