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Author
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Topic: Evolution and Design: a synthesis
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Frances
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Member # 169
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posted 06. March 2002 00:45
quote:
Originally posted by Drosera:
Evan's post is very interesting because it indicates what the IDer must be like (or at least, what the IDer must be like as far as we can tell from observation) if one finds the arguments of ID advocates successful.
Namely, it is an IDer who tinkers incessantly, has apparently quite limited powers, and produces "designs" which often seem to be at war with each other -- 'irreducibly complex' immune systems to counteract (partially -- remember what life was like before modern medicine) 'irreducibly complex' diseases, etc.
On the face of it, this intelligent designer looks to be 'intelligent' in only a very dim way (no undebatable directional trends) and to have some sort of split personality disorder to boot.
Of course, these features are also the kind of thing that one would expect if mutation and natural selection is the designer...
Drosera
I think you have reached an interesting conclusion. ID does not identify the designer, in fact the designer can only be 'infered' through an inductive step which means that ID cannot eliminate natural processes as the designer.
Wesley Elsberry commented on this a while ago.
quote:
This is an inductive argument. Notice that by the second step, one must eliminate from consideration precisely those biological phenomena which Dembski wishes to categorize. In order to conclude intelligent agency for biological examples, the possibility that intelligent agency is not operative is excluded a priori. One large problem is that directed contingency or choice is not solely an attribute of events due to the intervention of an intelligent agent. The "actualization-exclusion-specification" triad mentioned above also fits natural selection rather precisely. One might thus conclude that Dembski's argument establishes that natural selection can be recognized as an intelligent agent.
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Drosera
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Member # 139
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posted 06. March 2002 02:15
quote:
Originally posted by Evan:
The only difference is that sometimes the designer causes to happen things which would otherwise be too improbable to happen.
However, it appears to me that the designer is quite constrained by the mechanisms (i.e. natural laws) of evolution; that is has to work with the material he has at hand, and the effects of his actions are then subject to the vicissitudes of the rest of the world.
But this is no different then our existence as intelligent beings. We also are constrained by many physical factors, we “tinker” (often in our heads by manipulating thoughts sub-verbally,) etc. Much of what we do does appear to express patterned, regular behavior despite the fact that we also are creative, free agents. But our freedom to create is limited, and the process and goals of our creative processes are often quite murky, even to ourselves.
I think the designer is like that also, and I think the evidence suports my view.
Fair enough. Although *even humans*, which are admittedly quite muddled much of the time, have exhibited technological progress which is an eye-blink geologically speaking. This is true even if you factor in the whole ~100,000-year history of Homo sapiens sapiens.
So perhaps we could agree, "If ID proponents are correct in their arguments for design, the designer inferred is some combination of slower and more limited than human society".
Drosera
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Evan
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Member # 164
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posted 06. March 2002 08:16
Drosera writes, "If ID proponents are correct in their arguments for design, the designer inferred is some combination of slower and more limited than human society".
I don't think we can conclude that. First of all, our technology is really quite crude compared to the ability to manipulate genetic material, as the designer does.
Also, presumably the designer has a whole universe, and every organism in it, to deal with (at least periodically.)
Last, the designer is (again, presumably) a disembodied feature of the universe, and it is difficult (impossible?) to know what the ontological nature of the designer is, as we can only know his effects.
In fact, one of the most misleading parts of all this is that the language we use almost inevitably gives the designer the statuts os a being - an integrated, disembodied entity.
This is not necessarily the case. The "designer" could be a metaphor for a process by which a non-material principle interacts with the material world at an interface which manifests itself physically as "genetic material." Such a principle, in a manner analagous to gravity, for instance, could manifest itself everywhere, continuously, affecting the world at its place of contact whenever possible. The key difference would be that gravity nehaves in a law-like manner, and the designer does not. The designer is not necessarily (and in fact I would say is not) omniscient not teleologically omnipresent, but is influencing the world in a creative manner as the world unfolds. The designer may have principles that it manifests (like building greater biological complexity and adaptability), but the designer does not have a specif ic organism, or type of organism, in mind.
