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Author
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Topic: Murder by Design?
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Mike Baughman
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Member # 270
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posted 25. September 2002 12:47
Two women in Houston, both with the same name, were each murdered within 3 days of the other with similar MO. Click here for a link to the story. The police say it is just a coincidence while the families maintain that the first murder was a case of mistaken identity, the second being the intended victim.
It seems that this would be a situation where Dr. Dembski's work on CSI could be applied. The first murder provides the specification for the second - name of victim, city, date, MO.
How would one calculate the probability of the 2nd murder? Would one use the population of Houston, Texas, the US, or the world? What about the date - within 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 1 year, 1 decade?
It seems that as the area and time span increase, the "odds" of a coincidence get better; but then given the specification wouldn't the probability actually get smaller with a larger sample space?
Obviously my mathematics and probability skills are limited, but I'm interested in how the explanatory filter would apply in this real-world scenario.
(BTW it seems that the concept of CSI could get a good deal of public exposure in this case.)
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RBH
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posted 25. September 2002 13:24
Two remarks in the story regarding the police position are instructive. First, quote:
Though police say they have no evidence to support the theory, the families are speculating that a sloppy hit man hired to kill one of them may have initially killed the wrong woman. (emphasis added)
and second quote:
Nevertheless, investigators in Houston - a city with a population of nearly 2 million - could not recall two people with the same name being murdered in the same week before.
"That was a big coincidence, but as far as we consider it right now, that is just what we consider it, a coincidence," (Harris County Detective Ronald ) Hunter said. (emphasis added)
In other words, in the absence of actual affirmative evidence showing 'design' (i.e., the same perp killing both women), the cops are not jumping to the design conclusion. That is an instructive example.
RBH
[ 25. September 2002, 13:25: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Mike Baughman
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posted 25. September 2002 15:16
quote:
RBH wrote:
In other words, in the absence of actual affirmative evidence showing 'design' (i.e., the same perp killing both women), the cops are not jumping to the design conclusion. That is an instructive example.
Yes, you are correct, they are not inferring design. The question is, should they be? If they can reliably eliminate chance as an explanation, right away they know several things about both crimes:
- This was a hired killing, by a perpetrator who did not personally know the victims.
- The "motive" for the first murder is mistaken identity.
- The second victim was the intended victim.
- The murderer's location is known at two separate points and times.
- Physical evidence at either scene bears on the other scene as well.
It is possible that the police in actuality are following up on the "design" hypothesis and do not wish it to be generally known.
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RBH
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posted 25. September 2002 15:45
Actually, I think you're probably right: I'd bet they are following up on the same-perp hypothesis as well as on the different perps hypothesis, seeking actual evidence bearing on the issue. And that's the point: actual evidence, not a conclusion based solely on the probability that two women with the same name were murdered in the same general geographical area within a few days of each other. And that's the point of many criticisms of ID: There is no followup to seek affirmative evidence.
Suppose the cops nail the murderer in the first case, finding incontrovertible evidence for his guilt (maybe a surveillance videotape) but have no evidence at all concerning the perp in the second case. No prosecutor in his right mind would try the first-case murderer for the second woman's murder based solely on the coincidence of names of victims. The 'design' inference would not support any action in the second case based solely on evidence gathered in the first case.
RBH
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RBH
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posted 25. September 2002 16:41
Mike,
Let me add one or two remarks to my last post (walking the dogs stimulates thought!).
First, of course, is the observation that (from the news story's account) there is no question of "design" in either case: it appears that both were in fact murders, not accidental deaths. So the question is actually not one of design but rather of the number of designers, one or two. That's the issue that is being attributed to coincidence by the police spokesman. That's reminiscent of the Multiple Designers Theory I offered some time ago on ARN. Since ARN is down for maintenance I can't retrieve the URL, but the thread title was something like "How many designers are there?" (It may have been "were" rather than "are.") That is a genuine question, by the way, just as it is in the news story you recommended.
