|
Author
|
Topic: Frank J. Tipler: Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?
|
Nel
Member
Member # 614
|
posted 05. July 2003 22:57
Charlie,
All of these are hypothesis that can be investigated. Every bit of them seems to stimulate research questions. For example, where Mike says 86% of C->T increase hydrophobicity.
We can ask if that is looking at,
for example,
TCT (Ser) -> TTT (Phe)?
How do you count mutations on the noncoding strand, where you see both strands of the codon sequence? For example,
GCT (Ala)
CGA
mutates one strand to
GCT
TGA
copies off mutated strand to give
ACT (Thr)
TGA
Does enolase of the degradosome function as an adapter or does it have no function or a not-so-sexy structural function? What are the implications for nanotechnology of having an example of this specific biological adapter?
I can go on and on.
[ 05. July 2003, 23:03: Message edited by: Nelson-Alonso ]
IP: Logged
|
|
Mike Gene
Member
Member # 149
|
posted 05. July 2003 23:29
Charlie,
Many people make a distinction between abiogenesis and evolution. My ID thinking erases that distinction – it’s called front-loading evolution. While non-teleologists find it interesting to look backwards and come up with simpler, sloppier versions that might serve as step stones (a perspective dictated by Darwinian reductionism), teleologists find it interesting to look forward to determine how designed cells could have shaped evolution. Thus, for example, where the non-teleologist sees cytosine deamination as a frozen accident, I see a pattern that spawns further hypotheses. But then again, it’s been judged “boring” and “not biologically relevant.”
This is where Gold’s observations come into play:
quote:
It is important to recognize how strong this interaction really is. Suppose that you have a subject in which there is no clear-cut decision to be made between a variety of opinions and therefore no clear-cut decision to be made in which direction you should put money or which direction you should favor for publications, and so on.
This is the OOL. A choice of fictions. Who do the gate-keepers fund? Who are the gate-keepers?
Gold continues:
quote:
Suppose you have some curve between the extreme of this opinion and the extreme of that opinion. You have some indefinite, statistically quite insignificant distribution of opinions. Now in that situation, suppose that the refereeing procedure has to decide where to put money in research, which papers to publish, and so on. What would happen? Well, people would say, "We can't really tell, but surely we shouldn't take anybody who is out here. Slightly more people believe in this position than in any other, so we will select our speakers at the next conference from this position on the opinion curve, and we will judge to whom to give research funds," because the referees themselves will of course be included in great numbers in some such curve. "We will select some region there to supply the funds."
And so, a year later what will have happened? You will have combed out some of the people who were out there, and you will have put more people into this region. Each round of decision making has the consequence of essentially taking the initial curve and multiplying it by itself.
Now we understand the mathematical consequence of taking a shallow curve and multiplying it by itself a large number of times. What happens? In the mathematical limit it becomes a delta function at the value of the initial peak. What does that mean? If you go for long enough, you will have created the appearance of unanimity.
In the case of the OOL, the choice was made to extend the paradigm of spontaneous generation (see my discussion of Ruse’s essay on my web page). Due in large part, I would think, to the manner in which teleological thinking had been historically coupled to religion, along with the on-going residue of Special Creation. Everyone’s thus looking for ways in which the Earth Begat Life, even though there is no extraordinary demonstration that the Earth did in fact Beget Life. But if you are interested in figuring out how the Earth could have spawned Life, of course you are not going to be interested in the implication of Designed Life.
[ 05. July 2003, 23:30: Message edited by: Mike Gene ]
IP: Logged
|
|
Pim van Meurs
Member
Member # 541
|
posted 05. July 2003 23:47
Mike, talking about front loading suggests "But then again, it’s been judged “boring” and “not biologically relevant.”"
I think the real problem with your approach is that you have failed to show how an assumption of design has any relevance beyond helping us understand the function. In fact, your scenarios using front loading use chance and regularity pathways which according to ID are the compliment of intelligent design. Thus your form of 'intelligent design' not only conflicts with ID as used more commonly by intelligent design theorists such as Dembski et al but also fails to explain how your "front loading" variant of 'intelligent design' can be distinguished from fully naturalistic pathways. As such the initial condition might be considered 'intelligently designed' but your approach fails to explain how one can eliminate chance and regularity as the "intelligent designer". Thus at most your approach seems to be similar to what already is quite common in biological sciences namely the use of analogies to help us understand biological structures.
You suggest, without much further evidence, that non-teleologists would see "cytosine deamination as a frozen accident" but I would argue that you have neither shown that this is the common or even prevailing argument among non-teleologists nor that your hypotheses are somehow unique or dependant on teleological thinking. In fact I would argue that science may have come to similar conclusions as you have without the need for teleology. After all initial conditions hardly require a teleological approach. In fact looking back in time, one may be tempted to see teleology. After all we have an end point (where we are today) and an initial condition. And guess what... The two connect... Apparant teleology indeed.
