Why Not Accept the Fossil Record at Face Value Instead of Imposing a Theory on it?
| January 11, 2010 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
In a comment to a prior post Johhnnyb makes the following excellent points:
One thing which I think ID can contribute to any historical aspect of earth history is shaving off hypothetical creatures. While there are certainly many creatures which haven’t yet been found, and I’m sure many of these creatures include chimeras of existing features in existing creatures, there is no reason to believe that there must be creatures where none have been found or evidenced. Darwinism has a bad habit of perpetually adding dashed lines in-between creatures for where it expects to find relationships. Instead, ID says that, perhap we can just take the fossil record as we find it. Perhaps what we need to be doing is measuring, say, the average known time fossils go missing from the fossil record, and use that plus statistical completeness estimates to estimate the error bounds of the fossil record. Instead, Darwinists will substitute a narration of what they think happened in the past to substitute for 99% of earth history, rather than simply looking at what’s there.
Here’s a simple example – extinction estimates. Darwinists will say that 99.99% of species that have ever lived have gone extinct. Well, that’s actually a bunch of B.S. There are roughly 250,000 species that have been identified in the fossil record, and well over 1,000,000 species that exist today. Taken at face value, even if every species in the fossil record has gone extinct (which they haven’t), that means that 80% of species that ever existed ARE STILL ALIVE. That’s quite a stretch. So where do Darwinists get their number? By assuming that innumerable species existed in the transitional spaces. Why? Because they _must_ have existed there for their theory to be true.
ID says that Darwinism is simply an unnecessary hypothesis. We should take the fossil record as it comes to us, measure its completeness on its own terms, and determine its limits as we can determine apart from Darwinism. After doing so, we might find certain features of the fossil record to be consistent with Darwinism, or we might not. The problem is that the Darwinists distort what they see to fit into their picture of Darwinism. There are also a set of Silurian trackways which were thought to be arthropods…why? Because it was thought that tetrapods hadn’t existed yet. Basically, Darwinism has been forcing the way in which we view the fossil record and earth history. When it is in conflict with the data, over and over again, the data gets modified to fit with Darwinism. ID makes a clean break with the Darwinistic picture, and would allow us to take the animal distributions within the fossil record much more on its own terms.
116 Responses to Why Not Accept the Fossil Record at Face Value Instead of Imposing a Theory on it?
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Seversky (#82)
Thank you for a very thoughtful post. I’d like to respond to some of the points you made.
First, in response to my assertion that asking for a modus operandi for a design originating from a superior intelligence is unreasonable, you ask why it is unreasonable. It is certainly not because we are incapable of detecting patterns produced by intelligent agents: on the contrary, Dembski’s explanatory filter provides us with a useful tool for doing so. But then you ask why ID should be excused the “pathetic level of detail” that it demands of Darwinism. If Darwinists are required to explain how specified complexity arose, then ID proponents should be expected to do the same.
Is there a double standard here? No. What we want from the Darwinists is not an explanation, but a probability calculation. All you need to do is provide us with a computer model showing that the likelihood of a structure such as a ribosome (or for that matter, a protein) arising in a realistic simulation of the prebiotic earth, through unguided processes (I don’t care what they are, so long as no intervention by human agents is required during the execution of the program) exceeds Dembski’s probability bound. If you can’t, then I’ll turn my attention to the only process I know that can produce such structures: intelligent agency – presumably involving an agent who is a lot more intelligent than myself.
In other words, both ID proponents and Darwinists are being held to the same standard: calculate the probabilities, please. Do the math. Only if ID proponents can rigorously demonstrate that the complex structures exhibiting “specified complexity” do indeed fall below Dembski’s probability bound are they entitled to “claim” them as products of intelligent agency. I believe that Dr. Stephen Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell” represents a major advance in this regard – for he has clearly done his homework, and he has come up with some hard numbers.
Second, you use the example how the property of green-ness in natural and artificial Christmas trees can have completely different explanations to argue that Dr. Stephen Meyer is making an invalid argument from analogy when he compares the specified information in DNA to the specified information in computer code, and then asserts that because computer code is produced by an intelligent agent, DNA must be too.