Second, the question in Houston will be settled by the evidence being sought by the police, not by a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood that two women of the same name would be murdered in the same general geographic area within a fairly short time frame. If the police eliminate 'chance' purely on (uncertain) probability estimates and go directly to the design inference, addressing only the questions you suggest, in the event that the two murders actually were independent events they would have neglected several lines of investigation that should have been followed earlier. On the other hand, if they treat the two as two separate events, investigate each separately, and then after gathering the evidence in each case do a comparative analysis of the two sets of evidence, they can then test the 'same designer' hypothesis against the evidence. Understand that I'm not recommending that as an singular operating strategy for them. If I were king, I'd hold both hypotheses in mind simultaneously as I investigated, one murderer versus two murderers, not settling prematurely on either until the evidence unequivocally points me one way or the other, toward an inference of one designer or two.
Your other questions, those raised in the first post about how one would calculate the probability, and in particular what the boundaries on the class of specified events would be, are important, too, but I'll defer commenting on them here. The dogs can only do so much!
RBH
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William A. Dembski
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Member # 7
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posted 25. September 2002 22:12
Imagine 5 people in Houston are named Mary Smith. They all live within a half our drive of each other. At 12 midnight Mary Smith#1 gets murdered. At 1am Mary Smith#2 gets murdered. And so on until at 4am Mary Smith#5 gets murdered. Each Mary Smith gets murdered at home while sleeping in bed. Two possibilities: H1 -- chance (chance in the sense that murder rates follow well-defined probability distributions and the murders were independent); H2 -- design (i.e., some designing intelligence was coordinating the murders).
Suppose years pass and the police never uncover any "actual evidence" of such coordination. What do we conclude? Can this amazing coincidence simply as such count as evidence?
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Lizard
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posted 25. September 2002 22:31
There may be several hypotheses, but without evidence, none will stand.
"Mary Smith" is a fairly common name, so the odds of coincidence are probably increased. However, a pattern *seems* to be evident.
Now, if there were five women named Wanda Z. Kowzlowski who were murdered one hour apart on the same evening, I would certainly think the odds of coincidence would be reduced.
However, put yourself in the shoes of the police investigators. If the murderer(s) were extremely careful and left no clues, whatever the probabilities, there would be no evidence to *conclude* (versus hypothesize) the murders were related.
Evidence, evidence, evidence. It's what ID lacks. Why is Dr. Behe not uncovering some? And from your comments, I wonder, have you consulted with Dr. Behe about some of the basic facts of evolutionary biology/cell biology?
Sometimes I am surprised by your questions. I get the impression you are trying out various scenarios without realizing they have either already been explored and rejected or simply don't make sense in context with what science has discovered over the last 150 years.
I'm sorry, I am not trying to be rude, but I do wonder why you, with an extensive background in mathematics and philosophy and theology, would not pursue learning more about biology, if your published work concerns biological issues.
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RBH
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posted 25. September 2002 23:16
Dembski wrote quote:
Suppose years pass and the police never uncover any "actual evidence" of such coordination. What do we conclude? Can this amazing coincidence simply as such count as evidence?
Evidence of what? Of the existence of a single designer versus multiple designers? I'd sure take it as at least strongly indicative of a single designer, to be sure. Where one knows several objects or events are designed, and where the 'style' of the design is consistent from object to object, then one is led to the 'same designer' conclusion. (Obviously there are more caveats and explications necessary here: I abbreviate for the sake of space.) That's the sort of reasoning that art forgers depend on. They attenuate evidence for (and thereby attempt to defeat the detection of) multiple designers by imitating the observable evidence that normally leads to the 'one designer' inference. But note that we are here operating within the domain of events known to be designed and are talking about how one distinguishes a set of events or objects designed by one designer from a set designed by multiple designers.