You consider OOL to be a choice of fictions, designed life is interesting especially how nature may have been the designer. Perhaps you may want to help us understand how your approach to ID can help resolve these issues and problems?
IP: Logged
|
|
charlie d.
Member
Member # 159
|
posted 06. July 2003 17:10
Mike:
I wasn't even arguing whether your approach was valid or even worth considering, at this stage. I was simply saying, even assuming one adopts it, what does one do with it? Besides thoughtfully rubbing your beard while pondering the import of
"TCT (Ser) -> TTT (Phe)?"
as proposed by Nelson, what else can you do with your kind of front-loading?
IP: Logged
|
|
Mark Szlazak
Member
Member # 391
|
posted 07. July 2003 12:04
I previously mentioned a couple of additional sources on the problems with peer review and gave some examples of "thought control" in the university system. Here's some added sources on suppression of dissent within this system.
Strategies for Dissenting Scientists
Brian Martin, Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia
ABSTRACT
Those who challenge conventional views or vested interests in science are likely to encounter difficulties. A scientific dissenter should first realize that science is a system of power as well as of knowledge, in which interest groups play a key role and insiders have an extra advantage. Dissenters are likely to be ignored or dismissed. If dissenters gain some recognition or outside support, they may be attacked. In the face of such obstacles, several strategies are available, which include mimicking science, aiming at lower status outlets, enlisting patrons, seeking a different audience, exposing suppression of dissent, and building a social movement.
The author also has this website:
Suppression Of Dissent
IP: Logged
|
|
nosivad
Member
Member # 767
|
posted 07. July 2003 18:58
Thank you Mark Szlazak for the interesting post. As a dissenter to Darwinism I chose to expose the policies of the administration. I refer you to my home page www.uvm.edu/~jdavison and in particular to the entry "What it means to be an antiDarwinian at the University of Vermont." Appropriately my first antiDarwinian paper was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1984, the title of George Orwell's novel! I resigned from the University in December 2000 when I discovered that they were planning to "detenure" me. Even today, one can find no reference to my existence at the University where I taught for 33 years. Read and enjoy! nosivad
IP: Logged
|
|
andyg
Member
Member # 415
|
posted 07. July 2003 21:47
Mike wrote:
quote:
Thus, for example, where the non-teleologist sees cytosine deamination as a frozen accident, I see a pattern that spawns further hypotheses.
I'm not sure how one would distinguish between a frozen accident and a front-loaded designed system.
Person A says: "Cytosine deamination allowed the evolution of certain biomolecules in certain directions, which would have been less likely to occur had another base been used as one of the four original components of DNA"
Person B says: "A designer chose cytosine as one of the four original components of DNA. Cytosine deamination allowed the evolution of certain biomolecules in certain directions, which would have been less likely to occur had another base been used by the designer as one of the four original components of DNA"
It seems to me that at every turn, the alternative explanation to "A designer did it this way for a reason" is "the frozen accidents that occurred billions of years ago allowed life to develop int he way we see it today." I'm not sure how to distinguish between these alternatives. Do your "further hypotheses" address this?
AndyG
IP: Logged
|
|
Mike Gene
Member
Member # 149
|
posted 07. July 2003 22:51
Andy,
I doubt very much there will be one test or argument that will clearly distinguish between the frozen accident vs. front-loading. After all, such a distinction gets to the very core of the ambiguity – is it coincidence or intent? I suspect if a distinction is to be made, it will revolve around the consilience of many different arguments. For starters, we can note that the frozen accident hypothesis failed to notice a pattern that was under our nose this whole time. A front-loader may uncover other patterns that ultimately converge into a picture where evolution is not quite as “random” as many think.
However, in the end, it may always remain a judgment call. If there is no way to definitively tease the two apart, they will always remain as two alternative explanations (the sword cuts both ways). But this feeds back into my arguments listed above (especially those made by Gold). If the frozen accident is only an alternative perspective, why demand that everyone adhere to it as a prerequisite for raising testable hypotheses?
IP: Logged
|
|
Pim van Meurs
Member
Member # 541
|
posted 08. July 2003 01:24
Mike, I believe you raised a strawman argument here namely "If the frozen accident is only an alternative perspective, why demand that everyone adhere to it as a prerequisite for raising testable hypotheses? "
I doubt that anyone objects to you using teleology to propose hypotheses and if it ends there then there is neither an argument for intelligent design involved nor does one have to deal with the impact of extending the assumption for purpose of proposing hypotheses to actually validating the assumption.
