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Author
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Topic: No False Positives and the Lust for Certainty
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Mark Szlazak
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Member # 391
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posted 09. December 2002 03:01
John Wilkins states that:
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Likewise, the science in any metaphysical story must be correct, but no metaphysical story is science. The difference is that rational inference in an individual is relative to the commitments of an individual, but in science there are no such shared commitments beyond an attention to empirical measurement, and the construction of models to generalise within a domain of explanation.
I wish this was the case but it isn't.
Science does have a metaphysical story or stories and some of those are tied to things like empirical measurement, an example being the "sensationalist doctrine of perception." In fact John gives an example of one outside it ... revelation. However it gets worse, measurement has been found to be theory-laden just within this doctrine, the faith that it wasn't was one of the great mistakes of the logical empiricists.
Priveledged access to ultimate reality would be a great and needed step to omniscience but without such access all we're left with is just "relative truths", sort of like the shadows on Plato's cave.
Much more could be said on the metaphysics of measurement but let's turn to the belief that any experience can be rationally explained. An assumption found in many places within science and acedemia is that reality in it's ultimate sense or even experience within a domain will always be rationally understandable. Another one that's popular is that the highest form of thinking is ratiional thinking, or that arational or supra-rational thinking can't exist. Of course if ultimate reality is indeterministic in the grand sense that it's beyond human conceptualization, then we're again in Plato's cave. Mystics have said just this for thousands of years.
[ 09. December 2002, 11:13: Message edited by: Mark Szlazak ]
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Janitor@MIT
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posted 09. December 2002 12:16
“When we have eliminated all known chance hypotheses why should we infer Intelligent Design and not ‘we don't know’?”—Frances
“I don’t know,” are probably the three toughest words that a scientist can ever utter. Even though they often say just that through a variety of (sometimes hilariously contorted) circumlocutions. I believe, only half-facetiously, that these very words should appear prominently somewhere near the top and bottom of virtually every scientific paper published. However, even though “I don’t know,” is generally well warranted (being the ineliminable epistemic condition of life), we do know enough about design to draw some conclusions, and “I don’t know” comes uncomfortably close to saying, “I don’t know what I should know.”
Darwin can certainly be forgiven for not knowing much about design, in a scientific way, because no one then knew much about design scientifically. We are not in the same position today.
Unfortunately, theology and philosophy dominate this debate and virtually nothing about design science informs it. This is not however true of evolutionary science which borrows quite liberally (although not always to affect) from engineering design science and theory. In so far as the biologists are successful in adopting and adapting design concepts, theories, and methods from engineering then it is impossible logically to insist that evolutionary theory is “anti-design.”
This is why the Wilkens-Elsberry article is little more than an argument from ignorance of design. Design is not “rarefied” in biology. It is ubiquitous and pervasive. (See Csete, M.E. & J.C. Doyle, “Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity,” Science 295, pp. 1664-1669, March 1, 2002.) Whether one believes in some designer-in-the-sky or whether one believes Darwin’s words are etched in stone; life forms are definitively designs and sophisticated and complex designs at that. This is the fundamental and indeed revolutionary discovery of molecular biology ca. 1950, although it was always presumed to be true (!).
The IDers have not done enough, IMHO, to emphasize that biologists accept, if even only tacitly and implicitly, that design is a fact of life and that accounting for it is the central problem in biological theory. Now, if someone wants to argue that I’m equivocating between “design” and “evolution,” then please disabuse me. Tell me what the difference is? (I practically begged the participants to define “design.” Only Warren_Bergerson, thank you, sir, deigned to respond.)
It is a curiously surreal distraction for anyone to be arguing about whether we can or cannot “detect design,” or whether it does or does not exist in biology. See the article below where the authors state that the internal model/low-gain theorem of control engineering is a “law,” not only for engineers, but also for biologists. A consequential prediction as to the content of natural, biological law derived from “intelligent design” theory. Indeed, this elementary theorem provides for the quantification of design, another measure of design, wherever it might be found or however it might have evolved.
(See Tau-Mi Yi, Yun Huang, and John Doyle, “Robust perfect adaptation in bacterial chemotaxis through integral feedback control,” PNAS 97 (9), pp. 4649-4653, April 25, 2000, for an application of the theory to Behe’s controversial exemplar. In this article the authors seem to argue for the necessary convergence biology<>technology. This would be an interesting discussion point, and certainly far more productive of possibly useful insights than arguing over whether or not design can be detected.)
