The Dilemma of Joe the Archaeologist
| June 7, 2006 | Posted by crandaddy under Intelligent Design |
Joe is an archaeologist at a major university. Not long ago, he came across evidence which was strong enough to convince him that there lies somewhere in the Andes a fabulous ancient city which has since been lost and forgotten. Confident that he knew the location of the city, Joe was able to acquire a grant to fund an excavation and traveled to a village not far from where he had planned to dig. However, after lengthy conversation with the villagers, Joe discovers that the lost city is most likely not where he had originally planned to dig and could very well be at either of two other locations–both of them far less easily accessible than the original site.
Joe decides to send scouting teams to each of the sites to investigate and search for any signs of past civilization. After conducting thorough investigations, the teams were only able to find one anomaly each (labeled as site A and site B).
Joe only has enough funds and resources to dig at one of these sites. At which (if either) of these sites should he dig and why?
38 Responses to The Dilemma of Joe the Archaeologist
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Re: discussion between Eric and SCheesman.
Isn’t it a hallmark of design that designs start out simple and gradually evolve, becoming more complext over time? Isn’t an iterative process of design (reproduction?) found to be a better alternative than other design methodologies?
PS: It is ironic that I have done archaeological work at both locations in the photos (the Olmec head was originally from La Venta, Tabasco Mex, and the first image was from Semmi Valley Ca, specifically part of the Corrigan Movie Ranch park. Bob Hope bought the Corrigan Ranch and subdivided most of it. Various parts were selected for parks based on their scenic and scientific features. The scientific features considered included archaeology.
Gary, you can’t even spell Simi Valley much less figure out if you’ve been there or not. Get lost. -ds
I would infer a natural designer, because we’ve seen natural designers. I can’t reliably infer something I’ve never seen. If I wrote you and said “aha! proof of leprechauns!” you’d consider me an idiot. I’m not sure how something can be proven to have been carved 300 million years ago. We can date the rock with reasonable accuracy (unless you’re a YEC, in which case there is precious little to talk about), but the date the rock was carved is harder. We can place it in another culture via archeology and anthropology, and date that culture through writings, myths, and such, but none of that extends back 300 million years.
I think our seat-of-the-pants intuition is a poor judge of what is probable, particularly on large timescales. You could stumble on a 6000-digit section of pi that was all sixes, and your intuition might tell you that “this sequence of digits can’t be random,” but it still is. All you need is a large enough sample of random numbers, and you will find any string you want. Every single time you deal a deck of cards you’ve beat the odds to a tune of 1/(8 * 10^67). That’s one over a 68-digit number. The outcome was staggeringly improbable, but it just happened, and you can produce similarly improbable events time and time again. If I told you “That sequence of cards was too improbable! It must be magic!” you’d consider me an idiot, even though the outcome was, in fact, staggeringly improbable. Positing the supernatural because you consider whatever has already happened to be too improbable is to fall into the same trap.
I can’t reliably infer something I’ve never seen.
You’ve seen genetic engineers, haven’t you? If you’ve seen one then they are a proven possibility. So, genetic engineers are a proven possibility. We know for a fact that intelligent agents capable of manipulating genomes for directed purposes exist in nature. We have one indisputable example. Since we know of at least one instance of genetic engineers appearing on the scene we have to ask ourselves what physical laws of nature, if any, would prevent genetic engineers from having been around in the remote past. So tell me, why couldn’t there have been genetic engineers in the universe billions of years ago? -ds
“So tell me, why couldn’t there have been genetic engineers in the universe billions of years ago?”
As far as I understand evolutionary theory, it doesn’t say there COULDN’T be design, only that evolutionary processes can produce the genetic diversity we see on this planet without the need to posit a conscious designer. You can ALWAYS posit design, ALWAYS infer it, but if natural processes can explain what we see, I don’t see a reason to infer other entities. Science studies nature and natural processes, and doesn’t address any extra-natural or super-natural entity or force. Many people who believe in Darwinian evolution believe God is still the designer, and evolution is just the mechanism. So evolution doesn’t eliminate God or “prove” that He doesn’t exist, only seeks to explain in natural terms how things happened. I’d wager that most evolutionists still believe in God.
To return to your question, I can’t prove there CANNOT have been genetic engineers, just as I cannot prove that there wasn’t a plaid-wearing lycanthropic blue-eyed leprechaun who snapped the fingers on this third hand and said “let it be.” I can’t prove it wasn’t aliens, or cosmic snot, or anything else. Science and logic just hold you to the most probable, sensible answers in light of other data known. You can posit that an alien race existed before humans and created life, and no one can “prove” you wrong–all they can do is point out that no evidence points to that conclusion, if in fact that is the case. All science does is look for natural explanations because the natural world is the one we live in. It’s a process that produces theories to explain the facts as we understand them. Science is always provisional and tentative. But then again, it works. I’m partial to the mental process that gave me air-conditioning, antibiotics, and the internet. Nothing human-created is infallible, but it seems more grounded in reality than other mental models.