(In fact, notice how our language forces us into anthropomorphizing the designer - the designer does not necessarily even have a "mind" in the sense that we do.)
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Drosera
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Member # 139
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posted 06. March 2002 09:13
quote:
Originally posted by Evan:
This is not necessarily the case. The "designer" could be a metaphor for a process by which a non-material principle interacts with the material world at an interface which manifests itself physically as "genetic material." Such a principle, in a manner analagous to gravity, for instance, could manifest itself everywhere, continuously, affecting the world at its place of contact whenever possible. The key difference would be that gravity nehaves in a law-like manner, and the designer does not. The designer is not necessarily (and in fact I would say is not) omniscient not teleologically omnipresent, but is influencing the world in a creative manner as the world unfolds. The designer may have principles that it manifests (like building greater biological complexity and adaptability), but the designer does not have a specif ic organism, or type of organism, in mind.
Hey Evan, interesting posts,
You realize, of course, that Darwin himself could have pretty much written this, but about natural selection!
(Main difference, Darwin would say that NS is law-like)
It also sounds alot like Dawkins at the end of one of his books, which I don't have in front of me (speaking of natural selection, "there is calculation of a sort here...")...
Drosera
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Evan
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posted 06. March 2002 22:49
Yes, the key difference between my hypothesis and Darwinism is that sometime the genetic changes are not random, but rather guided by the non-material input of information.
Darwinian mechanisms by themselves are not enough to get one past a certain point in changing one organism (or one feature of an organism) to another. CSI can be rearranged once it is in the world, but new CSI has to be introduced in order to keep the flow of novelty proceeding. That is the critical difference.
The designer produces, in this indirect manner, events which are detectable by their improbability. If changes can happen by natural means, the designer is not involved. The role of the designer is to do what nature cannot do for itself, and then to step aside when not needed.
The only way we can know if something is designed is to recognize it’s improbability. But the path to an improbable state can lead through many probable steps - it’s just the cumulative improbable nature of the final outcome that reveals that the designer has been at work.
So we can never see the designer at work - we can only see the designer after he has accomplished enough for the improbability of the outcome to be clear.
There are two consequences of this hypothesis:
One is that virtually all of what falls under the category of descriptive evolution (what creatures have descended from which, what small changes have led step by step to what new feature, etc.) are all valid areas of study. The fact that the designer has been involved does not invalidate in the least bit that those changes have happened.
However, the question of whether any particular genetic change is random is always an open question.
In fact, if the phrase were changed to “genetic change and natural selection” instead of “random mutation and natural selection”, with the understanding that the source of the genetic change could either by a natural process or an undetectable act of design, then the two theories would lead to the same results - a synthesis of evolution and design.
That would leave as an area of study the investigation of what is in fact designed. That would involve studying the phenomena in enough detail that reasonable probabilistic measures could be determined for the many individual events leading to the accumulated change under consideration (assuming they happened naturally), and then by calculating the product of all the probabilities, determining whether the net result was so improbable that design could be inferred.
That would be putting Dembski’s EF to work, and sort out the designed features from those produced by nature acting alone.
=================================================================
I know this board is not very active. However, I have offered some fairly complete “brainstorming” ideas about a hypothesis that might lead to a theory of ID, and there hasn’t been much response. (Thanks to those that have participated.)
Maybe these are really dumb ideas.
Maybe there are really very few people here.
Maybe the people here are mostly interested in “fitness functions” and “genetic algorithms” and other ways of determining whether nature can really create.
But it seems reasonable to me that at least some people would move on, accept (at least tentatively as a hypothesis) that Dembski is right, and take his ideas from there, starting to at least think about a positive theory of what ID is rather than what natural evolutionary processes aren’t.
Any comments?