Wilkens and Elsberry might have just very briefly stated what Darwin in all forthrightness admitted—wrt design he was “color-blind.” How does one describe or explain colors to a color-blind individual? No doubt it can be grasped on some “intellectual” level. But it cannot be truly known or experienced. Just as there are some people handicapped unfortunately by the inability to rationally and scientifically comprehend the world, there are going to be some people who are incapable of rationally and scientifically comprehending the design of life. I may be a bastard—but the simple fact is that the world cannot be wholly shaped to accommodate the handicapped. It is incumbent upon the rest of us only to be helpful and not to place obstacles in their path—but there’s only so much one can do to help. Know what I mean?
Its silly to be arguing about “false positives” when one doesn’t admit the real possibility of a “positive”!
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Frances
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posted 09. December 2002 23:37
Dear Janitor
quote:
This is why the Wilkens-Elsberry article is little more than an argument from ignorance of design. Design is not “rarefied” in biology. It is ubiquitous and pervasive. (See Csete, M.E. & J.C. Doyle, “Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity,” Science 295, pp. 1664-1669, March 1, 2002.) Whether one believes in some designer-in-the-sky or whether one believes Darwin’s words are etched in stone; life forms are definitively designs and sophisticated and complex designs at that. This is the fundamental and indeed revolutionary discovery of molecular biology ca. 1950, although it was always presumed to be true (!).
One has to be careful not to equivocate over the meaning of the term design. You seem to suggest that you include natural design into the mix. And yet ID has been working hard on providing us with some tools to help us infer _intelligent_ design in some circumstances. The reason that the same is much more complicated in biological sciences is because the design is indeed rarefied leading to ambiguities in the usage of terms such as design. So when you quoting that 'design in biology is ubiquitous and pervasive, you are not necessarily talking about intelligent design but about us using design principles to help us understand the world around us.
Let's check out the reference you provide for us
From a review of the work found at:
"Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity by Csete & Doyle Gregory Ramsey"
The keypoints already show that my comments hit bullseye
quote:
The biological sciences have not had an adequate means for describing biological systems. If biologists are able to create models based on engineering control theory (employing closed-loop systems) it will aid in theory development.
The original paper
I would argue that without much more information, it is hard to argue that the presence of integral feedback control loops in biology has any relevance to intelligent design. So far the mechanisms seem quite natural and law like.
You also mention "Robust perfect adaptation in bacterial chemotaxis through integral feedback control"
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The necessity of integral feedback control is important to biologists, because they must reverse engineer systems ‘‘designed’’ by evolution. When a system exhibits robust asymptotic tracking, it must have integral feedback as a structural property of the system. When combined with biological realizability, this may greatly constrain, on the basis of external behavior, the possible internal mechanisms that can be used to achieve the observed behavior. Thus, one goal for the future is to catalog the types of basic biochemical networks that can implement integral control and other more sophisticated regulatory mechanisms. Barkai and Leibler provided one example of a simple enzyme system, an ‘‘adaptive module,’’ in which the activity of an enzyme E is influenced by modification. If the forward and reverse modification reactions depend on the system activity, then steady-state activity is independent of the ligand concentration (17).
It seems once again that integral feedback control loops may not be unexpected when robustness is an issue. We engineers may learn a lot from how evolution has worked its 'miracles'
Finally you argue that "Just as there are some people handicapped unfortunately by the inability to rationally and scientifically comprehend the world, there are going to be some people who are incapable of rationally and scientifically comprehending the design of life". There of course are a variety of reasons why people are unable to accept the concept of ID and while there may be some who are incapable of 'rationally and scientifically' compreheding the design of life, most critics of ID have focused on the scientific weaknesss of design. Similarly there may be some people 'jst as there are some people handicapped by their inability to rationally and scientifically to comprehend the world who are incapable of comprehending that the design may be purely apparant'. I hope that you realize that your argument fails on many fronts? May I also point out to you that your 'argument' seems unnecessarily 'ad hominem'.
