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Author
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Topic: Cataloguing Criticisms of Specified Complexity
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Micah Sparacio
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Member # 6
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posted 12. April 2003 10:09
Cataloguing Criticisms of Specified Complexity
In this thread I'd like to develop a list of legitimate criticisms of Dembski's notion of Specified Complexity as a tool for scientific use.
Here are the guidelines:
1. Be concise
2. No links
3. In your own words
4. Label your criticism as C* where * is a sequential number
5. No comments on the criticisms of others unless it is essential to developing your own criticism.
Here's my initial criticism:
C1: Theoretically compelling but too stringent on the UPB to be scientific useful. Too much effort put into keeping out false positives. In order to be freely applied scientifically, some effort needs to be put in to testing a scientifically useful Probability Bound.
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gedanken
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posted 12. April 2003 11:03
Micah, do you mean the use of "specified complexity", as in the EF, or do you mean the term itself? (Thus is a criticism of the EF per se a subject of this thread?)
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Evan
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posted 12. April 2003 13:28
Micah, it’s good of you to ask. Here’s my 2¢. I have limited these comments to just complexity and specificity, I think. I have not addressed the related topics of the EF, IC, and the various design/designer issues.
Complexity
C2) Imprecision of definition. On the one hand, Dembski defines complexity as being the reciprocal of the probability of something occurring via natural processes. Irrespective of the problems with this definition itself (see below), complexity is also used, by both Dembski and others, as referring to a measure of a state of an entity or event that is is independent of its history. For definition 2, one should theoretically be able to just look at the intricacies of the parts and their relationships of something and decide that it exhibits complexity, but for definition #1 one needs to know the history of the object. This confusion, and arguments which slide between the two meanings, is a major problem.
C3) Lack of measurability. There are no empirically useful measures for either of the definitions above that are applicable to biology. As I and others have argued, measurable and reproducible methods for establishing biological complexity (in either sense) need to be established such that they can reliably be applied to a full spectrum of phenomena - from those things we feel certainly are not complex in either sense to those that might be complex in the designed sense. No such procedures have been offered.
C4) Over-reliance on analogy. Almost all the arguments and examples of specified complexity rely on analogies with non-biological things: mousetraps, combination locks, outboard motors, etc. Analogies may be useful for understanding or stimulating thought, but analogies prove nothing. Only when the analogous aspects are tested against the true nature of the object of the analogy can one decide whether the analogy is apt or not.
C5) Over reliance on philosophical arguments without empirical content. For instance, the many versions of the “nature can’t create new information” arguments fail to ground themselves in empirically useful definitions or provide empirically useable procedures. (This is a more general problem that encompasses both points a and b above.) Philosophy, metaphysics, and theology are important fields of thought, but for them to actually lead to scientific knowledge, they must eventually connect with empirical data.
2) Specificity
C6 A similar set of concerns apply. There are no empirical, reproducible definitions or procedures for determining specificity in a biological context. Almost all arguments are based on things like throwing dice and scrabble pieces. Arguments from analogy abound - a flagellum is like an outboard motor, so its specified, but some reason the fact that a river system is like a plumbing system doesn’t lead to the same conclusion about the rivers. In general, specificity when applied to biology always looks to me like drawing the target around the arrow.
All of the above concerns have been presented at length by various critics of ID. My purpose here is just to summarize them, as Micah asked.
[ 12. April 2003, 16:23: Message edited by: Evan ]
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Evan
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posted 12. April 2003 16:30
Note to my above post: I support Micah's suggestions for the "rules" for this thread, and I renumbered my points as per his guideline.
I would like to point out that my C3 is an extension of his C1. The problem is not so much that the UPB is too stringent, but rather that we have absolutely no techniques for measuring the probabilities needed to compare to the UPB. To be scientifically useful, we need scientifically testable procedures for both calculating the expected probablilities of biological events and for testing whether those calculated probabilities match reality. Only after such procedures are developed and a body of data gathered will we be in a position to consider what boundary, if any, truly distinguishes the designed from the non-designed.
