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Author
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Topic: ID Research program
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RBH
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Member # 380
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posted 06. October 2002 20:52
Jack wrote quote:
What I want to know is what evidence would cause you to suspect that something in nature was intelligently designed. You gave some scenarios wherein you would question certain Darwinian hypotheses such as common ancestry but I didn't see any examples of things in nature you would suspect were intelligently designed.
I don't see anything in nature that I suspect were intelligently designed, and I'm not sufficiently interested in persuading you that I'm going to spend a whole lot of time trying to imagine an example. I'd have to develop a methodology, validate and calibrate it along the lines Evan suggested, gather the baseline data necessary, and systematically evaluate the phenomena that IDists identify as candidates for design, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to do that. That's the ID research program that's missing at present.
If I saw something along the lines I suggested in the MDT thread I'd begin to suspect something 'non-natural' might be occurring, but whether it was design imposed on matter by an unembodied designer, human fraud in data reporting (Dembski's EF is apparently good at detecting that), or a plain case of ignorance (a naturalistic explanation exists for the phenomenon but we don't know it) would require further research. Beyond that I can't help you, Jack. Your best approach is the one you alluded to above. I need "to see something positive come out of an ID research program" before I'll take the ID hypothesis very seriously as a competitor to current evolutionary theory.
RBH
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Xenon
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posted 06. October 2002 21:06
Xenon, thanks, but I'll do the moderating. See below.
[ 06. October 2002, 21:55: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Moderator
Administrator
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posted 06. October 2002 21:54
Warning to everyone on this thread, especially Xenon, RBH and Jack.
Do not bring up political or cultural issues on Brainstorms. Also, stop throwing around character attacks and sweeping generalizations. There are other places where these discussions can take place.
This thread is moving towards a quick death. Please get it back on track.
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Frances
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Member # 169
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posted 06. October 2002 22:04
Jack
Where did I say something was fundamentally wrong with non-teleological explanations? My position is that some data is explained best by non-teleological explanations and some data is explained better by teleological explanations. I'm open-minded on these issues. It's the non-teleologists that are not open to anything in nature being intelligently designed.
Teleology has its place in nature but I wonder what Jack has in mind when he refers to non-teleologists? After all we know of quite a few examples in nature that have been intelligently designed. The question is, can ID be extended to areas such as biology in a useful manner. My argument is simple: Until ID rejects the eliminative approach that has been proposed so far, ID will have little to contribute to a scientific discussion in the area of for instance biology. I am certainly open to teleology but I also expect that ID shows that its claims have a usefulness or relevance to science.
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Evan
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Member # 164
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posted 06. October 2002 22:05
Thanks to the moderator.
The main topic is: does the research program proposal I suggested (and remember this is "brainstorms") accurately capture what is needed in order to turn the theory offered by Dembski into empirically verified evidence for ID?
If not, what suggestions for improvement could anyone suggest? What aspects of the theory does it fail to take into account, or what aspects does it include that are not relevant to the theory?
[ 06. October 2002, 22:24: Message edited by: Evan ]
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Jack
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posted 07. October 2002 02:44
Evan>>The main topic is: does the research program proposal I suggested (and remember this is "brainstorms") accurately capture what is needed in order to turn the theory offered by Dembski into empirically verified evidence for ID?<<
With all due respect that's not the main topic of this thread. This thread was started because I asked Evan on another thread if he could share with us what evidence would cause him to merely suspect that something in nature was intelligently designed? Evan replied that the question was off topic and we both agreed to move it to a new thread. RBH has just replied:
"I don't see anything in nature that I suspect was intelligently designed." So far, Evan and the rest of the contributors to this thread have failed to answer the question.
The next question posed on this thread was again from me. Here it is:
"I would like to know what if anything an ID research program could discover that would be considered evidence of ID in the eyes of the ID critic."