If we can develop criteria for making that distinction then we are on the road to a methodology for testing Multiple Designer Theory, the hypothesis that if there are designed objects and processes in the biological world, they reflect the efforts of multiple designers. There is ample precedent in human design for asking and attempting to answer that question, after all. And human design is what the probabilistic apparatus of NFL is asserted to be good at detecting. The inductive argument for the reliability of design detection in Dembski's NFL is based solely on anecdotes about detecting human designs, so that apparatus may be adaptable to the testing the hypothesis of Multiple Designers in biology.
We (or appropriate experts, at least) can distinguish among the works of different artists based on an analysis of styles. Some are obvious even to the artistically untutored; think Vermeer versus Dali, for example. There is a body of research on the question of attributing literary works to one or multiple authors based on statistical analyses of the works. There are rules of thumb in law enforcement for distinguishing sequences of crimes by one individual from a series committed by different individuals. In all these cases the question of one designer versus multiple designers is the salient question, and they all address it directly, without equivocation.
There is no a priori reason to confine the intelligent design hypothesis to the assumption of a single designer, especially when nascent methodologies for detecting multiple designers already exist.
RBH
(edited for a couple of typos. Any typos that remain are the responsibility of the reader! ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
[ 25. September 2002, 23:43: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Mike Gene
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Member # 149
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posted 26. September 2002 00:44
Mike: It seems that this would be a situation where Dr. Dembski's work on CSI could be applied. The first murder provides the specification for the second - name of victim, city, date, MO.
Quick and somewhat related aside - On ARN, someone by the name of 'DNAUnion' used this approach to argue that another poster had been using two different screen names. He used the state from where the first screen name came from, along with various atypical phrases, book citations, etc. from the first screen name as the specification for the second. He then did some conservative guessing about the probabilities and concluded that the two different screen names were coming from the same person. Later, the ARN webmaster confirmed that the two screen names were from the same IP address, indicating DNAUnion's EF-like analysis was valid.
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yersinia
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Member # 324
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posted 26. September 2002 00:47
H3: The name is Sarah Conner and you are watching Terminator.
Ha, just kidding. I too would have to admit that the simple fact of 5 people with the same name getting murdered in one night would be a pretty good initial case for intelligent coordination (although we wouldn't have a satisfying explanation of it until we answered the "why" question). Two people is much more ambiguous however (like two people having the same birthday in a classroom, although more improbable).
Another ambiguous case: let's say 5 people with just the same last name died from mysterious causes (no obvious external trauma) in the same night in a city. Would the police run to their calculators and start running through Dembski's calculations? I doubt it. They would just begin looking for evidence for or against the several possible ways this situation could have occurred, e.g.:
- all the people went to a family reunion and got food poisoning
- all the people are related and share a hereditary defect that made them susceptible to a just-introduced rare disease that didn't harm most of the population
- mobsters are getting revenge on the family and poisoning everyone
- the Terminator is going through the phonebook
It's just good old-fashioned empirical investigation to sort through these possibilities, I don't see any particular role for Dembski's method even in this highly contrived class of cases, let alone in historical scientific investigations where hypothesis proposal and testing is absolutely the standard.
yersinia
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Frances
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posted 26. September 2002 04:47
RBH,
A truly interesting viewpoint which shows that behind the intelligent design there are as many hypotheses as there are behind non-intelligent design. The difference seems to be that intelligent design theory so far fails to provide for positive evidence of design. Your approach to apply multiple designers can help us at least formulate hypotheses which may be more capable of explaining the how, when and all the relevant questions related to formulating a testable hypothesis which can be compared with other ID and non-ID hypotheses to determine which one is the most likely one.
Would multiple designers be a better ID hypothesis than a single designer when looking at biology? FOr instance the marsupials seem to be mostly limited to the australian continent. Was there a separate (intelligent/non-intelligent) designer of marsupials? How would we go about formulating such hypotheses?
Additional questions that need to be answered in order for testable hypotheses to be formulated would be when. Was the (intelligent/non-intelligent) designer continuously involved, at the beginning only or at intervals?