I appreciate that some people see design wherever they look and I marvel at their faith but when we are talking science we cannot just take these rarefied and thus highly subjective forms of design and claim that nature exhibits 'ubiquitous and pervasive' evidence of design. If it were that easy, Dembski and Behe and others would not be working hard on the scientific hypotheses that would help us detect intelligent design in nature.
Thus we get to:
quote:
Its silly to be arguing about “false positives” when one doesn’t admit the real possibility of a “positive”!
That conclusion does not seem to follow. In fact in such cases any 'positives' would be 'false positives' so it is very important to make such an argument. But may I ask if you would similarly consider it 'silly to argue about positives when one does not admit the real possibility of false positives'?
You raised the very interesting issue of integral control loops in biology which peaked my interests
Feedback Control Theory and the challenges of postgenomic Molecular Biology Eduardo D. Sontag
Basic control theory for biologists
Cell signaling pathways as control modules: Complexity for simplicity?
It seems that it may be too early to jump to any conclusions of the relevance of this to Intelligent Design. But perhaps Janitor could explain us through what approach we may be able to determine if ID has any relevance here? I would think such would certainly classify as a positive contribution to Intelligent Design. Is it merely the use of the design paradigm which is important? Or is there more?
I also would like to point to the Following paper by Doyle
quote:
The lattice models were motivated by the desire to illustrate HOT by using familiar accessible models from statistical physics. In this context, adding even simple design mechanisms produces
results that are strikingly different. Despite their extreme abstraction and simplicity, the models provide clear connections between microscopic mechanisms and macroscopic features.
They further capture how intrinsic robust design tradeoffs interact with and constrain natural selection and engineering design to generate highly ordered structure, even from initial
randomness. Indeed, simple HOT models match all of the features of our motivating examples and data, as summarized in Table 1, and aside from the existence of power laws, their properties are the opposite of SOC. In addition, what emerged
was a very particular, although we believe fundamental, abstraction of biological and engineering complexity: building highly
structured barriers to cascading failures.
It may be interesting to relate these power laws, feedback control and self similarity.
I believe that these topics are closely related. I am presently exploring some of the exciting software tools and will let you know if I find more interesting things. I have always been somewhat of a 'control freak' ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
[ 10. December 2002, 00:50: Message edited by: Frances ]
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Janitor@MIT
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posted 11. December 2002 15:15
Sorry, Frances, I realize you’ve been ganged up on lately, and I’m sympathetic, but also impatient.
“One has to be careful not to equivocate over the meaning of the term design.”—Francis
Please, indulge me, how do you define “design”? W/o addressing directly what are, no doubt, a whole slew of largely unsubstantiated provocative blurbs, “design is a fact of life,” a “law,” and “ubiquitous and pervasive,” you’ve simply implied that I’m equivocating. Well, maybe I am, but you have not helped me to understand where I’ve gone wrong. Help me out here…
As I indicated, I feel that this talk about “rarefied" design is nonsense. Your (and Wilkins & Elsberry’s) argument is with the authors of these papers. I simply took up the authors argument that design is “pervasive” and “ubiquitous.” In your reading of the papers you apparently didn’t pick up on that—like those individuals who trip over the truth, get up, brush themselves off, and continue on their way as if nothing happened. (I do this so often I should get in a habit of filling my pockets with bandages before I take a stroll.)
“Advanced technologies and biology have extremely different physical implementations, but they are far more alike in systems-level organization than is widely appreciated (Csete & Doyle 2002).” No doubt, Wilkins and Elsberry have failed to appreciate the fact. Why? Many reasons. Their obvious intent is to defeat some species of design inference or argument. I don’t envy them the labor that must necessarily be involved—“Powerful and procrustean,” in the words of Susan Oyama (1985. The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.), the “argument from design” is pervasive in modern biology. (There is a rev. ed. issued 2000, with Lewontin listed as co-author.) Eliminating it is going to be nothing less than top-to-bottom overhaul of contemporary biological theory and research. Good luck! At least Oyama and Lewontin, powerful allies, are in agreement.
One of the reasons why the ubiquity of design is not appreciated is that “In advanced systems, designed features are so dominant and pervasive that we often take them for granted… As a consequence, it can be difficult to precisely characterize and quantify the role of design in complex technical and biological systems without going into great detail. Nevertheless, HOT [Highly or Heuristically Optimized Tolerance] illustrates that design leads to fundamental characteristics missed by theories that ignore design (Csete & Doyle 2002, p. 2545. Emphasis added.).”