But that’s not what Dr. Meyer says. Once again, the probabilities are what counts. Of course it’s wrong to infer that the green-ness of artificial Christmas trees must be due to chlorophyll. That’s because we have a perfectly reasonable alternative explanation. People make artificial Christmas trees in factories. This is a common process; it is happening as we speak. It is certainly not astronomically improbable.
By contrast, Dr. Meyer argues that the probability of the specified information in DNA originating through an unguided process (a combination of chance and necessity) is astronomically low. That is what warrants our looking for an intelligent cause. We know that intelligent beings can create this kind of information; we don’t know of anything else that can, except through some astronomically improbable fluke.
Third, you argue that that the soundness of a scientific theory is not decided solely by probability estimates, and that another litmus test is its capacity for prediction. You then cite Tiktaalik as an example of a successful evolutionary prediction.
Now, a singular prediction may certainly count as evidence for a scientific theory (e.g. the 2.7 K microwave radiation which counted as evidence for the Big Bang). But the theory of evolution is not merely a theory about what happened, but about how it happened: through some combination of chance and necessity (unguided processes): more precisely, random variation filtered by natural selection. The Big Bang-Steady State comparison does not hold up here: the two theories made quite different predictions about what happened in the universe, billions of years ago. The differences between ID and Darwinian evolution are primarily about the mechanism rather than the sequence of events in the fossil record. The fact that an ID proponent like Dr. Michael Behe has no qualms about accepting common descent demonstrates that.
So I’m afraid you do have to demonstrate the causal adequacy of your mechanism, for it is precisely this that is at stake here. Did the information required to produce a tetrapod come about through an unguided process that was within the realms of probability? In the words of one information theorist quoted by Denyse O’Leary in a previous post (24 December 2007):
In any case, Tiktaalik hardly counts as a suucessful evolutionary prediction. Never mind the problem of the date: tetrapods may turn out to have undiscovered “ghost lineages.” But what about the habitat? As Ed Yong wrote in a recent blog :
If you can’t even get the habitat right, what remains of your prediction?
Finally, I apologize for not addressing your remaining (and very substantive) point about whether DNA can be truly said to encode information. I shall return to this topic in a few hours, as I must retire for the evening.
One more thing-
Tiktaalik was not a prediction based on the mechanisms.
As Dr Behe and others have made clear- evidence for Common Descent is not evidence for a mechanism.
vjtorley:
Except that the event for which probabilities are being calculated is exactly the same — naturalistic evolution.
I have a strange feeling that if one calculates the “probability” of a designer successfully pulling off some bit of design, the result will always be 1.
Lenoxus (#94)
Thank you for your post. You write:
I’d like to clear up this point, since it often comes up. Let’s talk about footprints. Suppose you were living in the year 1700, and you found some very large, regularly spaced five-toed imprints in an inaccessible, undisturbed location – e.g. on the ocean floor, or in some ancient strata. After ruling out the possibility of a hoax, you would wonder what made these regularly spaced marks. You might reasonably conclude that it was some sort of animal, but bigger than any you had seen before.
Why would this be a reasonable inference? Because you have no other plausible account of how these prints could have originated, and because animals are the only things you know that make prints like that. Even in the absence of dinosaur bones (which nobody knew about in the year 1700), you would be rational to conclude that a very big unknown animal made them. You wouldn’t try to calculate the probability of a particular animal (say, a bear) making those prints, let alone the probability of some animal doing so (how would you calculate that, anyway?) The only thing which might cause you to jettison the “animal explanation” would be if the prints were so big (e.g. 100 meters long) that no animal could possibly have made them, because it would have collapsed under its own weight.
OK. Now let’s suppose you are a scientist on Mars, and you find a strange-looking structure that has a most peculiar feature which you immediately recognize, and which to the best of your knowledge is only produced by intelligent agents. Moreover, you have strong reasons for doubting any other explanation: you calculate that the probability of unguided processes producing this feature is astronomically low. However, you also realize that human agents could not have produced this feature – it’s too well-made to be of human origin. The quality of the workmanship is too good for it to be of human origin. You would then conclude that an unknown intelligent agent had made it.