Evan never told us what he would consider evidence of ID coming from an ID research program. What he said was:
"I would like to offer more thoroughly my thoughts on what type of evidence could be generated by an ID research program." But notice he never said that any of this evidence would cause him to suspect ID. RBH said : "I need to see something positive come out of an ID research program before I'll take the ID hypothesis very seriously as a competitor to current evolutionary theory." But he never tells what he would consider positive evidence for ID.
Can anything productive come from discussing an ID research program with persons that don't suspect that anything in nature is intelligently designed and can't tell us what evidence an ID research program could discover that would change their mind?
[ 07. October 2002, 02:58: Message edited by: Jack ]
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RBH
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posted 07. October 2002 03:10
Jack wrote quote:
RBH said : "I need to see something positive come out of an ID research program before I'll take the ID hypothesis very seriously as a competitor to current evolutionary theory." But he never tells what he would consider positive evidence for ID.
Can anything productive come from discussing an ID research program with persons that don't suspect that anything in nature is intelligently designed and can't tell us what evidence an ID research program could discover that would change their mind?
I'm not sure how much more I can usefully say about this. I'll just refer Jack to my response to John's post on another thread.
RBH
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Leonid Andreev
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Member # 282
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posted 07. October 2002 04:40
In the past, I used to work at a research institute which had a small engineering design department. I remember one of the specialists, a brilliant inventor, without a high school education but of fantastic energy. Any mysterious piece of disposed details from a waste bin would make him pensively frown and mutter, ‘Hmm, where could this go?’ Some time past, he would have constructed a device, where the detail in question would initially be the central part but in the course of subsequent redesigning and improvements would end up being discarded for complete uselessness, and the invented device would function without it all right.
ID research program reminds me of a search for a detail that inspired a construction of a machine.
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warren_bergerson
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Member # 262
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posted 07. October 2002 05:03
Evan,
Quote: My understanding of Dembski is that "empirically demonstrating design" and "measuring the complexity of biological systems" by ascertaining the probability of their occurrence are equivalent: if something can be shown to be too improbable to have happened through natural processes, it is design.
Since you agree we are talking about ‘change process probabilities’, then it is important to make two distinctions. First, there is the difference between ‘observable, measurable biological design’ and ‘design generated by an external designer’. Second there is a difference between ‘improbable from all natural processes’ and ‘improbable from a specified class or classes of natural processes’.
I believe that Dembski’s experimental design involves 1)identify a biological phenomena and demonstrate it has measurable complexity, then 2)demonstrate that the observed complexity could not have been generated by a specified class of natural processes. I don’t believe your experimental design defines how to quantify complexity. Your design also clearly does not specify the set or class of natural processes which are being used to measure complexity.
Quote: But evolutionary theory doesn’t posit that things come into existence at one time, so this is not very helpful. This is precisely why I think a research program of the kind I am mentioning is necessary, because it is vastly more realistic.
I agree that Dembski did not pick an ideal example to illustrate his point. His example does not provide a ‘standard’ basis for measuring complexity, and the example does not provide a testable, verifiable method of measuring ‘improbability relative to specified natural processes’.
I also agree that Dembski’s experimental paradigm could be improved upon. To improve on his paradigm, IMO, you need to recognize that he was trying to measure ‘ the probability/improbability of specified change processes producing biological designs with measurable complexity". In order to apply Dembski’s paradigm, you need to be able to 1)quantify complexity of some biological design phenomena, 2)specify the natural change processing being evaluated, and 3)measure probability of specified processes producing identified complexity.
I think your effort to address the problems with Dembski’s experiments are useful, but I think your paradigm is missing a couple of key features.
Response to Jack,
Quote: I don't think that probability arguments by themselves are going to convince ID critics that anything in nature is intelligently designed. They are simply going to assert that there is some yet to be discovered naturalistic law or mechanism that can account for the phenomenon in question.