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Tom Stalnaker
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Member # 114
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posted 07. March 2002 05:08
I know I've already commented, but, just to reiterate: I agree totally with you, Evan, in the last post, and I think it would be very important for more people who accept Dembski's ID arguments to attempt to grapple with hypotheses about the designer, or at least, to hypothesize about when he/she/it has interacted with the world. You put it well in seeking "a positive theory of what ID is rather than what natural evolutionary processes aren't". Suppose that the people who did the experiments that challenged Newtonian explanations (that led to the theory of relativity) had just said "All we know is that Newtonian physics cannot account for our results" and had never attempted to formulate a new theory, including how any new theory related to results that did fit well with Newtonian physics.
The one thing I keep thinking about after reading the other posts on this thread, is that if your theory were widely accepted by the scientific culture, would they have much different to say than Darwinian evolutionists say now? Conceptually, we would replace the "blind watchmaker" with the "intelligent designer", but, scientifically, it seems we wouldn't be able to attribute much more to the "intelligent designer" than we attribute now to the "blind watchmaker". The motto of this society is "retraining the scientific imagination to see purpose in nature". However, if your hypothesis were true, how would we determine anything about the purpose of the intelligent designer? I believe that one of the satisfying things about the Darwinian theory is that it explains why we do not see much apparent purpose in nature (at least I don't; do you? And what is it then?). As in your examples: if the designer created viruses and dinosaurs, and viruses killed lots of wonderful people, and dinosaurs were extinguished by a comet, it kind of makes you wonder what the designer's purpose was (I guess I am assuming he/she/it is omnipotent, and thus controlled the comet also). Maybe we can't say anything else about purpose besides what you said: the designer's purpose is "building greater biological complexity and adaptability". But what is the purpose of that? Just so we can have large numbers of life-forms who all try to eat each other? I really get the sense that most ID supporters would not agree with your thought (although I agree) that "the designer does not have a specific organism, or type of organism, in mind." That is the overwhelming impression that I get in looking around at the world. On the other hand, my impression is that many ID supporters believe that there is some kind strict teleology at work in the mind of the designer -- by analogy with human intelligence (although human play seems different than this). How could this be established scientifically?
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Evan
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Member # 164
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posted 07. March 2002 09:04
Thanks, Tom, for the comments.
I find it helpful to put some of these thoughts into words, and I appreciate your feedback on ideas that you (and others) do or do not agree with.
You mention a number of things in your post that I would like to comment on.
1) You write, “Conceptually, we would replace the "blind watchmaker" with the "intelligent designer", but, scientifically, it seems we wouldn't be able to attribute much more to the "intelligent designer" than we attribute now to the "blind watchmaker".”
First of all, I have never liked the phrase “blind watchmaker” as a metaphor for evolutionary processes, but I won’t digress about that.
But, no, I don’t think this simple replacement catches the essence of things, because the designer is only involved in some genetic changes, not all. In fact, as you argue in another thread (which I have not read carefully yet), perhaps all the CSI necessary was imparted at the origin of life, and that all that has happened since then has been an embellishment on that - rearranging the CSI to produce all the rest of life via evolutionary processes.
This seems possible particularly if the original CSI in early life contained information that caused the genetic structure to be susceptible to change - to “purposely” be imperfect so as to be able to evolve and adapt. This would sort of be like a computer program which contained rules of interaction so that as the program ran it added features to itself which caused its output to become more and more sophisticated.
I’m not saying that that I agree at this point that all CSI was imparted at the origin of life, but I am saying that I agree that this would be a viable hypothesis to begin ID study with.
But, to return to my main point - to replace "blind watchmaker" with "intelligent designer" misleadingly implies that the designer is responsible for all genetic change, as well as implying that all the rest of the changes are “blind.” Both of these implications are not true, in my opinion.
2) You also write, “The motto of this society is "retraining the scientific imagination to see purpose in nature". However, if your hypothesis were true, how would we determine anything about the purpose of the intelligent designer?”