Suppose the technical quality of the workmanship was far, far ahead of anything humans had ever dreamed of. Would that be a reason to reject the design inference? No. As far as we know, the attribute of intelligence has no built-in limitations – unlike the size of an animal. (Even if we consider the human mind, there is no reason in principle why it could not hold an infinite number of concepts.) Thus the technical expertise of a newly discovered design does not constitutes a valid reason to doubt agency was its cause. Nor would it make sense for us to reduce our estimate of the probability that some agent produced the feature (a probability which is incalculable anyway, as the class of agents is potentially infinite). Rather, what we should do is simply extrapolate and say, “Intelligent agency is the only process that can produce this kind of feature. Someone who is very much smarter than we are, made this.”
Acording to Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we have ever created.” The Road Ahead, p.228.
What inference do you draw?
Seversky (#82)
I’d like to return to a comment you made in your post, which raises a philosophically interesting question:
I have just been looking at a very interesting paper by John S. Wilkins, entitled “A Deflationary Account of Information in Biology” (2009), which can be accessed online at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004834/ . Although I profoundly disagree with its conclusions, I have to say that the paper is well-argued and substantive. If the Dr. Dembski should ever decide to produce a sequel to the volume “Debating Design,” this paper would merit inclusion, in my humble opinion.
But before I go on to discuss information, I’d like to present the following quotes from Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book, “The Signature in the Cell”, which is perhaps the best statement to date of the case for ID:
Back to Wilkins’ paper. I shall discuss it at length in a little while, but for the time being, let me simply observe that to me, it seems that the paper conflates various notions and sets up false dichotomies. In particular, it is quite false to say that concrete information is the same as causality, as the author does.
Seversky (#82)
I’d like to address some of Wilkins’ claims in his paper, entitled “A Deflationary Account of Information in Biology” (2009), which can be accessed online at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004834/ .
I’ll quote extracts and comment on them. The central claim Wilkins makes can be found in his Abstract:
1. To say that information IS causality is to confuse formal causes with efficient causes. Certainly, concrete information can make things happen. Dr. Stephen Meyer says as much: his second definition of information (cited above, p. 86) was: “the attribute inherent in and communicated by alternative sequences or arrangements of something that produce specific effects.” The point here is that biological molecules produce their effects by virtue of their form (i.e. their shape and sequence specificity). The concrete information resides in the form itself – it can even be quantified – not in its production of the effect as such.
2. Abstract information is in the head, claims Wilkins. How literally does he intend this phrase? Elsewhere he writes that “Abstract objects are those that are not bounded by time and space indexicals.” He clarifies his position when he writes: “Of course, any token of an abstraction exists somewhere – in a head or group of heads – but the abstract entity ‘information’ exists nowhere in time and space.” So it’s not in the head, either. Anyway, this is irrelevant to our purposes.
Wilkins continues:
OK. So for Wilkins, “information” has no extra job to do, if it’s concrete. Why not? Because if it’s concrete, it’s simply causal.
I have already argued that biomolecules can only be said to cause certain specific effects by virtue of their formal properties – i.e. their shape and sequence specificity. Causality is logically subsequent to form.
Is form abstract or concrete? Well, it depends what you’re talking about. A particular molecule is a concrete instantiation of a form. If you want to talk about THIS token of DNA which codes for THAT token of protein, then you’re talking about concrete information. But if you shift the discussion one level up, and talk about how a certain kind of DNA is able to code for a certain kind of protein, then you are talking about types, which are abstract. In short, it depends what you want to explain: the activity of this molecule or that of a certain class of biomolecules.
Wilkins asserts that abstract explanations exist only in abstract representation or models. They are not “out there.” They are “type terms that exist solely in a semantic context and system.”
Most of the above is hardly news, unless you happen to be a Platonic realist. I would however add that human beings are capable of entertaining universal concepts, and not just tokens of abstract types. That means that we don’t think with our heads.
Dr. Meyer’s point, however, relates to the licitness of the analogy between computer code and DNA. None of the foregoing considerations weaken the case for saying that they insstantiate information in the same sense of the word. If one is concrete, so is the other. But where does their information come from? That’s the question Wilkins does not address inb his paper.