“Some of the most cherished and appealing of traditional theoretical concepts in science and engineering are entirely misleading when applied to advanced technological systems. The central issue here is that advanced technologies (and biology) use protocols and feedback to create what amounts to deliberate illusions [?!] regarding their systems-level behavior. Thus theories that do not fundamentally address protocols and feedback, which is essentially all theory in science and most of engineering, simply do not address the complexity aspects of systems (Doyle et al, ‘Robustness and the Internet: Theoretical Foundations,’ PDF online and in the ISCID Bibliography. Emphasis added.).”
One of the interesting arguments (made by Doyle) is that comparatively simple DST & statistical physics models of “emergent” or “self-organizing” complexity are reducible to, but not identical with, “primitive” design models. This has been one of my arguments with Darwin since college—Darwin’s is a simple theory of design that seems to well explain simple (i.e., rarefied) designs. Unfortunately, that is not what begs explanation. I believe (in all “faith”?) that more sophisticated and explicitly design-based models are necessary—especially if, as the authors argue (but do not establish), complex biological and technological designs are necessarily convergent.
Ultimately, I’m interested in the application of “intelligent design,” i.e., advanced engineering design concepts, methods, and theories to biology and its evolution, because I have long believed that the future of technology is “life-like.” (Just trying to get ahead of the learning curve here.) Accordingly, as you’ve almost implied, I take a more “agnostic,” instrumentalist-operationalist perspective, and therefore less theoretically and philosophically rigid position. I’m less interested in the IDers philosophical, theological, and political programs (if they have such). But I am intrigued by the reaction of their critics to the IDers—it is a marvelous case study in the self-transformation of science. How do we, as scientists, respond when some our cherished and appealing traditional theoretical concepts are questioned and challenged? I don’t believe, wrt to the IDers, we have acquitted ourselves effectively or admirably here. Maybe because our cherished traditional concepts have not served us as well has we hoped…
I’ve appealed repeatedly for a broader understanding of design and evolution. Maybe the very idea of a “broader understanding” is objectionable? Although I don’t see how it could be for a scientist. But I await Frances’ insights on “design.”
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Mike Gene
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posted 12. December 2002 01:19
Y'know, as I read through the biological literature, more and more these days, I say to myself: "Y'gotta be a gosh darn engineer to understand this stuff!"
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Paul A. Nelson
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posted 12. December 2002 09:08
John,
I'm still trying to understand your position. You write, of rarefied design:
quote:
Nothing can license that conclusion as a scientific result, because in science such interpretations are inadmissible.
I take it that you would disagree with Kitcher, then, when he argued:
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Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more unscientific than postulating unobserved particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the ways in which they are articulated and defended. (P. Kitcher, Abusing Science, 1982, p. 126)
Your point, however, seems to be that rarefied design is inadmissible as a scientific inference in principle. That is, we are forbidden by the rules of science to infer an unobserved designer (a) irrespective of the evidence, and (b) irrespective of the predictive power or explanatory strength of our design theory. It wouldn't matter -- to use Kitcher's desiderata -- how well-articulated the design theory might be, or how empirical its character.
Is that right?
[ 12. December 2002, 09:09: Message edited by: Paul A. Nelson ]
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Wesley R. Elsberry
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posted 13. December 2002 11:07
Paul,
I'm not sure that John is disagreeing with Kitcher. Kitcher is talking about postulates, things that are assumed to be true for some line of inquiry. Rarefied design as an inference, though, is something that some people assert can be concluded from particular premises.
The problem with a postulate of the sort that Kitcher discusses, though, is that someone like Paul Nelson will come along and claim that what is being argued is theology and not science (as your 1997 NTSE talk set forth).
If "postulating an unobserved Creator" were as generally productive as "postulating unobserved particles" has been in physics, I don't think that we would be having this sort of discussion now. Postulating unobserved particles has led to specific hypotheses and experiments aimed at producing empirical data which would bear on whether outcomes based on the existence of those heretofore unobserved particles are actually there. So far in ID, though, there is no similar push to test the postulate: once the unobserved Creator is postulated, no evidence concerning whether that Creator exists is sought after or solicited.
But I wonder if this is going far afield from the topic of the first post.