[ 12. April 2003, 16:43: Message edited by: Evan ]
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Micah Sparacio
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posted 12. April 2003 18:31
Gedanken,
Criticism can be both of the utility and theory of specified complexity.
1. Is the notion scientifically useful?
2. Is the theory behind specified complexity strong?
I can imagine criticisms of Dembski's formulation of specificaiton, his use of complexity, etc. My interest is to get a feel for where others see weak spots in Dembski's work. I've got a general sense of some (a few) of these criticisms, but I'd like to collect them all in one spot.
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yersinia
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Member # 324
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posted 12. April 2003 18:53
C7: Dembski's original formulation of the CSI (complex specified information, i.e. specified complexity) argument was to:
(1) rule out chance causes (which can only produce small amounts of "specified information" -- the definition of this is difficult but we can think of it as a e.g. "functional DNA changes with a probability of random occurence greater than 10^-150"),
(2) rule out regular causes (which can only transmit "specified information", not increase it), and
(3) If (1) and (2) were successful, conclude design.
However this failed to rule out the very important possiblity of variation + natural selection, a combination of chance & regularity, which could randomly generate small amounts of specified information via chance and then preserve them (on average) via selection. Thus even hundreds or thousands of bits of SI (at some point we pass the 10^-150 random-generation-probability limit and reach CSI) could be generated by gradual accumulation.
To patch this hole, Dembski turned to Behe's concept of Irreducible Complexity. The beginnings of this are seen in his book Intelligent Design and IC is emphasized further in No Free Lunch. IMO Dembski's SC argument is in fact entirely dependent on the IC argument.
So C7 is: Dembski's SC argument boils down to Behe's IC argument, thus the SC argument adds nothing to the debate.
======================
C8 is that the IC argument has been subject to a number of severe criticisms, especially regarding indirect evolutionary pathways. In recent articles Dembski seems to have been hedging his bets by saying that even if convincing evolutionary pathways to IC/SC were found (to his satisfaction) that the SC would still somehow imply design via obscure means (front-loading the fitness function, but conceiving this in practical ecological terms is difficult).
Summary of C8: Dembski having an emergency backup design scenario in case it turns out that IC/SC can evolve removes the SC-->ID argument from being falsifiable even in principle.
[ 12. April 2003, 18:54: Message edited by: yersinia ]
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Alix Nenuphar
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posted 12. April 2003 19:03
C9: Misuse of an inductive argument by the assertion of no false positives.
As I understand it, specified complexity as used in the filter guarantees no false positives. But the argument is inductive in nature, i.e. it relies on the possibility of sweeping the field of all chance, regularity, and chance+regularity scenarios, without examining each in detail beyond what is required to assign a probability to the scenario. Nothing in this process guarantees that some highly unlikely natural scenario might not in fact, occur and be mis-identified by the filter.
[ 12. April 2003, 19:08: Message edited by: Alix Nenuphar ]
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Erik
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posted 13. April 2003 10:15
C10: One thing that can be said in favour of the definition of "specified complexity" is that it is detailed. To check if the definition is satisfied, one must specify a sample space, the set of hypotheses to be eliminated, the event under study, the specification, the value of the rejection function everywhere on the sample space, and background knowledge which "explicitly and univocally" identifies the rejection function. In practice, Dembski does not take his own definition seriously and in none of his examples has he provided the details needed to verify that the definition is satisfied. It is symptomatic that Dembski failed to specify any of these details in his analysis of the flagellum.
C11: The term "specified complexity" is a redundant, obfuscatory middle-man that serves no non-rhetorical purpose (it is apparently the name of the state of affairs that someone has sucessfully eliminated a set of non-ID hypotheses using the Explanatory Filter). It adds nothing to the actual argument, but it invites equivocation with other concepts with the same name (e.g. Paul Davies's concept) and with intuitive concepts of "complexity" that lack any a priori connection to specified complexity. Dembski also seems to equivocate between specified complexity w.r.t. to a uniform probability assumption and specified complexity w.r.t. all known natural causes.
