From the files: Why intelligent design is going to win, revisited
| November 30, 2007 | Posted by O'Leary under The Design of Life |
Douglas Kern at Tech Central Station warned, in 2005 that intelligent design is going to win.
And why was that?
He starts with the claim that ID types are more likely to be fertile than others.
I will not hash that out here except to say this: If it means YOU, you might want to include a budget item for receiving blankets, gripe water, and soothers – and if you do not know what those terms mean, ask your nearest and dearest …
Update note: Your nearest and dearest may even have some amazing news for you that will change your, um, “expectations.” Like remember that night when you and she got along so well? Okay, well, life goes on. No, really, it does, and this is how it does. )
He then argues that “the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of losers”:
“Ewww…intelligent design people! They’re just buck-toothed Bible-pushing nincompoops with community-college degrees who’re trying to sell a gussied-up creationism to a cretinous public! No need to address their concerns or respond to their arguments. They are Not Science. They are poopy-heads.”
There. I just saved you the trouble of reading 90% of the responses to the ID position.
Well, that certainly hasn’t changed! In fact, it was never any different. The Darwinists are always willing to believe any nonsense that underwrites materialism. And they always find supporters too.
He follows up with Darwinism’s critical problem:
ID has already made its peace with natural selection and the irrefutable aspects of Darwinism. By contrast, Darwinism cannot accept even the slightest possibility that it has failed to explain any significant dimension of evolution. It must dogmatically insist that it will resolve all of its ambiguities and shortcomings – even the ones that have lingered since the beginning of Darwinism.
Interesting. Strict intelligent design theory has never had – so far as I can determine – a problem in principle with natural selection (NS) as a conservative force that routinely eliminates non-functional life forms. Anyone can see that NS must function that way; otherwise, the planet would be overloaded with kludges.
The PROBLEM has always been with the idea that natural selection functions as a mechanism for creating information, as opposed to editing information. ID theorists have not been able to find any evidence that natural selection creates information at anything like the levels that Darwinists claim, and there is much evidence against it.
Which is, like, curtains, for Darwin’s theory.
Kerns also thinks that ID will win because it will attract the best minds, who are attracted to information theory. Could that be why the Darwoids are stepping up the persecution of smart guys who know that Darwinism is the Enron of biology?
Lastly, Kerns thinks that the human mind tends to find design whether it exists or not. This is a somewhat cynical view, as it begs the question of WHY the human mind finds design. For example, if I think that four and four make eight, did my selfish gene robot prompt that idea in the pile of mush in my head in order to help spread my selfish genes? Or … is Darwinism simply failing as an explanation of the history of life?
39 Responses to From the files: Why intelligent design is going to win, revisited
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Thanks poachy.
BA77, the amount of information in a piece of DNA is in principle calculable. But I may not have been clear: I want to distinguish between total information and CSI. Is all the information in DNA CSI? I doubt it. For example, a random mutation could “add” information to the genome, but it would not “add” CSI. In fact, as I think about it, it may be that an increase of random information in a genome could lead to a decrease of CSI! (Assuming that CSI is a mathematically coherent and quantifiable concept.) In order to make meaningful comparisons among species — again, assuming common descent, which I take for granted — you’d have to figure out how much of the total information in a genome is CSI.
getawittness, good question…
Well I am not sure about this but I too have read NFl and to me the Universal Probability Bound (UPB) tells us when an event or object exists that is more improbable that all of the universes natural resources can purchase. The UPB, if i correctly remember is 10^-150. Therefore, anything falling outside of this which also has a n arbitrary given pattern or a specification would be a candidate for a design inference. I would then assume that the lower the probability the greater the CSI. So, an object displaying SC of 10^-151 displays greater SC than one that has SC with odds of 10^-150. Remember the design inference is about SC which is then inferred into CSI. SC require CSI and the lower the odds the more CSI is required.
I don’t know too, too much about this topic so I could be missing something. Nonetheless, this is my current understanding of NFL, SC and CSI.
One can infer that if we took every example of SC and combined their probabilities you would very likely have a representation of a universe
that is extremely improbable without the guiding for of an ID. This is an ultimate SC argument for the Universe’s fine tuning.
Frost, isn’t it the case that lower-probability objects can also exhibit CSI? The UPB is a model for absolute improbability, and calculating hyper-low odds is extremely impractical in any event. Besides, In my example above, a genetic mutation might increase total information (and could increase improbability) but decrease specification. So the measure of CSI can’t be simply equated to improbability above a certain measure.
Bork,
Are computers becoming more or less intelligent? Are cars loosing technological advancement?
Even if we reduced the complexity of a car to burn less fuel it would be for the purpose of dealing with environmental issues of consumption and/or possibly climate change. This would be a reduction in complexity but an increase in specification.
What are the odds a car could be formed by a tornado going through a junk yard? Then, how much lower are the odds that a seconded tornado would come by and make that car more efficient just when the environment requires it to be?
Selfishness, is purposeful. If I want my kid to live a long life because I WANT him to experience the complexity beauty and mystery of being alive. I have a selfish motivation here. I reject the philosophical/ethical debate that ego or selfishness is bad. This is what gives us great competition. It is why people want to know more about origins. I could go on and on. The down side to selfishness is that not everyone’s goals align perfectly and this is where the selfishness of enlightened individuals comes in. We want to help the world coexist peacefully and lovingly even though our motives are driven by “our” forces within. Forces that ultimately display extreme SC and that I believe require an ID to account for.
Getawitness you stated:
In fact, as I think about it, it may be that an increase of random information in a genome could lead to a decrease of CSI!
BINGO getawitness:
That is the principle of Genetic Entropy!