Have readers of Dembski really been "thrown" by the "reliability issue"? Is it the critics who have the "lust for certainty"? I don't think so.
Let's revisit some history. Back in 1998, Dembski published his book, "The Design Inference". Before TDI came out, though, Dembski had a short piece published in "First Things" which discussed what TDI would be about. Here's a snippet of that article:
quote:
Biologists worry about attributing something to design (here identified with creation) only to have it overturned later; this widespread and legitimate concern has prevented them from using intelligent design as a valid scientific explanation.
Though perhaps justified in the past, this worry is no longer tenable. There now exists a rigorous criterion—complexity-specification—for distinguishing intelligently caused objects from unintelligently caused ones.
(Source: Science and Design)
This claim has not been explicitly retracted. It is echoed in the pages of "No Free Lunch" (p.6, IIRC). It sure looks like a claim concerning certainty to me.
In that initial post, Dembski writes:
quote:
I argue that we are justified asserting specified complexity (and therefore design) once we have eliminated all known material mechanisms. It means that some unknown mechanism might eventually pop up and overturn a given design inference.
This seems to me to be inconsistent with, if not contradictory to, the earlier claim. Perhaps, though, you have a different perspective that can accommodate both the "untenable worry" claim and the later admission that Dembski's "design inferences" can be overturned with additional knowledge.
Until such time as we get a statement from Dembski that the "untenable worry" claim is retracted, though, I think the critics are completely correct to hammer on this point. Else we have the apparently inconsistent stance that the critics responding to the "untenable worry" claim are mistaken because application of the EF/DI is fallible, coupled with the continued use of the "untenable worry" claim whose basis is that application of the EF/DI is infallible for distinguishing intelligently caused objects.
quote:
This is known as having your cake and eating it. Polite society frowns on such obvious bad taste.
Wesley
[Edit out site-promoting link]
[ 13. January 2003, 07:38: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 14. December 2002 20:07
Does Wesley's dissatisfaction just boil down to two things.
1) In the last decade, the ID God hypothesis hasn't produced any or enough as useful predictions as the micro-billiard ball hypothesis, supposedly over the same time span with adjustments for the number of people working on each.
Since both seem so equally simple, he ain't asking for much! Maybe another weeks extension will help.
2) Dembski was initially much to over-enthusiastic about his claims, unlike those poor, humble and tentative neo-Darwinists.
It seems that recently Dr. Dembski has become more tentative as well, I wonder if that will really be the case with the opposition?
Is that it!
[ 14. December 2002, 20:32: Message edited by: Mark Szlazak ]
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Wesley R. Elsberry
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posted 15. December 2002 08:43
Mark,
quote:
Does Wesley's dissatisfaction just boil down to two things.
I get the feeling that rather than inquire whether this is the case, that this post is trying to assert this.
quote:
1) In the last decade, the ID God hypothesis hasn't produced any or enough as useful predictions as the micro-billiard ball hypothesis, supposedly over the same time span with adjustments for the number of people working on each.
Since both seem so equally simple, he ain't asking for much! Maybe another weeks extension will help.
This has the character of a strawman argument. If Mark would re-read what I wrote, he would find no reference to "the last decade". What I did discuss, and what Mark does not touch upon, is the privileged position of a postulated Creator in ID conjectures. Once postulated, no attempt is made to determine whether the postulate is valid, and even broaching the topic is anathema to many ID advocates. This contrasts strongly with how certain other "unobservable" postulates are treated in science. Kitcher's insight is still quite useful.
quote:
2) Dembski was initially much to over-enthusiastic about his claims, unlike those poor, humble and tentative neo-Darwinists.
It seems that recently Dr. Dembski has become more tentative as well, I wonder if that will really be the case with the opposition?
Is that it!
IMO, humble or not, Dembski continues to be "much too over-enthusiastic about his claims". Page 6 of "No Free Lunch" only dates back to January of 2002, after all. I'm sure Bill does not need anyone to attempt to defend his arguments with another instance of the tu quoque fallacy, though.
Wesley
[Edit out site-promoting link]
[ 13. January 2003, 07:48: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 16. December 2002 00:19
Wesley, you say this about the God idea behind ID,
quote:
Once postulated, no attempt is made to determine whether the postulate is valid, and even broaching the topic is anathema to many ID advocates.