This statement of ISCID brings up an issue that is at the heart of the concerns that people have about the current theory of evolution, I think.
Human beings, as people, need and want a feeling of purpose in their lives. This is absolutely important, and many aspects of human society and human psychology work to satisfy this need.
But the kind of purpose we can find in science, even under this ID hypothesis, is not the same kind of purpose, and I think confusing the two meanings of the word complicates the discussion.
The ID hypothesis I am offering here accepts that a deliberate input of information (once, or how ever many times is eventually determined by a probabilistic analysis) has led to the development of life, including the fact that life has within it a mechanism to evolve and adapt - that is, that the CSI includes within itself information about how to allow its own rearrangement.
It is in this sense that we can say that we can see “purpose” in nature.
But, really, this puts us no closer to solving the problem of human purpose and meaning than we ever were.
The evidence seems to show that the “purpose of life” is to create a wide diversity of life, to create life forms that are increasingly complex (in the normal sense of the word, not the CSI sense of the word), and increasingly adaptable.
This does not really imply anything about human purposes in life (other than we are here as part of a vast web of life which was partially created by a source of information separate from the rest of the physical world.) Finding purpose in life comes from a whole different part of who we are as human beings; no amount of scientific knowledge, even knowledge about ID, can bridge the gap between empirically based knowledge and human issues of meaning and purpose.
So I think there are some confusions inherent in the ISCID slogan that need to be clarified.
3) Last, as an aside, you write “I guess I am assuming he/she/it is omnipotent, and thus controlled the comet also.”
Here is a point that I strongly disagree with. The designer adds information to the world that would otherwise not be there; the designer gets over barriers of impossibility that life, utilizing natural evolutionary mechanisms, cannot surmount; and the designer works (according to my hypothesis) on genetic material.
The comet was not an improbable event, can be understood perfectly well as a product of law and chance, and needs no (and contains no) CSI. The comet, and all the rest of the natural world. is not under the control of the designer. If we accept the definitions of design being offered, and stay true to having an empirical basis for ID, I don’t see how we can decide otherwise.
I think we can also say that the designer is not omniscient nor omnipresent. The designer does not have complete knowledge about what is going to happen. Natural selection will act on the life in ways the designer can not see; presumably the designer adjusts as things goes along.
I don’t mean to be flippant here, but consider this: the designer might have just designed a great new improvement in dinosaurs the day before the comet hit. All of a sudden (relatively speaking), all that work is gone. The designer is a force (in a non-miraculous way) in nature, but the designers actions interact with the rest of nature in ways that the designer cannot foresee or control. Life is a messy affair because of this, and the path of life’s development has taken a road of vast contingency. The designer contributes, but the designer is not in control.
We cannot know the intentions or purposes of the designer beyond whatever reasonable inferences we can draw based on what we see. Even if we knew, for instance, that the mechanism of the Venus fly trap was designed (i.e improbable given natural evolutionary processes), we can never know why the designer choose to design it that way.
4) Really last point: throughout all this, language seems to force us to speak of “the designer” as if this were a conscious, personal entity. I think we have no way of knowing whether this is true or not. “The designer” could be an impersonal process, a Platonic idea manifesting itself upon “the shadow that is the world”, a manifestation of the yin/yang principle that all qualities contain within themselves their complementary opposite, and so on.
Just as with the idea of human purpose, the concept of ID can be fit into many metaphysical systems. ID puts us no closer to resolving these issues than the current evolutionary theory does.
Metaphysical and religious beliefs, including those about meaning and purpose in life, will not be resolved by examining the empirically investigate-able world. Adding a measure of ID into the mix doesn’t change that.
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RalphW
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posted 07. March 2002 17:13
This is excellent; I found myself defending a similar position on one of the ARN postings.
quote:
As Tom pointed out earlier, there is not much difference between the standard theory of evolution and the theory (hypothesis) that I am offering here (using Dembski’s ideas as a starting point.)
