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Author
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Topic: The Wings of Eagles
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Frances
Member
Member # 169
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posted 16. August 2002 01:06
Warren.
I am amazed that you can take my request for actual data to support your assertions to be a rethorical effort to avoid discussion. What do you suggest we do in order to discuss your 'ideas' then?
Personally I find it far more helpful to actually try to link an idea to reality rather than to ignore the reality in favor of some fallacious logic but I have been known to be a bit strange in that area :-)
Charlie was very succesful in showing that your claims were without much merrit and did far more than you have done so far as he attempted to show how a simplistic model seems to contradict much of your claims. Of course you can rightly claim that the model was without much relevance but still the model is more than I have seen from you to support your views.
Whenever you are asked for such evidence you seem to be suggestion 'obviousness' but that is certainly not the prefered way to discuss science. In fact such subjective comments have little relevance in science.
A good example of people who used logic to identify reality seems to have been Charles Darwin. He of course had the added benefit that his ideas were useful in tying together a long list of observed facts. That's what really made Charles Darwin's contributions of interest to science. Thus I suggest that you provide some evidence that your claims have a foundation in reality beyond what you consider to be 'obvious'. After all if it is that obvious then it should not take you that much effort to provide for such data.
Your last paragraph suggests btw an unfamiliarity with Darwinian theory. Problem solving is hardly random, in fact without the help of natural selection problem solving would indeed be random and much less capable of finding solutions. Furthermore the suggestion that RM&NS cannot explain fast mutation rates remains unsupported by actual data and in fact contradicted by factual data.
So once again I urge you to provide some data. I have been hearing some suggestions that I am being "trolled" here but I have seen some of your contributions on the MSN boards as well as on ARN and you seem to be quite sincere in your claims although I believe that your claims do seem to often lack in supporting evidence. Others seem to have come to similar conclusions I hope that my efforts to contribute to directing this discussion into more fruitful areas will be helpful indeed.
James
I have no problem with you refering to natural selection as a teleological principle although it would be helpful to standardize on the terminology a bit.
Indeed without natural selection Dembski's tornado in the junkyard calculations would have some relevance but since natural selection exists, it would be more helpful if Dembski were to focus on mechanisms which actually apply this concept.
[ 16 August 2002, 01:09: Message edited by: Frances ]
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warren_bergerson
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Member # 262
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posted 16. August 2002 07:27
Francis,
I am still of the opinion that your request for detailed demonstrations is avoiding the issues being discussed, but I think I could do a much better job of explaining my position. The issue, in my view, comes down to the question of how science is performed or how the scientific paradigm is currently being applied in biology and how the scientific paradigm should be performed or applied.
In somewhat simplistic terms, in your view of science, if someone wants to introduce a new idea then they must convince you, or some set of authorities, that the idea being introduced is valid and supported by a body of evidence.
In my view of science, a new concept or technique is introduced for review and testing. In presenting an idea one has the right to assume that 1)the individuals performing review will have sufficient knowledge of the subject to understand and accept what is obvious and 2)the scientific analysts will address the substance, not the form of the issues or ideas being presented. If some feature of a proposal is unclear or ambiguous, the presenter has the responsibility to provide clarification, but the responsibility for understanding basic concepts and techniques rests with the scientist reviewer.
Your comments and view of science are compatible with the peer review/publish model of science which is the currently accepted model. My views are based on an older, and more dynamic/interactive approach to science.
The issues involved are somewhat confused in this thread because it started out discussing one subject, the validity of evidence, and ended up discussing, design science, a new approach, a new set of concepts and techniques for analyzing evolutionary change.
The starting point question, as you recall was, "Does the gradual evolutionary redesign of wings support current Darwinian theory?" The ‘peer review’ opinion is yes, but, I suggested there exists no valid demonstration to support this view. To demonstrate that the evidence relating to wing evolution does not support current theory, I introduced a simple test. The proposed test involves comparing the 1) random change rate or ‘random mutate select’ change rate to the 2)actual ‘maximum’ change rate. To put the proposed test in the context of standard ‘falsify and replace’ format I suggested 1)a simple mutate select starting point hypothesis, 2)the proposed test as a falsification test, and 3)the directed design hypothesis as a replacement model.
The ‘provide documented evidence’ discussion is completely missing the point of what is being discussed. To begin, the facts of the situation should be completely clear to anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of mathematics and evolutionary processes. No one would seriously suggest that evolutionary change is really and literally a random process. Directed design, the claim that evolutionary processes systematically search some options before others, is an obvious and trivial fact. The discussion here is not about disproving the narrow, literal meaning of RM&NS. In a choice between ‘directed design’ and ‘literal RM&NS’ no scientist would seriously take the side of literal RM&NS. (I know there are many individuals who like to argue the literal interpretation of RM&NS, but these are not serious scientists. Could you actually find a serious scientist who would argue for a narrow literal interpretation of RM&NS? ).