To be continued…
Seversky (#82)
In this post, I wish to review the question of whether John Wilkins’ paper on information mamages to dent Dr. Meyer’s thesis in “Signature in the Cell.” I would argue that it does not.
To dent Meyer’s argument, it is not enough for Wilkins to show that the information in DNA is concrete. So is the information in the software running on a particular computer. It, too, achieves its effects by virtue of its physical properties.
Yet we would consider it reasonable to ask where this information comes from. Why not ask the same question about DNA?
Dr. Meyer claims to have shown that the odds of this information arising by undirected processes are astronomically low. For that reason, I think it is quite reasonable for him to look to intelligent agency as the only causally adequate explanation.
Mr Joseph,
As Dr Behe and others have made clear- evidence for Common Descent is not evidence for a mechanism.
I think the mechanism is pretty clearly sex.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even overeducated fleas do it.
vjtorley:
Indeed. But we should note that Meyer and others have argued that material causes cannot explain information because information is abstract.
For example, here’s Meyer:
I have seen the same argument several times on this board. The obvious counter-question is: Why would an explanation of a physical state not also explain the abstraction that supervenes on it?
Technically, I don’t think Meyer is right about the mass thing — two CDs with different software do in fact have different masses, just as a page with ink has more mass than a page without. And even if two CDs have exactly the same mass, down to the last particle, that doesn’t mean they are physically identical, any more than two books (or cars or people) of equal weught are.
Now, if you can find two CDs whose matter-arrangements are identical but whose information content is different, that would be impressive, indicating the possibility of genuine compact-disc dualism. (!)
None of this rules out the philosophical possibility that information is truly non-material, but at least in the case of all known storage media, the “information” always has a 1-to-1 material analogue. Perhaps the letter A exists in a wholly abstract sense, but it is still only possible to communicate that letter by the arrangement of ink or sound waves.
R0b, Lenoxus (#100, 101)
Thank you for your posts.
1. If you want to transform the information content of a piece of paper without changing its mass, I can think of an easy way to do it. Just prick a few holes in it. Think of punched tape.
2. The fact that information is massless and immaterial does not make it abstract. It simply means that information is formal. Information does not need to exist in some shadowy Platonic realm. Just think of the old distinction between shape and stuff.
Hope that helps.
Philosophically, I personally am not a capital EM Eliminative Materialist — I am, above all, a pragmatist, and think it can be quite useful to talk about information as metaphysical or formal or what-have-you. The question of whether the information on a paper is “really” different from the paper itself, or the questions of qualia, are not of much interest to me (what difference does it “really” make?). In fact, I’m even okay with the scientific study of “non-natural” phenomena, just as long as the phenomena are testable (for example, intercessory prayer).
All that said, it seems to me that the only way to change the information content of a paper is to change something physically about the paper — the paper’s information can’t change “all by itself”, as though it had a disembodied spirit.
Okay, I can already think of some exceptions worth pondering — for example, you could change the outside-world phenomena to which the paper refers. Suppose a paper said “In the fridge is a certain type of food. This food is the spiciest in the world.” If you switch the jar with a totally different one, you have, in a sense, changed the proposition that the paper is making, without touching the paper at all. (The proposition’s truth or falsity is irrelevant here; all that matter is the question of what is being claimed.) This is arguable, of course.
It gets really crazy with imperative statements. Suppose someone wrote a petition that “The prisoner in cell 8Q ought to be released.” Then the petition is followed through, the prisoner is released, and 8Q gets a new occupant. Does the same petition now contain different information — namely a different imperative request?
Did I say I wasn’t interested by this stuff? Whoops! Somehow, the change in that information has caused a physical change to my pants, such that they are on fire.
Is Wilkins a dualist?
Nakashima-san:
Sex, the mechanism that put and end to Common Descent.
Got it, knew it and all the evidence supports it.
Joseph
Why’s that then?
Does that also apply to FSCI and CSI?
Joseph, your position that everything comes down to sheer dumb luck is totally vacuous. It cannot be tested. It relies solely on circumstantial evidence which is guided by your predisposition to reject design a priori.