The only difference is that sometimes the designer causes to happen things which would otherwise be too improbable to happen.
If you view the fitness function for life as a series of islands bounded by precipices and connected (if at all) by tightropes, the designer could (as it were) guide the changing lifeforms along the tightrope or carry them across the void, while chance alone would crash at the bottom of the cliff. Thus a lot of the evolution simulations proposed to date would actually correspond to something like this model, where the researcher props up the fitness function so that otherwise fatal conditions are either avoided or protected long enough to allow the transition to the healthier situation that is the target.
quote:
However, it appears to me that the designer is quite constrained by the mechanisms (i.e. natural laws) of evolution; that is has to work with the material he has at hand, and the effects of his actions are then subject to the vicissitudes of the rest of the world.
Given that the designer is probably also responsible for the natural laws, and would presumably have as much control over the viscissitudes of the rest of the world as he has over the genetic material of the organism at hand, this may not be such a large constraint as it might seem at first glance. If we assume that OOL was similarly brought about by a designer's intervention to bridge the gap between chemicals and life, we might get a sense of how big a change could be possible in this scenario by considering how much design intervention would be needed to convert the most complex collection of organic compounds that could naturally occur into the simplest self-reproducing lifeform that could be constituted from those compounds.
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Jules
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posted 24. March 2002 06:20
Evan,
I'm finding I've developed a number of misgivings and questions to what you have written here. I don't know if I can sort them all out in one post. Let me try.
1. You seem to conclude that the designer is not omniscient or omnipresent. On what evidence?
2.a. You seem to conclude that the designer will only act at a level that would be undetectable if somebody were present to observe it. For example, the designer would only make one mutation per generation. Again, on what evidence this conclusion?
2.b. Related to this, what if it turned out that there were no functional intermediates between a flagellum-less and a flagellumed bacteria. Would the designer be forced to miraculously keep such an intermediate in existence until all the mutations had occurred? Or would the designer be allowed to make numerous mutations in one generation?
3.a. You seem to assume that there is, in fact, only one designer. Again, on what evidence?
3.b. If we adopted a multiple designer hypothesis, couldn't this explain apparent cross-purposes in design?
I think that covers most of my misgivings. I'll wait for your answers to see if any more are generated.
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James A. Barham
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posted 24. March 2002 11:58
Evan:
I am sympathetic to your strictures about not confusing different sense of the word "purpose," but I would make the distinction a little differently.
To me, what is crucial is to distinguish goal-directed entities from ones that are merely in a dynamical or minimum-energy equilibrium. For instance, an organism is clearly organized internally in a goal-directed manner. Each of its myriad structures and all the individual dynamical processes that they undergo are all coordinated for the purpose of maintaining the whole in existence as a whole. I believe this is a simple empirical description of what we see in nature, as free from theoretical assumptions as any observation can be. Purpose in this sense is just as objective (i.e., observer-independent) as the statement that the moon exists even when nobody is looking at it, or so I believe.
Now, in contrast to purpose in this physiological sense---call it agency---there is the phenomenon of ecosystem equilibrium that consists of the sum of the interactions of the individual agents, but cannot be said to have its own overriding purposive organization (this interpretation means that I am opposed to Gaia-type theories).
Another good example is the distinction between individual firms and the economy as a whole, or certain forms of protists (such as dichtyostelium) which can exist as a loosely associated foraging group or as a tightly teleologically organized fruiting body. Most social systems can in fact switch back and forth between the two states, with the higher level exhibiting greater or lesser degrees of teleological organization, as conditions demand. (Think of nation states in time of peace vs. time of war.)
Now, these are difficult matters, and I don't say this is well understood, but intuitively I do believe there is an important distinctions between organisms vs. ecosystems, firms vs. markets, etc. "Purpose" in the strict sense should be limited to the former, in my opinion.
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Evan
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posted 24. March 2002 20:57
Thanks for the questions, Jules.