The issue here is also not about techniques for applying the proposed test. Both ‘random search rates’ and ‘actual maximum rates of evolutionary change’ are established concepts that can be readily measured and/or estimated. The specific details of measuring either value will vary with the application. Calculations can become very complex if the values being compared are close. In the examples considered here, rough rule of thumb estimates produce the obvious predicted result.
[As an aside, it appears that some people are trying to argue that the directed design hypothesis is only valid if it can be shown that ‘actual maximum rates of evolutionary change’ are faster than all possible RM&NS models. As I have stated before, testing or disproving imaginary and unknown models and theories is not part of the scientific process. If someone wishes to demonstrate that there is some obscure form of RM&NS that could actually explain and simulate the measured rates of wing redesign then they are welcome to try( as Charlie did). I repeat, it is not the job of science to prove that their quest is impossible, and it is not appropriate science to assert that ‘RM&NS is valid scientific concept until someone proves it can’t work’.]
If the hypotheses being tested are trivial and the measurement techniques are standard, ‘What, you may ask, is the real substance or value of the discussion?". Darwin, you will recall, proposed that evolutionary change could be explained in terms of heritability, diversity, and natural selection. The modern synthesis suggested evolution was explainable in terms of genes, mutation, and natural selection ( and drift ). The value of design science and the test I propose is that they make it possible to objectively and scientifically test the completeness of the hypothesized lists of Darwinian and neo-Darwinian mechanisms( and thus the completeness of the associated models and theories).
It seems strange, but evolutionary biology offers no objective, scientific means of determining or testing the completeness of either the Darwinian or neo-Darwinian mechanisms or Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories. All attempts to suggest the need for additional processes and mechanism, (and all suggestions to modify the ‘theoretical formulas’ describing evolutionary processes) are routinely rejected as adding unnecessary complexity. The simplest theory or model, it is argued is the best and attempts to refine Darwinian and RM&NS theories and models are rejected. The inability to demonstrate and objectively measure the incompleteness or inadequacies of existing models and theories has resulted in the stagnation on the ‘theory construction’ side of evolutionary biology. A stagnation which is hidden by 1)an ongoing successful accumulation of facts, and 2)an increasingly authoritarian view of (opposition to) theory construction. [I know the moderators don’t view it as an appropriate subject for discussion in this forum, but, IMO, there are serious problems with the way science is practiced today. ]
Design science and the test I proposed are important for two reasons. First, and the direct topic of discussion, they provide an objective scientific basis for testing ‘fit’. The test provides on objective method of determining if a model or theory actually fits or is logically consistent with an observed example of evolutionary change. On this basis, the test shows there is no known, explicitly formulated RM&NS model which passes the fitness test for evolutionary redesign of eagles wings.
Second, and of far more general importance, design science and the proposed test demonstrate the necessity of recognizing additional, non-Darwinian processes and mechanisms in modeling, simulating, and explaining evolutionary change. As shown, a model/theory of evolutionary change needs to include and recognize mechanisms and processes which ‘direct design’. [Directed design elements and components are by no means the only ‘additional’ processes and mechanisms needed to model, simulate, and explain evolutionary/adaptive change.]
[It might be useful to explain ‘why’, IMO, design science will succeed in testing and formulating realistic theories of evolutionary/adaptive change while evolutionary biology has failed. One of the key differences is viewpoint or perspective. Evolutionary biology views evolutionary/adaptive change as a very slow process of finding a permanent adaptive solution to an environmental situation or problem. From the EB perspective, a species defines an evolutionary ‘solution’ to the problem of survival.
From the design science perspective, adaptive designs are continually and rapidly changing in order to maintain an adaptive solutions to the problems of survival. From the design science perspective, the time frame for finding adaptive solutions to the problems of survival is milliseconds, not millions of years. This change in perspective dramatically changes the criteria or requirements which must be explained, modeled and simulated in order to explain evolutionary/adaptive change.
Implicit in the EB approach is the assumption that if you can construct a model that simulates change over a long interval of time, you do not need to be concerned with explaining in detail the intermediate steps. This EB approximation is, IMO, one of the key reasons for the current stagnation in the construction of evolutionary theories.]
SUMMARY
To get back to your original issue of documentation. You are, IMO, advocating that I put my ideas or proposals into a standard evolutionary biology format so that it can be subjected to the standard EB peer review process. On the surface your proposal sounds reasonable. I reject this ‘reasonable’ approach because, IMO, it is seriously and fundamentally flawed. The approach you suggest will not permit a fair, objective, scientific review of the concepts being proposed.