I find your attempt to formulate testable hypotheses to fill in the large category of intelligent design hypotheses quite helpful. I have long been arguing that we need positive approaches to ID just like we do for non-ID before we can develop useful hypotheses that can be tested against each other. Your suggestion is a first step in developing such an approach.
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Frances
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posted 26. September 2002 04:53
Wrt to Mary murders proposed by Dembski, I would suggest a third possibility: copy cat murders. Although the time frame is somewhat limited we need to look at all the possibilities. Another one would be that the last Mary was in fact not murdered but committed suicide after hearing how here two sisters had been murdered. Or perhaps there are multiple designers at work who coordinate their plans to murder their wives and trying to place the blame on a serial killer and distracting from their own guilt.
In the end murder all requires ID so how the ID filter can be applied here seems somewhat vague imho.
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Mike Baughman
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posted 26. September 2002 10:48
This is not a case of detecting individual design events but rather eliminating chance as an explanation.
How should the EF be applied, practically speaking, to this real-world occurrence?
Since each murder is the specification for the other, the "chance hypothesis" probability is the statistical likelihood (not sure if my terminology is correct?) of the individual crimes multiplied together. The murder rate in Houston in 2000 was 7.7 per 100,000 (according to Morgan Quitno Press). So P(E) where E is "a person is a random murder victim in 3 day period" = (7.7e-5/365)*3 = 6.33e-7. Squaring this figure yields 4e-13 (a highly conservative estimate since the murder rate includes people at much higher risk than your average citizen). This is well within Dembski's UPB but still, I think, applying the principle that specified events of very small probability do not occur by chance, lends strong support to the families' position.
Applying Lizard's hypothetical, the name is irrelevant to the probabilities and only supplies the specification. I think. Each individual "specified" murder in a 5-hour period has a probability of 4.39e-8. The probability of 5 specified events would be that probability to the 5th power or 7.21e-45. Clearly attributing a coincidence of this magnitude is absurd.
Am I approaching this correctly?
[ 26. September 2002, 11:47: Message edited by: Mike Baughman ]
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William A. Dembski
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posted 26. September 2002 10:52
The Bell Labs Hendrik Schön investigative committee has now concluded its investigation (see http://www.lucent.com/news_events/researchreview.html). The first quote below is taken from the executive summary. In the second, taken from the actual report, Schön responds to the report and denies all wrong doing. Clearly the committe is drawing a design inference. But what exactly is being inferred and how is the evidence being marshalled? Is there "actual evidence" of data falsification?
==========QUOTE FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY===========
The Committee’s main findings and conclusions can be summarized as follows.
By all accounts, Hendrik Schön is a hard working and productive scientist. If valid, the work he and his coauthors report would represent a remarkable number of major breakthroughs in condensed-matter physics and solid-state devices.
Except for the provision of starting materials by others, all device fabrication, physical measurement and data processing in the work in question were carried out (with minor exceptions) by Hendrik Schön alone, with no participation by any coauthor or other colleague. None of the most significant physical results was witnessed by any coauthor or other colleague.
Proper laboratory records were not systematically maintained by Hendrik Schön in the course of the work in question. In addition, virtually all primary (raw) electronic data files were deleted by Hendrik Schön, reportedly because the old computer available to him lacked sufficient memory. No working devices with which one might confirm claimed results are presently available, having been damaged in measurement, damaged in transit or simply discarded. Finally, key processing equipment no longer produces the unparalleled results that enabled many of the key experiments. Hence, it is not possible to confirm or refute directly the validity of the claims in the work in question.
The most serious allegations regarding the work in question relate to possible manipulation and misrepresentation of data. These allegations speak directly to the question of scientific misconduct. The Committee carefully investigated each of these allegations and came to a specific conclusion in each case.
The evidence that manipulation and misrepresentation of data occurred is compelling. In its mildest form, whole data sets were substituted to represent different materials or devices. Hendrik Schön acknowledges that the data are incorrect in many of these instances. He states that these substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. The recurrent nature of such mistakes suggests a deeper problem. At a minimum, Hendrik Schön showed reckless disregard for the sanctity of data in the value system of science. His failure to retain primary data files compounds the problem.
