In this post, I will first summarize some of Tom’s points, and some related points of Mr. Dembski’s. Then I will offer, as a brainstorm, an ID hypothesis that perhaps helps answer the questions.

Tom writes “We should feel scientifically dissatisfied until we have proposed some coherent theory regarding how the CSI was instilled in life."

and Mr. Dembski responded

quote:

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In other words, we need to be able to provide a chain of natural causation for how CSI became expressed in the object of interest. But this is precisely what the design inference is saying is not possible, at least with regard to the origin of CSI. At best a chain of natural causation will re-express already present CSI. ...

Tom is doing science the old way, in which nature constitutes an unbroken nexus of natural causes. This is inconsistent with an information-theoretic conception of nature, and it is precisely such a conception to which ID is committed.

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Tom also writes in a later post,

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One of the things the Scientific Revolution was predicated on was an elimination of God and supernatural forces from an understanding of the world; I would argue that this was not some nefarious antireligious plot, but rather was necessary because it was
(and is) not clear how God could interact with the world in a well-defined, investigable way. It is not surprising that scientists will (as they should, I believe) defend this hard-won elimination. Until, of course, theistic interaction with the physical world _can_ be shown to be well defined and investigable.

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Expounding further, Tom says,

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I understand that if you follow CSI backwards, you will only find (at best) more CSI. So, my question is, what will happen to physical causation at the point at which CSI disappears (which is presumably the point at which the non-embodied designer intervened)? ...

[Another poster] mentions that morphological adaptations might be something that ID explains better than evolutionary theory. So, suppose you could follow the physico-causal (along with the CSI) path backwards to the source of a morphological adaptation. Presumably, you would go back, progenitor to progenitor, until suddenly, in a single generation, you would see (going backwards) the disappearance of the morphology. The offspring would have it and the parent would not. Presumably also, the offspring would have all the correct genes in the correct places to produce the new morphology, and the parent would not have those genes. If you looked closer, you would see the exact moment, perhaps during formation of the offspring's genetic material, that each mutation happened (and there would have to be many many that happened in quite a short space of time). Is this a legitimate description of the kind of thing that ID theorists are (might be?) committed to? If so, do you think it would ever be practically possible to observe such a thing happening?

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Now I think Tom has done a very good job of thinking about the question of how and when design enters the world, and what that might mean from a biological point of view.

One last point: Mr. Dembski addressed some of these questions about causality in an essay entitled “ID Coming Clean.” In this essay, he explained that ID does not posit “miraculous interventions” in which the laws of nature are superseded. Rather, hypothesizes Dembski, God imparts information into the world in a way that utilizes no energy, “moves no particles,” and is observationally undetectable - possibly through quantum mechanical effects.

(There are many other interesting points in this essay. See http://www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?program=CRSC%20Responses&command=view&id=534 for the whole essay.)

This position is fundamentally consistent with the idea that Dembski is presenting here: that ID can only detect design, after the fact, but that ID theory cannot, and therefore will not, offer a mechanistic theory of how information enters the world. That is science the “old way,”, in which mechanistic and naturalistic causes are found. In ID, it seems, the world can change in ways for which no naturalistic causes can be found, and yet there is no break in the causal chain - no miracles.

How is this possible (which may be an unanswerable question)?

More importantly for this post, what then does evolution look like?

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So here’s my “brainstorm” contribution.

Here’s some preliminaries:

1) The earth is 4 billion years old. The scientific evidence for this is overwhelmingly solid, and the arguments of the young-earth creationists have nothing to do with ID.

2) There has been a steady progression of creatures alive on earth over that time, and there is ample evidence of a progression of characteristics along many different taxon lines. We don’t have rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian, there are a succession of fossils in the whale sequence showing the transition from land to sea animals, etc.

3) All living organisms are born of other living organisms. All organisms have parents. (The only alternative I see is “creation ex nihilo” - spontaneous materialization of a new organism, and this would certainly qualify as “miraculous.”)