Let me explain. "A frozen accident" is in fact a neutral statement, it does not propose any mechanisms beyond chance, and although other hypotheses may exist which suggest that selection may have played a role, lets assume for the moment that we have "frozen accident" versus your assumption of intelligent design. Either assumption can generate hypotheses that can be tested and neither one depends on the assumption namely your findings wrt hydrophobicity can exist equally well in a 'frozen accident' scenario as in an 'intelligent design' scenario. Thus the perspective 'frozen' versus' designed' has no impact. But if you want to extend this to using the findings to infer intelligent design then you have to explain mechanism since now you are proposing something beyond 'frozen accident' you are trying to infer the validity of your assumption from your observations.
Let me give an example which may be helpful in understanding what I am trying to say here. In my younger years I watched a program in which a woman proclaimed the existance of pixies. She would communicate with them, they would acknowledge her and while noone else could see them, they allowed this woman to make sense of her surroundings. Thus the observation that mushrooms would sprout up in her yard, either based on the assumption of some chance dispersal or designed planting by pixies would be equally well helpful in one's understanding and acceptance of observations in nature and neither assumption affected the observation that mushrooms grow well in shaded areas with the right kind of soil and water. We all know how analogies can be quite helpful in guiding our understanding, Homer used it widely in his literary works. The question of course is if the assumption/analogy has any relevance to the findings and if the findings can be used as evidence for the assumptions. Without any claim to method or methodology or mechanism for intelligent design, one can only speculate but the assumption of intelligent design if taken beyond a mere assumption does require extraordinary evidence since it makes certain claims and when taken as a scientific claims, it needs to do more than "well the assumption helped me formulate a hypothesis which turned out to be verified by the data", in fact as you admit, it equally well would be explained by a myriad of irrelevant assumptions about how the initial condition arose. But in case of a frozen accident, we claim that we don't know but at least no mechanism is formulated to explain the initial condition beyond what we already observe namely that initial conditions can happen as frozen accidents quite naturally and quite commonly. Much rarer are instances in which initial conditions are intelligently designed and such instances, in order to be identified as such, require some evidence that seems to be absent in your front loading scenario.
Thus while noone should object to your assumptions that led to your hypothesis, they are merely assumptions whose veracity or lack thereof are in no way influenced by the hypothesis.
The moment one tries to make claims about ID that go beyond an assumption to help one formulate a hypothesis however evidence seems to be required, and in this case it would seem to be extraordinary evidence as you state yourself
"I doubt very much there will be one test or argument that will clearly distinguish between the frozen accident vs. front-loading."
Am I making sense here?
[ 08. July 2003, 01:26: Message edited by: Pim van Meurs ]
IP: Logged
|
|
andyg
Member
Member # 415
|
posted 08. July 2003 14:48
Mike wrote:
quote:
For starters, we can note that the frozen accident hypothesis failed to notice a pattern that was under our nose this whole time. A front-loader may uncover other patterns that ultimately converge into a picture where evolution is not quite as “random” as many think.
I"m not sure I agree. The observation that deamination may cause certain amino acid substitutions can be made without the need to beg the question of either a designer or a frozen accident.
I still think that no matter how many such patterns one uncovers, we will still be unable to distinguish between the patterns being the result of front-loaded design or random occurrences that promote evolvability. You can find such systems until the cows come home. The arguments will still look like this:
Mike: I've identified 100 systems that look like they were front loaded to promote evolution. Are you seriously telling me this is a coincidence?
Devil's Advocate: No, it's not a coincidence at all. Selection will favour those systems that are best able to evolve. Thus it makes perfect sense that the most evolvable systems are the ones we see today. There is no need to invoke front-loaded desgn.
quote:
However, in the end, it may always remain a judgment call. If there is no way to definitively tease the two apart, they will always remain as two alternative explanations (the sword cuts both ways). But this feeds back into my arguments listed above (especially those made by Gold). If the frozen accident is only an alternative perspective, why demand that everyone adhere to it as a prerequisite for raising testable hypotheses?
I don't think the frozen accident is a prerequisite for raising testable hypotheses. Anyone can propose a hypothesis. Testing it is harder. In the absence of a good test, people tend to opt for parsimony. I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do until the data suggest otherwise.
It is formally possible, for example, that God causes cancer as a punishment for sins. This is still as true today with everything we know of the aetiology of cancer as it was 100 years ago. However, if there is no reliable way to test the fact that God actively brings about cancer causing mutations in somatic cells, parsimony tells us to choose simpler idea.
Similarly, if there is no reliable way to distinguish between a) a system that arose by chance with the capability to evolve in certain ways, and b) a system that was designed with the capability to evolve in certain ways, then parsimony tells us to choose (a).