The point that seems to be overlooked here, is that Dembski’s experimental design is a ‘test to determine if biological phenomena with measurable complexity could be produced by specified naturalistic mechanisms’ . Dembski, IMO, defined a method of testing the adequacy specific models of naturalistic processes. He did not develop a test for ‘intelligent design’ and he clearly did not develop a test for ‘design by a designer’.
Dembski’s views on intelligent design and designer, IMO, rests on the ‘interpretation’ of the experimental results, not directly on the results themselves.
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Daniel Edington
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Member # 421
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posted 07. October 2002 07:04
Evan,
"The main topic is: does the research program proposal I suggested (and remember this is "brainstorms") accurately capture what is needed in order to turn the theory offered by Dembski into empirically verified evidence for ID?"
The answer is a resounding maybe. Which is fine, research is often that way. Start with an idea see if it works. Your idea is probably as good as any place to start. However, there are some serious issues with Dembski's theories that need to be addressed before they can support a research program.
First is the distinction between what is 'designed' and what is not. If one claims that some creator is responsible for creating everything in the universe, then can we find anything that isn't 'designed'? Even mundane items such as hydrogen gas were designed, at least indirectly, if one suggests that the very natural physical laws that are responsible for their generation were in fact designed. The design may be indirect, but it would none-the-less still be there. One could define anything designed by indirect methods to be 'not designed', to circumvent this problem. It is required though that one can find some item that was not designed to serve as some sort of control group, otherwise Dembski's explanatory filter is meaningless.
Another interesting dilemma is the fact that none of the ID theorists have produced a calculation of the ‘improbability’ of the origin of any biological system that is biologically relevant. This issues is discussed (briefly) in the review of Dembski’s book (No Free Lunch), by Howard Van Till. Basically the problem boils down to this, there is currently no empirical data showing that ID can support a research program.
So the real question is: What about ID warrants the time and effort of a research program?
Dan
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Evan
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Member # 164
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posted 07. October 2002 13:12
in response to Jack:
Jack writes,
quote:
The next question posed on this thread was again from me. Here it is: "I would like to know what if anything an ID research program could discover that would be considered evidence of ID in the eyes of the ID critic.
Evan never told us what he would consider evidence of ID coming from an ID research program.
I very clearly stated what I thought would be evidence coming from an ID research program. Following Dembski’s theory for detecting ID, scientific evidence for ID would consist of calculations of improbability for a biological event - calculations that followed from methods that had been developed and tested with events that are generally thought to not be designed. That is what the theory claims divides designed events from non-designed events, and therefore that’s what type of evidence needs to be gathered.
I did not answer the question about what type of preliminary evidence might cause one to “suspect” ID. Let me explain why.
For most people, including myself, the reasons why one “suspects” design are religious and metaphysical, and probably aren’t a proper topic for ISCID. The mere existence of our universe, with the properties and objects that it has (including life in general and human beings in partcular), causes me and countless other people to wonder (in the strong sense of the word) about how it came to be this way, and what, if anything, might be behind the order that we see. In this sense, virtually everyone “suspects” design, I think. In fact many people would go far beyond merely “suspecting” design - they feel certain that some or all of the world is designed, based on their religious beliefs. However, ISCID is not the place to discuss these religious beliefs, and particularly not the place to discuss the nature of any one person’s, mine or anyone else’s, religious reasons for suspecting design.
However, ID theory takes the position that design is empirically detectable. This is the part that makes ID potentially part of science, and thus the part that is a suitable topic here at ISCID.
So I have focused on discussing on this empirically based evidence might be gathered. Discussing why I am interested enough in the issue to think this is a worthwhile topic is not really relevant to a discussion at ISCID.
in response to Warren:
Warren makes some distinctions that I would like to comment on. First, he writes,
quote:
First, there is the difference between ‘observable, measurable biological design’ and ‘design generated by an external designer’.