But, the point at which most critics of evolution fail to assent to the standard model is the mechanism for the large changes - new morphological features, major transitions between species (or genera, or whatever). The most persistent criticism of “macroevolution” is that the mechanism of “random mutation and natural selection (RM&NS) can’t accomplish these changes.

So here’s what I propose:

1) There is an unbroken chain of common descent back to the origin of life (where the same arguments I am going to make here could be applied to early chemical reactions.)

2) Random mutations do occur, and the mechanisms of “microevolution happen.”

3) But, and this is the ID brainstorm contribution, 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.

4) It is important to understand that the transition from one species to another, or to the development of a novel biological structure (or IC structure) would not take place in one generation. This is not a hypothesis of “hopeful monsters” by which a “cow gives birth to a whale,” or some other silly anti-evolutionist story.

It would be important for new-born creatures to be enough like there parents so that they could be raised and nurtured to adulthood. So a change might take hundreds of generations of designed intervention (and not necessarily in consecutive generations) for the new designed creature or feature to come about.

So not only would we not be able to observe anything “unnatural” if we could watch every moment of conception, we would not notice design happen if we observed every birth, because the changes would be strung out over too long of a time period.

5) P.S. I owe the above idea that each change could not be very much so that the new creature could be raised by its parents to an essay by Jonathan Wells, entitled “Evolution by Design.”

(See http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/nat-select.htm)

However, in this essay, Wells hypothesizes that there is no biological common descent at times between “parent” and “child,” but that the child must be enough like the parent in order to be raised. He says, for instance,

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And because human babies are totally dependent on other creatures for their survival during early development, animals capable of raising the first human babies must have been a necessary part of the original plan.

Human babies need milk to survive and grow, so mammals had to exist before humans appeared. And not just any mammal. The first human baby presumably had to be nurtured by a creature very much like itself--a humanlike primate. This creature, in turn, could only have been nurtured by a creature intermediate in some respects between it and a more primitive mammal. In other words, a plan for the emergence of human beings must have included something like the succession of prehistoric forms we find in the fossil record.

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I disagree with Wells for the need for there to be a lack of direct biological connection between parent and child at any point. The hypothesis being put forth here by me, which is entirely consistent with Dembski’s ideas about information, and causality, I think, is also entirely consistent with common descent.

So Wells arguments about why there needs to be the progression of creatures we find in the fossil record (so that new individuals can be raised to sexual maturity) is solid, but his denial of common descent is not, in my opinion.

quote:

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Originally posted by Evan:

6) So there is my contribution: the designer can manipulate genetic events at the moment of conception (or not, as he chooses) in order to move life slowly towards biological novelty, but his manipulation is observationally undetectable. Common descent is true, the phylogenic relationships studied within the theory of evolution are entirely valid, the transitional forms are truly transitional, and so are all the mechanisms of “microevolution.” But the major transitions are designed by the means that I have mentioned.

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quote:

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1. Why accept common descent?
2. Which transitional forms are truly transitional?
3. Unless I misunderstand your post, you are suggesting that the Designer intervenes at the embryologic stage and affects at the genetic level (sometimes). Its interventions are guided evolution (i.e. beneficial changes). How much of evolution is guided? How do we tell if it is guided?

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Good questions

1) Why accept common descent?

Why not?

This is not meant to be a flippant answer. All organisms that we know of are born of biological reproduction. The only alternative I know of is creation ex nihilo, and I accept Dembski’s idea that “miraculous” interventions are not needed in ID. One creature gives birth to another, but at times the genetic changes are guided by the designer. There is no reason to invoke anything other than common descent.

2) Which transitional forms are truly transitional?

All creatures are transitional. The fossils that are found are a very limited and random sample of evidence about all living creatures.

If the designer causes large changes via the means I am describing, even taking 100 or 1000 generations (or even a million for small organisms) to effect the changes would be but a blip of geologic time.

The existence of transitional forms is a consequence of common descent. A common objection to transitional forms is “what good is half a transition.” Many of these objections are ill-founded, in my opinion, but transitions guided by the designer would not suffer this flaw. Presumably the designer has both the knowledge and power to execute small genetic changes that produce viable organisms, and that lead, over many generations, to the desired large scale change.