So please provide evidence for your position or stop making the claim (ideally!).
backwards me:
That is not my position.
However in the absence of design or special creation that is basically all that is left.
Sex, the mechanism that put and end to Common Descent.
That is what all observations and experiments support.
It has quite a bit to do with the way sexual reproduction works.
You may want to read about it.
Sexual selection is another big player that keeps mutants in check.
Information is neither a physical nor a chemical principle like energy and matter.
I do not know why it wouldn’t.
Joseph
What’s the difference between design and special creation?
Joseph
A couple of citations would not go amiss then. Can you be so kind?
Referenes? Or have you made a blog post yourself previously about this?
What’s the difference between FSCI and CSI then? Can you give me an example of a couple of situations where one would be used rather then the other?
If these tools (EF, CSI, FSCI) do what you claim then examples like I ask for should be close at hand, no?
vjtorley @ 102, thank you.
I have no doubt that we can change the information content of something without changing its mass. (Although in some cases, information is stored by adding mass to or subtracting mass from the medium. According to Meyer’s computer disk logic, it would seem that information has positive or negative mass in these cases. But that’s all beside the point.)
It does. But to be clear, I’m simply repeating arguments I’ve heard from the ID side (quotes available on request). And although Meyer doesn’t use the word “abstract”, he does argue that material causes cannot explain the origin of information because information is immaterial. So the question remains: Why would explaining the configuration of a material medium not also explain the information entailed by that configuration?
R0b
Thank you for your post. You ask:
If by “configuration” you mean shape and sequence, then I agree it would. But explaining the configuration, in this sense, is a formal explanation.
Aside from that, my point is simply that for proteins, the configuration appears to be fantastically improbable.
By the way, I have since learned that John Wilkins (whose paper I cited above) is an Assistant Professor at Bond University. His online paper (which addresses the explanatory power of the term “information,” when applied to biological structures, but not the probability of life arising by undirected processes) is still in a draft stage, and I am sure that the finished version will be very interesting to read.
vjtorley @ 92
First, let me thank you for taking so much time and trouble to discuss these points. Even though we may disagree, I appreciate the civility and consideration of your comments. They demonstrate clearly that it is possible to talk about these issues without descending into confrontation.
The only intelligent agent for which we have any evidence, namely ourselves, did not, as far as we know, design those biological structures which ID proponents allege were designed. Moreover, some of those structures, even from the viewpoint of what is presumably inferior human design, are judged to have been poorly designed. They look more like something that was cobbled together by some process of ad hoc adaptation than being the product of carefully-optimized design. While there are some features that do not look half bad, the overall impression of biological ‘design’ is that it is something of a curate’s egg.
As for the lack of a probability calculation, you have to ask yourself which is more valuable to science: an estimation of odds of something happening or hard evidence that it happened? Would calculating the likelihood of finding the Tiktaalik fossils have been more useful than actually finding them or more useful even than the theory which predicted where to find them?
I suspect you do not realise just how clearly this reveals the weakness of Intelligent Design’s claims. Let us suppose a statistician in the late nineteenth century had calculated the probability of an obscure German theoretical physicist working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern devising a revolutionary theory which would overturn Newtonian mechanics. Which would have had a greater influence on the progress of physics, those odds or the observations of Eddington and others which confirmed the predictive and, hence, descriptive power of that physicist’s theory? This is not to diminish the importance and power of mathematics but hard evidence is going to trump the odds every time.
Of course, proponents of Intelligent Design are bound to stress probability calculations because when it comes right down to it, that is pretty much all they have. The Argument from Design, the Explanatory Filter, irreducible complexity and CSI are all basically claims about probability. There is nothing else. Set that against, for example, Tiktaalik, the peppered moth, nylonase and antibiotic-resistant bacteria and you can see the force behind the saying “Them that count, do. Them that don’t, count.”
Mr Joseph,
It has quite a bit to do with the way sexual reproduction works.
You may want to read about it.
Sexual selection is another big player that keeps mutants in check.
Do you have a reference that isn’t the same Sermonti quote you used before?