Really! How do you know they haven't been thinking of ways to do this all along and they're only in alpha stage before they're ready to release their beta's on the road to release candidate for version one. Hopefully, they wouldn't charge too much extra for later service packs like Microsoft.
If that's the case then my first comment stands. I'm being charitable and don't feel that they're trying to be deceptive. However, you seem to think that they are. Now that's juicy, do you have evidence for that charge or is that just how you feel about the situation?
quote:
IMO, humble or not, Dembski continues to be "much too over-enthusiastic about his claims". Page 6 of "No Free Lunch" only dates back to January of 2002, after all.
It's almost 2003 after all, so nothing he's written since counts?
[ 16. December 2002, 00:37: Message edited by: Mark Szlazak ]
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Frances
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posted 16. December 2002 02:11
Hi Mark,
I do not think you are correct to conclude from Wesley's comments that he is accusing 'them of being deceptive'. It may be helpful if one addresses the arguments and not create one's own strawmen to beat down.
What did Wesley state is quite simple:
quote:
What I did discuss, and what Mark does not touch upon, is the privileged position of a postulated Creator in ID conjectures. Once postulated, no attempt is made to determine whether the postulate is valid, and even broaching the topic is anathema to many ID advocates
Perhaps the ID movement may have been thinking about this but that surely seems to be a top secret project :-)
Wesley raised some very good points. Lets stick to his arguments and try to refrain from distracting from them through the use of strawmen.
What I would like to see is perhaps addressing Wesley's observations that
quote:
If "postulating an unobserved Creator" were as generally productive as "postulating unobserved particles" has been in physics, I don't think that we would be having this sort of discussion now. Postulating unobserved particles has led to specific hypotheses and experiments aimed at producing empirical data which would bear on whether outcomes based on the existence of those heretofore unobserved particles are actually there. So far in ID, though, there is no similar push to test the postulate: once the unobserved Creator is postulated, no evidence concerning whether that Creator exists is sought after or solicited.
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Wesley R. Elsberry
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posted 16. December 2002 02:53
Mark,
quote:
Wesley, you say this about the God idea behind ID,
quote:
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Once postulated, no attempt is made to determine whether the postulate is valid, and even broaching the topic is anathema to many ID advocates.
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Really! How do you know they haven't been thinking of ways to do this all along and they're only in alpha stage before they're ready to release their beta's on the road to release candidate for version one. Hopefully, they wouldn't charge too much extra for later service packs like Microsoft.
If that's the case then my first comment stands. I'm being charitable and don't feel that they're trying to be deceptive. However, you seem to think that they are. Now that's juicy, do you have evidence for that charge or is that just how you feel about the situation?
This is getting bizarre. A false dilemma is provided here by Mark to go with the strawman of the first post. I haven't said anything here about "deception", and I don't feel like being treated to a smorgasbord of fallacies. Mark's mindreading skills seem to be, ahem, not very well developed.
Since I don't claim to be a mindreader, I'm not particularly interested in the "bare possibility" that the situation in ID advocacy will change drastically next week. I am interested in what has been observed thus far, and nothing Mark provides here would indicate that my reportage has been anything but dead-on accurate. Many ID advocates have dismissed suggestions that the existence or nature of a postulated "designer" be explored rather than being treated as a "brute given". If Mark insists, I'll be happy to start a thread on collecting instances to document this claim. But I think that this should be stipulated. It is not an extraordinary claim.
quote:
quote:
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IMO, humble or not, Dembski continues to be "much too over-enthusiastic about his claims". Page 6 of "No Free Lunch" only dates back to January of 2002, after all.
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It's almost 2003 after all, so nothing he's written since counts?
Dembski provided both tentative and non-tentative claims concerning his EF/DI in NFL. See page 6 for a non-tentative claim, and page 14 for a tentative-style claim. Nothing he has written since has been a retraction of the non-tentative statements used in NFL. At least, nothing that I've seen does that. I'd appreciate a reference if the "untenable worry" claim has been explicitly retracted.
Wesley
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[ 13. January 2003, 07:49: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Wesley R. Elsberry
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posted 16. December 2002 04:12
Frances,
quote:
Wesley raised some very good points. Lets stick to his arguments and try to refrain from distracting from them through the use of strawmen.
