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Author
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Topic: Flagellum rotation: Universal joint or not?
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Pim van Meurs
Member
Member # 541
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posted 08. July 2003 23:57
Nelson I am not really sure what your argument really is here? Water could horse powers? As I have argued, quite conclusively I'd say, is that the issue of specification seems to be trivial. I wonder what the impact of this knowledge could be on for instance Dembski's design inference? What if specification is trivial, simply because specification is subjective. In fact, Del Ratzsch points out the importance of subjectivity in Dembski's argument when he points out that
quote:
Detachability must always be relativized to a subject's background and knowledge
Subjective specifications, subjectivity in detachability, false positives all seem to make the ID inference to be trickier than many may have initially guessed. Or as Del puts it
"The problem with the tractability criterion is that there is no substantive discrimination among the patterns produced. The lack becomes accutely evident and the tractability requirement clearly loses all bite when omniscience expands those patterns to the set of all possible patterns."
Subjectiveness, unconstrained specification all seem to make the conclusion that almost anything must be designed an interesting concept.
Or as Sobel argues
quote:
From this second illustration can be gathered that Dembski's theory enables a moderately imaginative person, with a list of possible delimitations of an event, easily eliminate relevant chance-hypotheses for the event; if they all make more probable that not its non-occurrence, and avoiding 'false negatives' concerning relevant chance-hypotheses for this event is somewhat (it need not be very) important to him. From the two illustrations, one may
gather that by the lights of Dembski's book, we are entitled, and will always be entitled to conclude, that not much happens by chance.
And thus we may understand how the concept of water cooled rotary engines becomes an interesting concept indeed.
Nelson wonders about the relevance of this to design since design involves specified complexity. The answer is simple and straightforward, if specification is trivial then all that design is, is improbable but such an improbability approach has failed in the past for obvious reasons. Now as Nelson has argued, one can infer design in some instances but as Del Ratzsch argues, Dembski's approach seems to eliminate the most interesting cases. In fact that Dembski's approach has been applied only to some trivial cases does not help. But I digress, if Intelligent design is reduced to "it's improbable that", since specification is not really a useful distinguisher since it is too subjective and too trivial, then we are left with the age old argument of probability. But probability depends strongly on our knowledge and as IDers have found out, probability is far from trivial to calculate in biology. Del Ratzsch does address the impacts of these issues on Dembski's design inference in far more detail than I can reproduce here. I am excited to discuss these issues with Del in more detail. Perhaps you should join the group Nelson?
[ 09. July 2003, 00:29: Message edited by: Pim van Meurs ]
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Nel
Member
Member # 614
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posted 09. July 2003 00:11
Pim,
Your problem is that it is not just specification that points to design, it is specified complexity. A specification can occur by chance like randomly typing and getting the word "the".
However, the paragraph above is both specified and complex.
I have no idea what this has to do with the topic under discussion. This is my last post for the night. G'night.
[ 09. July 2003, 00:12: Message edited by: Nelson-Alonso ]
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