For review, my hypothesis, based on Dembski’s idea about CSI and the explanatory filter as well as other ideas of Dembski’s from “ID Coming Clean” and from Wells’ in “Evolution by Design,” is this:
Quoted from my first post - my hpothesis is:
quote:
The designer is present at each and very moment of conception (either sexual or asexual), and can (although not necessarily does) impart new information to the genome in observationally undetectable ways by manipulating what would look to us like otherwise random genetic events. Only by the fact that those events led to an improbably well-coordinated and adaptive change in the resulting new creature would we know that design had happened.
Furthermore, the designer can coordinate such changes throughout a population (as merely creating one slightly new organism would be insufficient - two would be better for sexual organisms, and even then the vicissitudes of life in the wild might undo quickly what the designer had done.)
Therefore, at times, the designer has guided the evolution of creatures in new directions, adding new features, always building on previously existing creatures. And yet common descent and all the various taxonomic relationships that the standard theory of evolution studies are still valid - the only change is that designed genetic change replaces random genetic change at certain times.
Now for your questions:
1) Jules: “You seem to conclude that the designer is not omniscient or omnipresent. On what evidence?”
The only evidence we can use to conclude design is evidence based on the insufficiency of natural causes (and hence the improbability of something happening.) Natural causes appear to be sufficient to explain events in the inanimate physical world and much of the biological world. Therefore, there is no evidence that a designer is at work here.
Furthermore, such things as the evidence of small progressive changes throughout time seem to show that the designer is fairly constrained in what it can accomplish as any one time; the existence and significance of non-designed physical events (from the comet wiping out the dinosaurs to much more local conditions affecting survival) seems to show that the actions of the designer are only one part of the overall set of causes of the history of life; and the existence and persistent of micro-evolutionary change that are believed to be non-designed seems to show that the designer only intervenes periodically.
Assuming the our goal is to try to restrict ourselves to inferring only what is supported by the evidence, I see no reason to conclude that the designer is omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent. No evidence as defined by Dembski would support this claim, I don’t think.
2) Jules:
quote:
You seem to conclude that the designer will only act at a level that would be undetectable if somebody were present to observe it. For example, the designer would only make one mutation per generation. Again, on what evidence this conclusion?
Related to this, what if it turned out that there were no functional intermediates between a flagellum-less and a flagellumed bacteria. Would the designer be forced to miraculously keep such an intermediate in existence until all the mutations had occurred? Or would the designer be allowed to make numerous mutations in one generation?
I don’t think I’ve suggested what you say here. In one of my posts I mentioned that the designer could affect a whole population or sub-population at one time, and the designer could make as much genetic change as would be physically feasible at one time.
However (and this is the idea that I owe to Wells), at any one time the child organism must be enough like the parent organism for normal development, birth, and nurturance to take place. Therefore the designer is constrained by many factors, and even under optimally efficient conditions a transformation over the macro-evolutionary boundary (whatever that might be in any particular case) will take a number of generations.
This is an hypothesis. There is no direct evidence that this happens. The evidence is based on the observation that many people make that says natural causes are not sufficient to generate the novelty that can account for macro-evolution, and that the fossil record seems to show fairly quick macro-evolutionary changes. Therefore, my hypothesis is that this is when the designer is active. However, even if it took the designer 1000 generations of a population of some vertebrate (say a primitive ancestor of whales) to affect a macro-evolutionary change, that would only be perhaps 5000 - 10,000 years, and that’s a blink of geological eye. So I don’t think this could ever be observed.
3) Jules: “You seem to assume that there is, in fact, only one designer. Again, on what evidence?”
No I don’t assume this. In an earlier post, I wrote,
quote:
Throughout all this, language seems to force us to speak of “the designer” as if this were a conscious, personal entity. I think we have no way of knowing whether this is true or not. “The designer” could be an impersonal process, a Platonic idea manifesting itself upon “the shadow that is the world”, a manifestation of the yin/yang principle that all qualities contain within themselves their complementary opposite, and so on.