More troublesome are the substitutions of single curves or even parts of single curves, in multiple figures representing different materials or devices, and the use of mathematical functions to represent real data. Hendrik Schön acknowledges these practices in many instances, but states that they were done to achieve a more convincing representation of behavior that was nonetheless observed. Such practices are completely unacceptable and represent scientific misconduct.
3 One of the most troublesome cases is that of superconductivity in polythiophene. Here, identical curves appear multiple times in whole or in part in a single figure. Hendrik Schön acknowledges that these data are not valid but cannot explain how they arose. In the view of the Committee, it is not possible that this set of curves represent real data and therefore this is a clear, unambiguous case of scientific misconduct.
In the end, the Committee concluded that, of the 24 Final Allegations examined, Hendrik Schön committed scientific misconduct in 16, some of which were interrelated. Of the remaining 8, 2 were judged to have no clear relationship to publications, while 6 were troubling but did not provide compelling evidence of scientific misconduct.
========RESPONSE BY SCHÖN============
Although I disagree with several of the findings and conclusions in the report of the investigation committee on the possibility of scientific misconduct in the work of Hendrik Schön and coauthors, I have to admit that I made various mistakes in my scientific work, which I deeply regret. Some of these mistakes might have been related to difficult circumstances and others I did not realize in time. Nevertheless, it was my responsibility and there are no excuses for these mistakes and would like to apologize honestly for these mistakes to the coauthors and the scientific community.
However, I would like to state that all the scientific publications that I prepared were based on experimental observations. I have observed experimentally the various physical effects reported in these publications, such as the Quantum Hall effect, superconductivity in various materials, lasing, or gate-modulation in self-assembled monolayers, and I am convinced that they are real, although I could not prove this to the investigation committee. Furthermore, I believe that these results will be reproduced in the future and, if possible for me, I am willing to work hard on this task, since reproduction will be the only prove of these scientific effects.
Based on experimental observations I tried to communicate the science that described the experimental findings and that I was convinced of. Although I have made mistakes, I never wanted to mislead anybody or to misuse anybody’s trust. I realize that there is a lack of credibility in light of these mistakes, nevertheless, I truly believe that the reported scientific effects are real, exciting, and worth working for.
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RBH
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posted 26. September 2002 12:14
(edited per the 'cross-threaded' post three or four posts below)
MDT
My remarks about Multiple Designer Theory (MDT) are intended to take the ID hypothesis seriously. While I myself don't agree that resort to the hypothesis of an intelligent agency is required by either the data or the various probability estimates of this or that 'IC' system or occurrence of 'CSI,' nevertheless one can make conjectures about about the implications and extensions of a hypothesis one doesn't hold.
Multiple Designer Theory seems to have some desirable implications for ID theory and particularly for an ID research program. For example, it allows deployment of comparative analysis within ID theory, and comparative analysis is the most powerful general scientific methodology, in fact the fundamental methodology of science. Multiple Designer Theory takes account of, and perhaps even provides explanations for, a number of phenomena that ID critics use to oppose ID theory. For example, it provides a plausible account for why parasites and hosts both exist: they have different designers. It provides a richer set of hypotheses about the timing of interventions: one is not obliged to assume a single immortal designer. All in all, it enriches and extends the ID account without the artificial constraints imposed by the single designer assumption. And assumption it is.
RBH
added in edit:
From Dembski's Schon case post: quote:
Except for the provision of starting materials by others, all device fabrication, physical measurement and data processing in the work in question were carried out (with minor exceptions) by Hendrik Schön alone, with no participation by any coauthor or other colleague. None of the most significant physical results was witnessed by any coauthor or other colleague.
This is a nice instance of a test (and rejection on evidential grounds) of MDT in a real case.
RBH
[ 26. September 2002, 14:12: Message edited by: RBH ]
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