Dembski’s experience clearly illustrates the results of the so called peer review process. A detailed argument with detailed supporting evidence is presented. After presentation, a wide range of individuals launch attacks on the details presented. There is no peer review control to insure the critic has even a modicum of technical qualifications to perform reviews nor is there any peer review control to insure that the criticisms presented are in anyway relevant to the argument being presented. Finally, ‘peer review experts’ present their conclusions based on judgment and personal opinion with no requirement that they demonstrate that the opinions have a sound defensible scientific basis. I don’t believe that I am in any way risking the chance for a fair review of my ideas by rejecting the existing peer review process.
You request what you call documentation and evidence supporting my conclusions. I am rejecting your request because you have failed to demonstrate a need for such supporting detail. You have also failed to demonstrate that you have the technical knowledge/expertise to evaluate the evidence if it was presented.
Your request/suggestion, and I assume it was well intentioned, is a suggestion that I ‘play the game’ by the existing rules. I hope I have made it clear that in my mind the issue/problem design science must address is as much the issue/problem of bad rules, as it is an issue/problem of competing scientific theories.
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charlie d.
Member
Member # 159
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posted 16. August 2002 10:31
James:
I was done with the eagle wings - but I will comment on your post.
quote:
When I say that such coordination is "teleological," I just mean that it displays the general power of the organism to harness the events within it for its own good, its own self-preservation. I just mean that we have to posit a holistic or top-down form of organization, that a reductionist or exclusively bottom-up view of the organism does not jibe with the facts.
Why doesn't it "jibe with the facts"?
The real fact is, until teleologists can show in empirical, not poetic, terms what the "general power of the organism to harness the events within it for its own good" consists of, since there is no evidence for its existence, there is no teleology to discuss. The only example I know of of suspected teleology in nature is "adaptive" mutations in bacteria, and they also seem to have recently "gone darwinian". I said this many times: there would be nothing wrong with teleology in biology. If it occurred by natural mechanisms, teleology could be studied like anything else (nobody objected to Cairns' quasi-teleological studies on bacteria, just to his conclusions). However, until that time, the scientific conclusion is that organisms do not "harness" their phenotype for their own good, a phenotype is what organsisms are. And organisms, by and large, have one thing in mind: reproduction. That they reproduce maximally according to their phenotypic ability does not require teleology: organisms that don't try to do that, do not pass their abstinence genes on.
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Without the assumption that traits evolve somehow in tandem, Warren's and Dembski's and many other people's criticism of the RM/NS mechanism are on target. [my emphasis] It is simply unthinkable on probabilistic grounds (or statistical-mechanical grounds, if you prefer). But with it---that is, with the assumption of an internal self-organizing power---then we no longer have a reductionistic RM/NS mechanism. Rather, we have a nonlinear dynamical system with its own inherent propensities and powers. And that is now the real explanation for evolution, not RM/NS.
That is, if we ignore the fact that we do have darwinian explanations for co-adaptation of traits, darwinian explanations are not good enough. Well, sure, who wouldn't agree? Alas, we do have explanations, the study of coadaptation and coevolution is very lively indeed, and the models seem to reasonably fit the data.
The problem of warren and Dembski (and others) is not that they raise the conceptual issue of coadaptation/coevolution (darwinian evolutionists also do!), but rather that they focus their concerns on systems for which not much is known, ignoring the existing data on better characterized systems that can be studied and understood. So, sure it is hard to imagine how all the flagellar proteins evolved in concert from some precursor doing something else, but why is this different from, say, the coevolution of selective transcription factor/DNA binding site pairs - wouldn't either one would be useless without the other? Is the difference just one of scale, or truly qualitative? Of course, the less we know of a certain system, the more puzzling it seems: sometimes in science the trick is not to ask the right general question, but to find the right specific model to approach the answer. For theoreticians, it is easy to speculate about overly complicated issues (especially if the purpose it to highlight complexity), but for practicing empiricists, whose goal is to find answers, the real work is from the bottom of the complexity pile up, and the rest is philosophy.
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In short (and this recapitulates many discussions I've had with Frances on other threads), Warren's and my complaint is not that evolution is impossible. It is that evolution is impossible without presupposing an internal teleological principle of coherence and coordination constantly at work.
Sure, but this seems to be just yours and a few others' opinion. Those who do study evolution every day, find plenty of evidence, instead, that it can do its job quite well according to non-teleological models.
[ 16 August 2002, 10:33: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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