You avoid the point that genetic engineers are a natural process. Unless you want to contradict yourself then you have to admit that genetic engineers are a natural occurence in the universe. There are only two possibilites my friend – genetic engineers are either natural or supernatural. You need to drive a stake in the ground on which you believe. If you choose natural, which I do because I don’t believe in the supernatural, then Occams Razor has you choose which is more likely – a narrative of accidental self-assembly of organic life which has not been demonstrated as plausible in any way is responsible for the self-assembly of DNA based life or that genetic engineers in some other physical manifestation in an earlier period of the universe’s very long history is responsible for the seeming design of DNA based life. For me, the choice is clear. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck. If it looks like a design and functions like a design and designers are a natural happenstance in the universe then it was probably designed. -ds
I didn’t avoid the nature of genetic engineers–I just considered it an obvious. Please don’t imply that I was trying to avoid conceding that genetic engineers exist. But I’m not buying into a false delimma via the either-or assumption that RNA was designed by either supernatural or natural engineers, because that begs the question of design. Abiogenesis is a murky field at best, and is tangential to evolutionary theory. I’ve read plausible accounts of “replicators” that via competition for resources became RNA (rather, the things they replicated into, may iterations later, with much incremental variation, became RNA) but this field is largely speculative. It makes sense, but I can’t say how closely it maps to reality. Self-replicating molecules have been developed, and the difference in complexity is one of degree. We know that proteins/lipids can spontaneously form under the correct conditions, we have found self-replicating molecules, so the leap from here to the next step isn’t as staggering as many would believe.
Science is the mental process I trust to explain the world, even if parts of the world haven’t (or can’t, even) be explained by our limited abilities. If you’re asking me to believe in a “designer” for RNA, a conscious being who exists in the real world, your “explanation” necessitates explaining something far more complex than RNA or DNA. You’re posing greater and more insoluble questions, rather than answering any we currently have. I’d rather tentatively entertain an evolutionary explanation for life and biodiversity than start positing a “designer” who I must then explain. Who is this designer? Who designed the designer? Who designed the one who designed the designer, and so on. I’m more amenable to explaining the world in terms of what we know, rather than that which is unknowable.
We know that life exists here and now, and we know about RNA, DNA, etc. We know that diversity in a population, followed by a selective pressure from the environment, can cause changes in the gene pool, and eventually result in speciation via reproductive isolation, morphologial changes, etc. That’s been seen, tested, verified, and is uncontroversial in the scientific literature. I think it more sensible to go with what we’ve seen, even if it involves a little backwards extrapolation and inference, than to start positing all-new beings which in turn open up all-new questions that we can’t even begin to approach. Science is messy enough, and intriguing enough, without bringing in processes that by their nature cannot be studied.
I’ve read plausible accounts of “replicators†that via competition for resources became RNA (rather, the things they replicated into, may iterations later, with much incremental variation, became RNA) but this field is largely speculative.
These are not plausible accounts. They’re wild speculation absent anything but a few tenuous wisps of connection to anything real or demonstrable and frought with insurmountable problems. The proposed chemistry just doesn’t work. Also, you constructed a straw man in the false dilemma. I told you that you must choose between genetic engineers being natural or supernatural. The fact that genetic engineers exist is not a matter of dispute. Only their nature and origin remains a question. As a man of science I don’t believe in the supernatural so I accept the fact that genetic engineers are a natural thing in the universe – as natural as stars and planets but probably not so abundant. So are they supernatural or natural in your opinion? -ds
“They’re wild speculation absent anything but a few tenuous wisps of connection to anything real or demonstrable….”
And the designers of which you speak are NOT speculative or tenuous, and they ARE real and demonstrable? You can peek into a biology classroom and belt out “I don’t believe it!” and no one can refute you, but don’t go thinking that your incredulity in and of itself constitutes an alternative argument.
You are abandoning an admittedly speculative position for one vastly more speculative, one that poses vastly more unanswered, ostensibly unanswerable questions. I’m not sure exactly how you are improving your position.
And the designers of which you speak are NOT speculative or tenuous
<>b>Correct. Genetic engineers even have websites. We know that naturally arising agents can tinker with genomes for fun and profit. The only thing we don’t know is how long they’ve been doing it. The evidence, the genomic designs we see in the world, indicate they’ve were doing it around 3.5 billion years ago at least. Maybe longer. -ds
All of the genetic engineers with which I am familiar have been natural. If I inferred design, it would be a design by an entity occurring in the natural world. I am unfamiliar with ways to investigate, verify, or know the supernatural world.
Are you proposing that people engineered the code from which people sprang? The only genetic engineers we have direct experience with are human beings. That would seem to run into a rather large bootstrap problem. That is, unless you’re positing an unknown entity, with unknown qualities and abilities, as an asnwer. That proposition’s causal inspecificity is far greater than the idea that natural chemical processes resulted in a self-assembling, reproducible molecule.
What natural chemical processes are those? There is nothing known that can produce DNA without machinery that is controlled by DNA. There’s the big bootstrap problem. You are babbling about a mechanism that can’t even be imagined in working detail much less demonstrated in a lab. Intelligent agency is already known to be a part of nature, unless of course you want to claim that human intelligence is supernatural. Is that your claim? So in invoking intelligence as a cause we take a mechanism that is demonstrable in the present as sufficient and hypothesize that a similar mechanism existed in the past. Chemical evolution by blind chance is not demonstrable in any way, shape, or form in the present. If you can’t demonstrate it in the present then postulating about it in the past is pure wool gathering. -ds