We may not see much of this is in the fossil record because of the vast amounts of time involved. In fact, my hypothesis is that even if we were somehow there to witness every single birth in a population over 10,000 years, we would not notice anything “unnatural” at the time of any one birth, because the changes would be too gradual.

The key element of design is its improbability. If one were to look at each generation from 1 to 1000 (both the genetic structure and the resulting organism,) one would not see anything “unnatural.” However, if one were to look at the net result from generation 1 to generation 1000, one could conclude that the coordination necessary for the change was highly improbable, and thus the change was designed.

This seems to me to be the essence of what Dembski is saying about the difference between detecting design vs. finding a causal mechanism for design.

3) You ask “Unless I misunderstand your post, you are suggesting that the Designer intervenes at the embryologic stage and affects at the genetic level (sometimes). Its interventions are guided evolution (i.e. beneficial changes). How much of evolution is guided? How do we tell if it is guided?”

I am suggesting that the designer intervene at the moment of conception, when the various genetic events which create the first cell for that organism happen, and no place else. The designer changes the genetic structure, and nature does the rest. This is the point in which CSI is introduced to the world - the rest is a redistribution of CSI as explained by Dembski in NFL.

The answer to the second half of your question is that we tell if something is designed if it is otherwise improbable, as explained in Dembski’s filter.

In practice, it might prove to very difficult, if not impossible, to make this determination about any particular change. The problem with this is that we would need to know a great deal of specifics about any particular genetic change to know whether it was probable or not (maybe more than we could ever know, given that design would take, under this hypothesis, many generations over a large population.)

But Dembski understands that this business of “teasing out” the designed part from the undesigned part will be hard. My hypothesis is meant to point to the place in the world where design enters, to show its relationship to what is happening with the rest of the world (which is not subject to design), and to synthesize design with evolution.

The key element in this synthesis is to replace “random mutation and natural selection” with “usually random mutation but occasionally guided genetic change representing the input of CSI by the designer and natural selection.”

[ 03 March 2002: Message edited by: Evan ]

You said:

4) It is important to understand that the transition from one species to another, or to the development of a novel biological structure (or IC structure) would not take place in one generation. This is not a hypothesis of “hopeful monsters” by which a “cow gives birth to a whale,” or some other silly anti-evolutionist story.

By this do you mean that, say, the bacterial flagellum and other IC structures might be built up piecemeal by the designer over many generations? In the case of the flagellum, perhaps first the coding and the structure of the rotor in one generation or design step, then the stator, then the bushing, filament, etc.? Are you saying that bacteria at one time may have had nearly complete but completely useless flagella just waiting for the next design step?

If design of IC structures proceeded in this way wouldn't we be able to detect partially completed IC structures all over the biotic landscape right now?

and Stuart responded,

quote:

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By this do you mean that, say, the bacterial flagellum and other IC structures might be built up piecemeal by the designer over many generations? In the case of the flagellum, perhaps first the coding and the structure of the rotor in one generation or design step, then the stator, then the bushing, filament, etc.? Are you saying that bacteria at one time may have had nearly complete but completely useless flagella just waiting for the next design step?

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First of all, I think (and I alluded to this in an earlier post) the development of the bacterial flagellum, and other “origin of life” organisms and IC structures could have been done more quickly, because in the beginning there was neither sexual reproduction nor a complete biotic environment in which predation and other causes of death were so common.

So, my main answer to your question is that I would prefer to focus on the other end of the spectrum, such as the evolution of humans from pre-human hominids, whales from land animals, dinosaurs to birds, amphibian to reptiles, etc.

But, even in respect to the flagellum, I don’t see a problem. First, the designer would know how to make changes so that parts weren’t completely useless, by, for instance, making small changes in a number of parts each generation, so as to add a very mildly beneficial change each time.