C12: I have not checked all the relevant publications, but to the best of my knowledge at most one person has been able to apply Dembski's concepts and methods to a real example, namely Dembski himself. It's been something like five years the methods were first formulated and only one real application (the flagellum calculation) has been published. That no one except its creator has been able to apply the method and concepts, not even to simpler non-trivial real-world cases than the origin of flagella, is clear testament to its lack of scientific utility in its current state.
C13: The form of the Explanatory Filter gives ID a free-ride by asking us to accept a general "ID hypothesis" without evaluating the merits, or lack thereof, of this hypothesis. It also assumes the existence of a sharp dividing line separating non-intelligence and intelligence. Hypotheses involving intelligence are to lumped into the general ID hypothesis and protected from being subject to critical evaluations of their merits. This assumption is made without a definition of "intelligence".
C14: The definition of the concept of "specification" is so subjective that specifications, like the appeal of painting, are in the eye of the beholder. To establish that something is a "specification" all you do (and can do!) is to assert that you have background knowledge that allows you to explicitly and univocally identify a superset of the event in question without recourse to the event, and hope that the rest of the world believes you.
C15: The Universal Probability Bound is a reasonable estimate iff the definitions are strictly adhered to and intelligence is not as magical as Dembski assumes. This means, among other things, that one must be sure to specify the rejection function on the entire sample space. Since the definitions are not strictly adhered to in practice, there is no reason to think that the UPB is an underestimate of the appropriate probability. In Dembski's terminology, vagueness translates to lots of specificational resources. Regarding intelligence, we must assume that the intelligent agent that applies Dembski's method is not sufficiently magical and creative to (e.g.) come up with a specification for every observed event, whatever it is. If intelligent agents can escape the implications of the NFL theorems for learning/inference and optimization, and do things that no natural causes can, then what prevents them from inventing a (non-trivial) specification for every event they investigate?
Erik
[ 13. April 2003, 10:28: Message edited by: Erik ]
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Micah Sparacio
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posted 13. April 2003 14:06
Discussion will eventually open up in this thread. For the time being, I'm looking for specific criticisms without discussion.
Legitimate criticisms need only show an awareness of the nuances on Dembski's argument: they need not be perfectly formed. For the time being, I'm more interested in putting together a collage of arguments rather than assessing their strength. Let's just say that illegitimate criticisms will be obvious rants.
[ 13. April 2003, 14:10: Message edited by: Micah Sparacio ]
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rossum
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posted 13. April 2003 18:32
rossum,
check out the rules of this thread. no commenting for the time being.
[ 13. April 2003, 19:54: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Rex Kerr
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Member # 632
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posted 14. April 2003 17:42
The numbering scheme should probably be reworked later, since some of the points already raised are redundant or unhelpful in deciding how to proceed. However, I will simply charge onward in the numbering scheme.
I have two mathematical criticisms:
C16
In NFL, Dembski broke the calculation of the probability of a specified set by allowing the specificational resources to include only specifications that are both simpler and rarer than the observed outcome. This is simply wrong, but fortunately can be fixed, as I do here. The criticism stands for any computation done with the NFL method of computing specificational resources.
C17
The result also is not mathematically solid if the language that one uses to describe a specification is dependent on the objects that one is trying to describe. Unfortunately, language is useful precisely when it depends on what exists; with a short phrase such as "Presidential Election Campaign" or "Pentium IV", we can very simply describe an extremely complex process or object. There is thus a fundamental problem: how can we avoid making it too easy to specify complex and arbitrary objects because, in fact, we have hidden that complexity inside the definition of words in our language (words which are not independent of the phenomenon in question)? This topic is, at least, under-addressed to the point where one would have limited confidence in the accuracy of any results of a probability calculation.
And I have one application criticism:
C18
There are precisely zero fully-worked-out positive examples of the design hypothesis applied to a scenario where there is known to be design. All examples to date have been sketches used for illustrative purposes. The mathematical results apply only if the determination of SC is made rigorously. A sketch is not typically regarded as a substitute for a positive validation, although after a rigorous positive validation, sketches can allow one to skip over the tedious and uninformative parts of a proof.
[ 15. April 2003, 17:07: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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Evan
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posted 19. April 2003 10:12
So Micah - now what?