I was actually trying to steer discussion back around to Dembski's arguments given in the initial post. Perhaps I should have left Paul's interchange with John alone, but I thought I could clarify things there pretty quickly and move on. I may have been wrong about how quickly...
I appreciate the moderator letting the discussion continue in this thread at all, since it doesn't really seem to have a "brainstorming" style topic. It is a pretty straightforward response to criticism, and in this case the critics have chosen to get somewhat involved. (My involvement needs to be limited, as I'm getting acquainted with LaTeX for preparation of my dissertation and also have the usual daytime job. Well, perhaps not that usual.)
Anyway, I think that what should be followed are Dembski's arguments.
Here's one:
quote:
(William A. Dembski:) Briefly, the claim that specified complexity is a reliable marker of design means that if an item genuinely instantiates specified complexity, then it was designed. As I argue and continue to maintain, no counterexamples to this claim are known.
I was there when Ken Miller presented the Krebs cycle as a counterexample to Dembski on June 21st of this year. I think that Dembski should note that counterexamples have been proposed by Miller and also Rob Pennock. Now, it is a given that these have not been demonstrated to Dembski's personal satisfaction, but I think Dembski's phrasing of his claim is somewhat misleading to the reader.
Further, I think the claim doesn't mean much, anyway. Since 1996, Dembski has provided EF/DI calculations, in various degrees of completeness, for a total of four events.
- The Caputo case
- The Contact primes sequence
- Dawkins's METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL string
- The E. coli flagellum
(If I've missed an application of the EF/DI that comes with actual numbers and complies with more than two or three of the seven steps outlined on pages 72-73 of NFL, please let me know so I can expand the list.)
That's not much of an empirical base upon which to build such sweeping claims as the "no counterexamples" claim above.
Back in 2001 at Haverford College, I made the point to Dembski that collecting "confirming" cases does nothing to test his EF/DI. I suggested that he apply his EF/DI and perform calculations for a number of events that could be agreed have sufficient evidence of natural causation to provide real tests of his EF/DI. These included the Krebs cycle, since shown by Miller to be a real counterexample (well, he convinced me). I also suggested the mammalian middle ear impedance-matching system and "fairy rings" as good candidates for testing the EF/DI.
I think I brought up the point that the EF/DI should be applied to a broad range of biological phenomena at the June 21st get-together at the Fourth World Skeptics conference. Create a workbook style presentation of a series of EF/DI calculations starting with small-scale events that everyone can agree should not trigger a "design inference" and work up to larger-scale events that biologists have evidence for saying that natural causes are sufficient. Is the EF/DI a good guide to classifying biological phemomena? Until we see a series of real examples of complete application of it, I think that the issue is still wide open.
Well, I'll come clean. I expect that if such a workbook were attempted, that the EF/DI would find "design" at ludicrously small-scale events, ones that not even Bill Dembski would want to go on record as saying that they must be considered to be "due to design". I think that Dembski's statement at the end of TDI that a "design" conclusion is not easily reached via the EF/DI is simply false. A simple way to show me wrong is to actually produce such a compendium of example EF/DI calculations, where the EF/DI performs in a stable manner and produces expected (by ID advocates, natch) results.
The production of such a workbook would also do much to vitiate another criticism of mine, which is that the EF/DI framework is too unwieldy to be applied. Dembski says of Gell-Mann's "effective complexity" that it "resists detailed application to real-world problems" (I think that's verbatim, but I don't have NFL in front of me. Check around page 133.). I think Dembski's EF/DI very much "resists detailed application to real-world problems", and the fact that Dembski has offered so few EF/DI calculations (even including the only partially complete E. coli flagellum example) supports my view. Of the four examples, the Contact primes examples is plainly fictitious, neither the Caputo case nor the METHINKS string yield an improbability smaller than Dembski's "universal small probability", and the E. coli flagellum example suffers from a large number of defects. Does it really take a year-and-a-half, on average, to apply the EF/DI to any sort of problem, no matter how trivial or how many steps are skipped?
I'd be interested in hearing if any third party has attempted to apply or applied the seven-step process outlined on pages 72-73 of NFL. I know of no such examples yet.
Wesley
[Edit out site-promoting link]
[Fixed a couple of typos. - WRE]
[ 13. January 2003, 07:49: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Evan
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posted 16. December 2002 13:14
I appreciate Wesley’s post on these issues.