I agree. There are alternatives to the idea that design is accomplished by an external designer. However, the discussions on these recent threads (MDT, Designer-centric, and Research program) have been about a theory of external designers. That’s what we’re discussing. You can’t discuss everything all at once. People with ideas about internal or immanent sources of design should be thinking about offering hypotheses about that. In this case, however, we are talking about external designers.
Warren writes,
quote:
I believe that Dembski’s experimental design involves 1)identify a biological phenomena and demonstrate it has measurable complexity, then 2)demonstrate that the observed complexity could not have been generated by a specified class of natural processes.
Here I think Warren is confused about something that is a very common problem.
For Dembski, “measurable complexity” means the same thing as “could not have been generated by a specified class of natural processes.”
But Warren makes it sound like complexity is something you can measure before you investigate the possibility that it was naturally caused. This is not possible if you follow Dembski’s definition.
Warren thinks, as is common, that we ought to be able to quantify some type of complexity just by looking at something (what he calls point-in-time complexity) and then, as a separate matter, investigate whether natural causes could have produced it (what Warren calls process complexity, I think.) This is possibly a useful distinction, but it is, again, not a distinction that Dembski makes. Since my research proposal follows Dembski’s theory, this distinction is not relevant to my proposal. “Process complexity” is all that matters.
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warren_bergerson
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posted 07. October 2002 14:22
Evan,
Quote: I agree. There are alternatives to the idea that design is accomplished by an external designer. However, the discussions on these recent threads (MDT, Designer-centric, and Research program) have been about a theory of external designers. That’s what we’re discussing. You can’t discuss everything all at once
I can’t speak for Dembski, and I am not sure that you can either. To suggest that Dembski has proposed a test to demonstrate the actions of external designers, is to suggest that Dembski has proposed a test to demonstrate the existence of a god. I don’t claim to be an expert on Dembski or his work, but I am a bit doubtful that he has made such a claim. It seems more consistent with what I have read to suggest the ‘Dembski has interpreted the experimental results as suggesting the possible existence of an external designer’. A very different interpretation.
The question here, is not, however, really what Dembski meant, but rather what does your experimental design claim to do. Is your experimental design intended to measure/detect the existence of external designers? Or is your experimental design intended to detect the existence of design?, Or is your experimental design intended to test the ability of certain processes or models to explain the creation of design?
Quote: For Dembski, "measurable complexity" means the same thing as "could not have been generated by a specified class of natural processes."
Dembski found what he suggests is ‘one step design process’. In such a situation, complexity and probability of generating design of directly related. If you go to a multiple step process, as your paradigm seems to suggest, then you need to 1)define the natural processes you assume are being applicable and 2)you need separate measures for a)complexity and b)change process probability.
It might be useful to note that you are not strictly ‘applying Dembski’s experimental paradigm’. More accurately you are modifying his experimental paradigm in order to make it useful in new areas where, it is hoped, the results will be less ambiguous. IMO, if you are going to make the ‘modified Dembski paradigm’ work in new applications, you will have to address a number of the technical issues Dembski’s paradigm avoids. I don’t think you have yet addressed those issues.
As an aside, there is an experimental paradigm that is 1)a variation of Dembski’s paradigm and which can 2)be used to evaluate the adequacy of ‘design process models or theories’. In this variation, you measure both the level of complexity, and the specific form of biological design at both the beginning and end of a change process. You can then test to determine if a specific class of ‘design change process models can explain, model or simulate the observed change in biological design’. The advantage of this modification of Dembski’s paradigm, is that it can be used under ‘laboratory conditions’ rather being dependent on historical data.
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RBH
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posted 07. October 2002 14:23
Evan wrote quote:
Warren thinks, as is common, that we ought to be able to quantify some type of complexity just by looking at something (what he calls point-in-time complexity) and then, as a separate matter, investigate whether natural causes could have produced it (what Warren calls process complexity, I think.) This is possibly a useful distinction, but it is, again, not a distinction that Dembski makes. Since my research proposal follows Dembski's theory, this distinction is not relevant to my proposal. "Process complexity" is all that matters.