Are you planning on summarizing these various concerns? Are we going to open up the various criticisms to further discussion?
Perhaps most importantly, will those in the ID community (most notably Dembski, but including you also) be interested and willing in responding to these criticisms?
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Micah Sparacio
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posted 19. April 2003 10:40
I have no idea what Bill plans on doing, but I was hoping to get to page two before doing anything further with the thread.
My plans from there (and after second semester winds up) are to open the discussion. When I get some free time, which doesn't come cheaply, I may organize these criticisms and then post summaries of what I see as the stronger ones in the ISCID Encyclopedia.
The most important thing for me, in starting this thread, was to get a survey feel for where people see problems in Bill's notion of specified complexity. There is no urgency on my part to see all the criticisms resolved. I'll be perfectly content with this thread if it only achieves the purpose of being a reference point for summaries of various criticisms.
Thanks for bringing the thread back up to the top though.
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gedanken
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posted 20. April 2003 00:44
C19
Take a case in which the prior probability is extremely low that a designer can effect the potential “design” being observed. (By this I do not mean that this is a generally usable method for evaluating cases, rather I am specifying that in this case that prior probability can be known. I do not mean that such prior probability can regularly be known.) Also assume that there is a rather high probability that something was missed in the steps of analyzing chance and necessity in the explanatory filter. (In other words that the “argument from ignorance” aspect actually may have an important case that the observer is ignorant of, and this is a high probability in this case.) In this case the Bayesean posterior probability that the “designer did it” is often lower than the posterior probability that the missed case is the explanation. Now considering cases in which the prior probability is unknown (a basic assumption of the normal application of the “explanatory filter”) the reasonableness of the EF is dependent on the actual prior probability, though unknown. If one has certain religious reasons, for example, of having differing views of that prior probability, then the result changes based on those views. The EF is not an objective methodology, and its “reliability” differs depending on precisely that prior probability.
[ 20. April 2003, 00:47: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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GP
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posted 20. April 2003 12:13
C20: As I previously discussed with Paul Nelson [* on the thread cited at the end of the post], I pointed out that Dembski's own displacement thesis seems to hinder any form of meaningful testing. If all forms of data representation that are passed through Dembski's EF are inherently the result of some intelligent (human) post-processing, I don't see how to provide valid controls for a verification experiment that would provide a baseline measure of how much SI this post-processing introduces. That is to say, my concern is with the data encoding itself displacing information in some manner.
For instance, suppose I want to test if a Shakespearean play was intelligently designed. But, rather than encoding the contents using ASCII encoding, I encode the words in reference to their order of appearance in Webster's Unabridged dictionary. Or suppose, I want to test if Beethoven's last piano concerto was intelligently designed. Rather than encode the audio according to the frequency content in the audidble range of human beings, I encoded it according to the audible range of vampire bats. Or perhaps, I measure the neural electrical impulses that come out of cranial nerve VIII of a test subject.
C21: The true positive vs. all the rest (i.e. false positive/ false negative/ true negative) distinction used to constrain the utility of Dembski's EF is a bit weak. In the absence of, for instance, true negative references, I do not see how a true positive is meaningful in any absolute sense. In other words, to hear the claim that X is truly designed, I'd like to know what is truly not designed. Otherwise, there exists the logical possibility that every object is designed, in which case claiming X is designed does not present much additional knowledge about what it means to be designed. More to the point, it diminishes the objectivity of the notion of design employed by Dembski. For instance, if I were to discover another filter that explains more designed items (including the ones that Dembski's EF might label incorrectly as false negatives), would that then mean that my filter is a better description of design? Or does that mean I have simply happened upon a different class of designed objects?
In any case, at the moment, I see no effort in discriminating between a false positive, a true negative, or a false negative. Indeed, Dembski dismisses the significance of false negatives all together. This approach is particularly frustrating for me because I could potentially offer many design scenarios that are clearly designs in some sense other than Dembski's, but fails the EF consistently for whatever reason.
* http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-6-t-000288.html
PS: oops, didn't say what I meant to say.
[ 20. April 2003, 12:21: Message edited by: GP ]
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