This principle stands for the genomes of all living organism. Viruses only “seemingly” get by this principle because they decrease far more complexity of the organism they infect than they increase personally. Thus, like rocks off the side of a mountain, Genetic Entropy is obeyed even down to the level of Viruses!
All mutations that are scrutinized to be beneficial to the genome turn out to be detrimental in some fashion. All sorts of mutations have been offered here on UD as positive proof of evolution (Nylon Bacteria, Styrene Bacteria, Antibiotic Bacteria, Heavy metal Bacteria etc.etc..) but all fain to generate complexity and all decrease complexity in some fashion from “parent” type.
As well encode is revealing that the genome is in fact devoid of any “swaths” of junk DNA and is in fact a “complex interwoven network” that appears to be spread throughout the ENTIRE genome! This was only a study for 1% of the genome so the functionality is sure to be proven encompass the entire genome in short order.
This is all in accordance with the Theistic postulation of “front-loaded” parent species for all sub-speciation events.
The fact that all sub-speciation events to new environmens, occur with a loss in complexity stays in accordance with Genetic Entropy and indicates that once design is implemented the “Designer” no longer tinkers with the genome of the “sub-species”.
This is all fine and well for now the ID/Genetic Entropy mo^del can rest its postulations on both the second law and on the law of conservation of information.
Is there a formula for figuring out CSI? I don’t know. But I like you think and hope it should be possible to figure CSI in a rigorous manner but I really have nothing more than a few hunches to back up that thought.
For now, to measure information, I primarily follow the changes in complexity of organism to find if it has gained or lost it. And as I stated before, all mutations claiming roof of evolution decrease complexity.
Excellent point. I would then say that the probability of that mutation would have to be defined. Lower probability objects I don’t think can display definite CSI. This because we don’t know what is or isn’t designed unless we can assess it as improbable by natures natural resources. This requires a probability test of some kind.
Specification needs to be taken in to probability. A mutation might increase complexity but at the same time hide the ID in the object.
Also Dembski points out that Randomly picking 250 proteins and having them all fall among those 500 therefore has probability (500/4,289)250, which has order of magnitude 10-234 and falls considerably below the universal probability bound of 10-150.”
So UPB is a good test for SC.
Now, it is a logical truth that designers can and do design things that are simple with low or high specification, but, ID needs to be safe and secure in its specificity and explicitness in order to be a scientific theory. Dembski uses UPB to be very conservative.
Also CSI is obviously not the same thing as ID. What the universal probability bound does, is signal design. CSI in relation to a design inference however would need to fall outside the UPB in theory.
The term CSI is a way of talking about SC in the form of its informational exponent. This is the transfer from SC to information theory with looks at the bits of information present and required (conservatively) to account for the design inherent in given phenomena. That is why Dembski’s second book NFL was subtitled why SC can not be purchased without intelligence. Intelligence being understood here through information theory (one of the main topics of the book).
One of the best discussions of CSI I have seen is in
Intelligent Desig: The Scientific Alternative to Evolution
http://www.intelligentdesignne.....alvert.pdf
which is by John Calvert and William Harris who led the ID discussion of the Kansas science curriculum in 2005.
It is not just on CSI though they spend a few pages on it.
GAW:
You have put your finger on a major facet of the core of the debate:
Several points jump out:
1] First, let’s unpack that abbreviation, CSI: complex, specified information. In short, there is not at all any “equat[ing] to improbability above a certain measure.” That is why we talk about functional specification [FSCI], hard-to-find-by-chance islands of functionality in a large configuration space [747 assembly by tornado . . . ], Kolmogorov compressibility, macroscopically describable situations, etc etc.
2] In your example, genetic information in the sense of complexity [how big the config space is, across all possible combinations of values of elements] can increase without functionality [specification] increasing indeed: in short, noise is very — overwhelmingly — likely to introduce corruption of the FSCI. Thus, functionality falls, and beyond a certain point life functions fail — e.g. radiation damage and cancer etc. Or, beyond a certain [too often, frighteningly small] limit, outright life function collapse.
3] It is worth pointing out the scale of the DNA molecule as a storage medium: 500,000 – 3,000,000,000 digital storage units, each capable of 2 bits of storage capacity — what Shannon Information more or less measures. At the lower end, that corresponds to a config space of 4^500k ~ 9.9 * 10^301,029 cells.
4] A storage capacity of just 500 bits [250 4-state elements] corresponds to ~ 10^150 cells and 1,000 bits moves that to ~ 10^301. As the Dembski UPB type calculation shows, anything beyond this sort of range is so vanishingly improbable to be found by random-walk based searched [even with functional filtering] that it is not credible that on the gamut of our observed universe, such a chance + necessity only mechanism is likely to access such islands or archipelagos of functionality.
5] So, WD chose this sort of range as the threshold for identifying where CSI is present. Now, obviously, designers can make things simpler than that so the filter will “miss” such cases. But what is more material, is that in no observed case where the filter rules” design, and we independently know the causal story, has it been wrong.
6] For instance, look at the text of this post; which is beyond that limit and which the explanatory filter correctly infers as “designed.” In short, on the empirical evidence, the filter is reliable in the cases where it rules: designed. [And in fact the use of rejection regions that are imperfect is a well-known, frequently used and generally accepted standard statistical praxis; all the complaints that Bayesian inference is "superior" notwithstanding.]
7] Now, apply to certain key cases: Origin of Life, and origin of body-plan innovation-level genetic information [e.g the Cambrian life revolution]. In both cases, we are dealing with config spaces that are orders of magnitude beyond the relevant limit. The EF rules: designed.
8] As noted, we know that filter to be reliable when it rules positively. So, the issue is not the cases it may miss but the cases it catches, and the implications that flow therefrom — implications that are fatal for the reigning evolutionary materialist paradigm and worldview.
THAT is the challenge.
GEM of TKI