If we accept the design inference based on the arguments of Dembski, the I think we must limit our inferences about the designer to that which is supported by the evidence (for instance, that the designer is not omnipotent).
Both our language and our Western philosophical background pushes us into thinking of the designer as a single, conscious, personal entity, but that is, I think, a metaphysical bias. I think that inferences we can draw about the designer must be based only on the evidence that arises from the design inference itself. To make further metaphysical assumptions about the designer is unwarranted, including the assumption that the designer is a single enitity, or even an entity at all.
[ 25 March 2002, 00:10: Message edited by: Evan ]
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Jules
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posted 25. March 2002 00:15
Evan: "I see no reason to conclude that the designer is omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent. No evidence as defined by Dembski would support this claim, I don’t think.
I agree. However, I think there is a difference between concluding (1)there is no evidence that the designer is omnipotent and omnipresent, and concluding that (2) therefore the designer is not omnipotent and omnipresent. I thought you were claiming (2).
Evan:
"However (and this is the idea that I owe to Wells), at any one time the child organism must be enough like the parent organism for normal development, birth, and nurturance to take place. Therefore the designer is constrained by many factors, and even under optimally efficient conditions a transformation over the macro-evolutionary boundary (whatever that might be in any particular case) will take a number of generations."
I think Wells makes a good point, but it doesn't answer the question of what if there are no functional intermediates? In such a case would the designer incorporate a number of mutations into the child organism, something that would be observed if we were present, or would the designer somehow keep the child organism alive and reproducing despite having functionless additions?
Evan:
"If we accept the design inference based on the arguments of Dembski, the I think we must limit our inferences about the designer to that which is supported by the evidence (for instance, that the designer is not omnipotent).
Both our language and our Western philosophical background pushes us into thinking of the designer as a single, conscious, personal entity, but that is, I think, a metaphysical bias. I think we need to draw the conclusion that the only inferences we can draw about the designer must be based on the evidence that arises from the design inference itself. To make further metaphysical assumptions about the designer is unwarranted."
If number is included under metaphysical assumptions, then I agree.
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Evan
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posted 25. March 2002 00:45
Hi Jules.
Two quick responses before bed:
1) You write, “I agree. However, I think there is a difference between concluding (1)there is no evidence that the designer is omnipotent and omnipresent, and concluding that (2) therefore the designer is not omnipotent and omnipresent. I thought you were claiming (2).”
Because we are trying to keep separate beliefs based on empirical evidence and beliefs which are metaphysical and go beyond the evidence (which is something I am trying to do,) then I am only interested in statement (1) above. If one wants to claim that the evidence doesn’t support the claim that the designer is omnipotent, but still wants to claim that the designer is omnipotent, then I think that is unwarranted. If we are going to let the detection of design follow from the evidence, then I think we should stay with what the evidence tells us.
2) In reference to the idea I got from Wells, you write,
quote:
I think Wells makes a good point, but it doesn't answer the question of what if there are no functional intermediates? In such a case would the designer incorporate a number of mutations into the child organism, something that would be observed if we were present, or would the designer somehow keep the child organism alive and reproducing despite having functionless additions?
First, I am assuming in my hypothesis that the only place the designer acts is in the genome at the moment of conception (or asexual reproduction.) You can think of that as the location of the “interface” between the physical world and the designer.
Therefore, there is no question of the designer “keeping the child organism alive.” All organisms have to be able to function: develop embryologically, be born, mature, survive and reproduce. So there will always be organisms that have at least non-detrimental intermediary characteristics.
So when a child organism is born that bears genetic changes initiated by the designer, the changes will be small because the new organism can’t vary too much from the parent and still develop and be raised properly. If we were watching (somewhat omnisciently) we might notice that (again using whale evolution as an example) that the back legs of a whole population of animals that lived around the ocean were in fact a little shorter, and had some traces of webbing, and the nostrils had shifted upwards a bit, etc. And if we were then able to watch this over many generations, we might conclude that we had watched design in action because of the cumulative improbability of this series of changes in respect to natural microevolutionary means.