Secondly, and this is probably more important, the designer would know how to make a change and preserve it over generations even if it were not immediately useful. That is, the designer would know how to “front-load” components so they would then be available later.

In the case of bacteria, since they reproduce asexually, and have no dependence on their parents, the designer could make wholesale changes at the moment of cell division and get radically different bacteria fairly quickly. But with creatures such as humans, the opposite is true. Because the new creature must grow in the mother, be born, and be nourished and raised to adulthood, the new child creature can not be much different than the old parent creature. So a steady change in features, such as brain size and brain structure, could take place over many generations as pre-human hominids evolved, under this guidance, to humans.

Stuart also writes,

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If design of IC structures proceeded in this way wouldn't we be able to detect partially completed IC structures all over the biotic landscape right now?

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This is a good question, and there are lots of components to the answer, I think.

No. First of all, the biotic landscape is fairly complete. Given that IC structures constain CSI, and given that once CSI enters the world it can be rearranged, I would think that both natural evolutionary processes and designed evolutionary processes could improve upon IC structures once they were created, creating a “better” IC structure.

In fact, how do we know that we aren’t seeing partially completed IC structures? Take the human skeleton in regards to walking. Both the knee and the back are certainly not perfectly adapted to an upright stance. For all we know, improvements in this will be made by the designer over the next million years. Someone looking back then will see us as a transition between pre-human hominids and this human of a million years from now.

IC is not equivalent to perfect. Somewhat inefficient and imperfect IC structures are the rule.

For a third point, consider the evolution of the vertebrate eye, which is often pointed to as a classical example of design. The owl can see far better than we can - is the owl’s eye a “better” IC structure? Is our eye a “partially completed” IC structure?

First of all, from a physico-causal point of view (Dembski's "old way"), there would seem to be absolutely no difference between what your proposal would expect to find in the past, and what a Darwinian evolutionist would expect to find. That is, every mutation by which the designer slowly designed new structures and systems would appear to be a random mutation, if it were examined in isolation. The _only_ way to detect a difference between the Darwinian explanation and the design explanation would be by an information analysis, such as Dembski's filter. Consequently, the only thing wrong with the Darwinian theory is that it proposes that chance can drive this process. The physical process is _precisely_ the same in the two theories.

So, when some ID theorists talk about lack of evidence for intermediaries, problems with the theory of common descent, and other differences in the predictions of an ID theory and a Darwinian theory, all of that can be tossed aside, given your proposal. Under your proposal, there is only a single, solitary disagreement between ID theory and Darwinian theory. If this way of framing the disagreement could be agreed upon, it would simplify matters a great deal (and would save me the trouble of having to learn arcane details of trilobite fossil records and the like ).

Relatedly, your proposal would seem to lessen the importance of the IC structures and systems that Behe has theorized about. My understanding is that at least part of the argument for IC is that some structures appear not to have been able to have evolved piecemeal. If, however, an ID theorist can accept that they might have been _designed_ in a piecemeal fashion over many generations (as you suggest), then I don't see any difference between the physical expectations of an IC proponent and an evolutionary proponent. In other words, it doesn't matter whether these structures evolved piecemeal or not, because either way we can apply Dembski's filter and figure out whether they were designed or not. For example, in another thread (ISCID thread) some members got into an argument about whether some new evidence was in fact evidence that an IC system could have evolved piecemeal. Under your proposal, if I am drawing implications correctly, this kind of argument would be moot (on both sides). Just do the information analysis, period.

Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it that this ISCID Brainstorm forum has appeared so there is a place for discussion like this.

Tom writes,

quote:

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First of all, from a physico-causal point of view (Dembski's "old way"), there would seem to be absolutely no difference between what your proposal would expect to find in the past, and what a Darwinian evolutionist would expect to find. That is, every mutation by which the designer slowly designed new structures and systems would appear to be a random mutation, if it were examined in isolation. The _only_ way to detect a difference between the Darwinian explanation and the design explanation would be by an information analysis, such as Dembski's filter. Consequently, the only thing wrong with the Darwinian theory is that it proposes that chance can drive this process. The physical process is _precisely_ the same in the two theories.