The same point follows from the observation that the fitness landscapes on which populations evolve are not static, but are plastic. On ARN in a thread concerned with hardware evolution research I posted this remark: quote:
The second, which needs to be developed in more detail than I can do here, is the failure to recognize that in naturally evolving systems the fitness landscape(s) is(are) not static but is(are) plastic, constantly changing due both to changes in the physical surroundings and to changes in the population itself. The composition of a population forms part of the selective context of members of that population (that's what intraspecific competition means) and as the population changes (via mutation, recombination, drift, selection, and the like) the fitness landscape(s) on which the members of the population are evolving deform and change. Thus to make conclusions based on the image of a snapshot of a single static fitness function, as Dembski does in NFL, is to ignore the most important component of evolution, its selective dynamics.
(minor edit to correct grammar)
Because fitness landscapes are plastic in the evolution of a population, a snapshot at a fixed time is uninformative; it tells one nothing about how the population came to be what it is. As Evan says, with a little added emphasis, "Process complexity" is all that matters.
RBH
[ 07. October 2002, 14:25: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Jack
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posted 07. October 2002 16:21
Evan>>I did not answer the question about what type of preliminary evidence might cause one to “suspect” ID. Let me explain why.
For most people, including myself, the reasons why one “suspects” design are religious and metaphysical, and probably aren’t a proper topic for ISCID. The mere existence of our universe, with the properties and objects that it has [including life in general and human beings in partcular], causes me and countless other people to wonder [in the strong sense of the word] about how it came to be this way, and what, if anything, might be behind the order that we see. In this sense, virtually everyone “suspects” design, I think. In fact many people would go far beyond merely “suspecting” design - they feel certain that some or all of the world is designed, based on their religious beliefs. However, ISCID is not the place to discuss these religious beliefs, and particularly not the place to discuss the nature of any one person’s, mine or anyone else’s, religious reasons for suspecting design.<<
Perhaps I wasn't specific enough. When I asked the question: "what would cause you to suspect that something in nature was intelligently designed", what I really wanted to know was: what empirical evidence from the natural world would cause you to suspect something was intelligently designed. I have no intention of asking religious or metaphysical questions on this thread. Now, there are some persons that will tell you that there is no empirical evidence from the biological world that would cause them to suspect something was intelligently designed. On top of that they can't even imagine any evidence that could be discovered that would cause them to suspect design.
RBH has just recently said on this thread:
"I don't see anything in nature that I suspect was intelligently designed." RBH also said : "I need to see something positive come out of an ID research program before I'll take the ID hypothesis very seriously as a competitor to current evolutionary theory." But he never tells us what he would consider positive evidence for ID.
All I'm saying is that if a person claims that nothing in the biological world causes them to suspect ID and they can't tell us what evidence an ID research program could discover that would cause them to merely suspect [not be convinced] of ID, then what's left to discuss with them on this thread?
[ 07. October 2002, 16:38: Message edited by: Jack ]
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Jack
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posted 07. October 2002 16:57
Jack>> I don't think that probability arguments by themselves are going to convince ID critics that anything in nature is intelligently designed. They are simply going to assert that there is some yet to be discovered naturalistic law or mechanism that can account for the phenomenon in question.<<
Warren>>The point that seems to be overlooked here, is that Dembski’s experimental design is a ‘test to determine if biological phenomena with measurable complexity could be produced by specified naturalistic mechanisms’ . Dembski, IMO, defined a method of testing the adequacy specific models of naturalistic processes. He did not develop a test for ‘intelligent design’ and he clearly did not develop a test for ‘design by a designer’.
Dembski’s views on intelligent design and designer, IMO, rests on the ‘interpretation’ of the experimental results, not directly on the results themselves. <<
I agree but don't ID critics dispute that Dembski’s has provided a reliable ‘test to determine if biological phenomena with measurable complexity could be produced by specified naturalistic mechanisms’?
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