But if we just to see one child organism born, we would only notice what looked like slightly unusual variation as the most.
Evolution proceeds slowly, whether it is by natural evolutionary microevolution or designed macroevolution. Whichever happens, the changes at each generation are small, and must at least not produce a distinct disadvantage in terms of survival. The designer can make such changes so as to produce viable offspring that are still enough different so as to continue a multi-generational trend. But the designer is fairly limited at any one time by both biological constraints (producing viable and functioning offspring) and by the vicissitudes of the rest of the organism’s environment (which are not in the designer’s control.)
[ 25 March 2002, 00:47: Message edited by: Evan ]
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charlie d.
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posted 25. March 2002 09:40
quote:
Evan:
If we were watching (somewhat omnisciently) we might notice that (again using whale evolution as an example) that the back legs of a whole population of animals that lived around the ocean were in fact a little shorter, and had some traces of webbing, and the nostrils had shifted upwards a bit, etc. And if we were then able to watch this over many generations, we might conclude that we had watched design in action because of the cumulative improbability of this series of changes in respect to natural microevolutionary means.
Evan, do I interpret this correctly, that you think that teleologic, adaptive mutations would coordinately, contemporaneously be introduced in multiple individuals in a population (potentially, even all the individuals in each new generation)? Of course, if an intelligent designer or goal-oriented mechanism were at work, this would make a lot of sense because it would be far more effective than mutating a single organism and waiting for its chances to reproduce (which of course would be always a stochastic process).
In this respect, your model would be significantly different from darwinian mechanisms and, most importantly, is actually testable genetically (basically, you would expect to see no significant genetic "bottlenecks" at speciation, no linkage disequilibrium for adaptive mutations, and so on).
[ 25 March 2002, 09:41: Message edited by: charlie d. ]
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Evan
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posted 25. March 2002 10:32
Charlie d writes,
quote:
Evan, do I interpret this correctly, that you think that teleologic, adaptive mutations would coordinately, contemporaneously be introduced in multiple individuals in a population (potentially, even all the individuals in each new generation)? Of course, if an intelligent designer or goal-oriented mechanism were at work, this would make a lot of sense because it would be far more effective than mutating a single organism and waiting for its chances to reproduce (which of course would be always a stochastic process).
Yes, this seems entirely reasonable that the designer would work on whole populations (or, more likely, sub-populations in some local environment.) That doesn’t mean every individual, or the exact same way in every individual (since there is already variation among individuals, slightly different adjustments in individuals would be necessary, it seems.) The only thing necessary is to establish a general trend from feature A to feature B, where the two features are across the “macroevolutionary” boundary. Since the vicissitudes of life (that is, natural selection) will be working independently from the work of the designer, the designer could in fact affect a wide band of changes, and then let natural selection narrow the scope of what adaptations actually survived in succeeding generations.
Charlie also writes, “In this respect, your model would be significantly different from darwinian mechanisms and, most importantly, is actually testable genetically (basically, you would expect to see no significant genetic "bottlenecks" at speciation, no linkage disequilibrium for adaptive mutations, and so on).”
Theoretically, yes, although I’m not sure whether we could ever gather enough data to test it.
It is important to remember that the only empirical test of design is improbability. Therefore, we would have to have enough data about things for whom individual probabilities, from a naturalistic perspective) were known in order to calculate the probability of the overall effect and determine that it was small enough to conclude design.
For instance, here’s a hypothetical example: if we watched a population of 1000 individuals, and in a generation of 500 births we saw virtually identical changes in all offspring, and in the next generation a slightly similar change, and over 10 generations the uniform establishment of a significantly coherent and adaptive change (perhaps not even related to any obvious aspect of the environment that might be selecting for that trait), then we might be able to establish some empirically based probability calculations that would lead us to conclude design.
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