So, when some ID theorists talk about lack of evidence for intermediaries, problems with the theory of common descent, and other differences in the predictions of an ID theory and a Darwinian theory, all of that can be tossed aside, given your proposal. Under your proposal, there is only a single, solitary disagreement between ID theory and Darwinian theory.

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Yes, and well said. Given any one particular moment in time, a theoretically perfect examination of nature would never reveal a difference between what the current theory of evolution would expect and what design would expect. The only difference is in the cumulative effect, where the actions of the designer lead things to happen which would be too improbable to happen otherwise.

The key here lies in the idea of randomness. In all my readings on the evolution / creation debate, the role of randomness stands out the overriding key issue.

Here’s a little digressive story: I just listened to Dembski on the radio show “Truths That Transform.” (See http://www.crm.tv/ttt.htm in order to get a transcript).The first questioned asked by Dr. Kennedy was about how Dembski got involved in ID. Dembski told a story about attending a conference on randomness where the conclusion was the less-than-satisfying statement that “we know what randomness isn’t: we don’t know what it is.”

Dembski went on to say:

quote:

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What you found with people who were trying to understand randomness is that
something would be random only until a pattern was found in it, and then, suddenly, it would no longer be random. I went to work on this, and I started thinking, “You know, as a Christian it really makes sense that randomness should not be fundamental, that randomness should always depend on some sort of fundamental design, and that something would only be random until we found the pattern in it.”

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So finding the patterns in randomness is what Dembski set out to do: to try to find a way to deduce the pattern - the design - behind what look like random events.

Randomness is connected to the causality questions Tom asked in the other thread. Dembski does not deny that the natural world proceeds by cause-and-effect, not that is proceeds by a combination of law and chance. He does not propose that “miraculous” events cause a break in the natural chain of events. And he does not deny that information can be carried forward by natural chains of cause-and-effect.

What he is saying, though, is that information can enter the world without contradicting any of the above statements.

What he is saying is (but not in these words) that it is at the moments of randomness that the door opens for the input of information by the designer.

But someone watching this moment would not be able to see the information enter, because nothing would look any different than if a “truly random” event had happened. Only when we see the bigger picture - the pattern over a long period of time - do we see that in fact design, not randomness, was guiding the series of events.

Tom also writes,

quote:

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Relatedly, your proposal would seem to lessen the importance of the IC structures and systems that Behe has theorized about. My understanding is that at least part of the argument for IC is that some structures appear not to have been able to have evolved piecemeal. If, however, an ID theorist can accept that they might have been _designed_ in a piecemeal fashion over many generations (as you suggest), then I don't see any difference between the physical expectations of an IC proponent and an evolutionary proponent. In other words, it doesn't matter whether these structures evolved piecemeal or not, because either way we can apply Dembski's filter and figure out whether they were designed or not. ...For example, in another thread some members got into an argument about whether some new evidence was in fact evidence that an IC system could have evolved piecemeal. Under your proposal, if I am drawing implications correctly, this kind of argument would be moot (on both sides). Just do the information analysis, period.

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No. “Theistic evolution” is a consequence of the more fundamental Christian belief that God is in control of everything. The hypothesis I am proposing does not state that the designer is in control of everything.

In my proposal, the vast majority of the world’s events proceed according to natural law. The things that happen according to law-and-chance are not improbable, are not designed, and are not the product of the actions of the designer. The designer is involved only in those aspects of life that cannot happen on their own accord - that is the essence of the idea that CSI is a measure of improbability.

My proposal is meant to synthesize evolution and Dembski's ideas about information, probability, and causality. It is not meant to synthesize evolution and Christian theology (which I believe is actually supposed to be a topic beyond the scope of this forum.)

P.S. a later note: I see that this Board is not supposed to discuss politics, personalities, or motives, but no mention is made of discussing religious ideas related to ID. I was mistaken in the last line of my post.)

[ 03 March 2002: Message edited by: Evan ]