In earlier threads on an ID Research Program, both RBH and I made some suggestions (one of which appears to have been mentioned by Dembski in his RAPID speech.)
1) Methods for applying the EF to biological events need to be developed so they can be applied to simple events that we are fairly sure (intuitively) are not designed. In this way, the methods (whatever they might turn out to be) would gain some credibility and allow themselves the opportunity to be refined as the bugs were worked out in their application. These methods needs to be clearcut enough that the reproducible results are possible.
It will not be enough, I think, for the filter to rely merely on negative arguments that no plausible set of events can explain the occurrence of X. Until there are ways to measure and calculate the probability of biological events, there will not be any verification that this approach can actually distinguish designed from non-designed events.
2) A catalog of thing that are intuitively thought to be designed needs to be compiled, so that the eventual targets of the methods described in 1) above are clear.
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John Wilkins
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posted 16. December 2002 22:08
Janitor said
quote:
This has been one of my arguments with Darwin since college—Darwin’s is a simple theory of design that seems to well explain simple (i.e., rarefied) designs.
You are misusing Wes' and my term here. "Rarified" design is design about which we know nothing, and which the designer is unknowable. Simple design is just noncomplex ordinary design. If a rarified design inference is made, it is not made by analogy with known designers, none of whom are able to make the laws by which they then operate, or are able to precognitively foresee the outcomes of their design. Ordinary designers act by trial and error, and by learning from their mistakes. This is a kind of "darwinism", and you are perfectly correct that Darwinism proper is a theory of ordinary design (although, since ordinary design typically involves intentional agents, I would rather expunge the word "design" and cognates from biological evolutionary models, which do not involve intentionality).
Paul wrote:
quote:
I take it that you would disagree with Kitcher, then, when he argued:
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Even postulating an unobserved Creator need be no more unscientific than postulating unobserved particles. What matters is the character of the proposals and the ways in which they are articulated and defended. (P. Kitcher, Abusing Science, 1982, p. 126)
Your point, however, seems to be that rarefied design is inadmissible as a scientific inference in principle. That is, we are forbidden by the rules of science to infer an unobserved designer (a) irrespective of the evidence, and (b) irrespective of the predictive power or explanatory strength of our design theory. It wouldn't matter -- to use Kitcher's desiderata -- how well-articulated the design theory might be, or how empirical its character.
Is that right?
I'm sure you know it isn't. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Kitcher is not, from this quote, offering the claim that rarified design is a reasonable inference to make. I know, as he does, that in the history of science (ending around 1850 or so, and not because of Darwin in particular) God was postulated as a theoretical entity with properties that helped explain the otherwise imponderable aspects of theories. Newton, for example, could not see how his orbital system would be stable for very long, and so he introduced God as a "stabiliser". Laplace showed how the solar system would be stable, and so when his former student Napoleon asked where God fit into his hypothesis, he very properly said, "I have no need of that hypothesis, Sire".
But this relies on an independent knowledge of the nature of God. this is not a design inference, it is a design explication. Since God is no longer a viable theoretical entity in science (due to the God of the gaps phenomenon that Bonhoeffer noted), this is no longer a legitimate move, but it was at least as reasonable in that context as postulating an unobservable atom.
But note also what Kitcher says here: "What matters is the character of the proposals and the ways in which they are articulated and defended." Scientific proposals have to do work - they must be definite, measurable and explanatory. Newton's divine stabiliser is all of this - we can see on Newton's calculations how much God has to intervene to keep things in orbit (a quantity which Laplace removes with his more elaborate calculations), and it is very definite what God has to do. It is certainly explanatory.
Design of the rarified variety is none of these. There is no quantifiable sense in which "A designer created this gene sequence" is correct for rarified design. We do not know what the default state was, how the gene sequence was changed, or how the designer was able to infer that the novel sequence would work out in the environment (if trial and error, the hallmark of ordinary design, is not used).
These are the reasons why rarified design is not science. It lacks the explanatory power of a scientific theory. It may very well work as a theological inference, abnd I cannot deny believers that option (although it has no power for me), but it isn't science.
Incidentally, what is the predictive power of the design theory, exactly? What does it say we should expect, before the event, to observe?
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