This doesn't mean that (a) becomes accepted for all eternity - it just means we have to wait for more data. Perhaps the interesting question is: what data could help you to reliably distinguish between the two?
AndyG
[ 08. July 2003, 16:05: Message edited by: andyg ]
IP: Logged
|
|
Nel
Member
Member # 614
|
posted 08. July 2003 21:04
Andy writes:
quote:
Similarly, if there is no reliable way to distinguish between a) a system that arose by chance with the capability to evolve in certain ways, and b) a system that was designed with the capability to evolve in certain ways, then parsimony tells us to choose (a).
Andy are you saying that Mike has to eliminate (a) in order to investigate (b)?
It seems as though that is what the paper in question was doing. It attempted to eliminate (b) in order to argue for (a) (an engineer would never use it). However, what Mike is investigating is that an engineer would likely use it.
quote:
Put simply, C-to-T transitions, as a function of deamination, may have posed a form of "direction" on evolution.
I think that the distinction here is clear in it's utility. From the perspective of (a), the author of the C-T paper missed the patterns that Mike found. And Mike found those patterns by looking at the data through (b). In that sense, (a) is of no use to a teleologist.
IP: Logged
|
|
andyg
Member
Member # 415
|
posted 08. July 2003 21:21
Nelson:
quote:
Andy writes:
quote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Similarly, if there is no reliable way to distinguish between a) a system that arose by chance with the capability to evolve in certain ways, and b) a system that was designed with the capability to evolve in certain ways, then parsimony tells us to choose (a).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy are you saying that Mike has to eliminate (a) in order to investigate (b)?
No, not at all. I am saying that Mike can investigate (b) until he's blue in the face, and he still won't be able to distinguish between the two alternatives.
By the way, I think that the statement "an engineer/designer/God would never do something that way" is an extremely poor argument. I think there should be a moratorium on authors using it in papers.
I am not disagreeing that Mike found a pattern in his consideration of cytosine deamination. What I am saying is:
1) the pattern could have been found without recourse to considering a designer.
2) the fact that Mike has found a pattern says nothing about whether the system in question arose by chance or by front-loading.
AndyG
IP: Logged
|
|
Nel
Member
Member # 614
|
posted 08. July 2003 21:33
Andy,
Of course there is no way, with certainty, that we can distinguish a data point, with respect to it's origin, from whether it arose by chance or by design. But that is irrelevant. The point of forming a hypothesis is to reach the inference to the best explanation. That is why the distinction is so clear in it's utility. The paper stated that an engineer wouldn't use it because it exhibited the sloppy tinkering indicative of a stochastic process. '
However, Mike, from a design perspective, was able to show otherwise, that there good reasons why an engineer would use it, an indication of good use of a "design problem" that is a fingerprint of intelligence. From the perspective of Poole, it doesn't matter whether it's sloppy or useful for directing evolution. However, it would have been problematic for a design perspective (from the view point of error correction) if the predisposition showed sloppy tinkering. In this sense, in my opinion, the teleological perspective wins in terms of actually putting forth a hypothesis that can make an a ~a prediction and actually was able to find and explain the patterns that Poole did not find.
[ 08. July 2003, 21:34: Message edited by: Nelson-Alonso ]
IP: Logged
|
|
andyg
Member
Member # 415
|
posted 08. July 2003 22:45
Nelson wrote:
quote:
In this sense, in my opinion, the teleological perspective wins in terms of actually putting forth a hypothesis that can make an a ~a prediction and actually was able to find and explain the patterns that Poole did not find.
But you are ignoring the fact that discovering that cytosine deamination might allow proteins to evolve in a particular way does not depend on using Mike's teleological perspective.
You seem to be trumpeting the fact that Mike's observations prove that his viewpoint has utility. I'm simply pointing out that one could have arrived at the same observation from a very different perspective. The fact that Poole et al. did not do so is irrelevant.
AndyG
IP: Logged
|
|
Nel
Member
Member # 614
|
posted 08. July 2003 22:51
Andy,
quote:
But you are ignoring the fact that discovering that cytosine deamination might allow proteins to evolve in a particular way does not depend on using Mike's teleological perspective.
But there is no particular reason why a non-teleological perspective would have happened on it. It seems to flow more naturally from a teleological perspective. A non-teleological perspective doesn't really care whether a pattern exists that shows the predisposition is sloppy or if it actually directed evolution.
I think the fact that Poole et. al. didn't find those patterns is not irrelevant. It illustrates my point. In fact, one can say, in more stronger terms, that the non-teleological perspective predicts Poole's findings. Sloppiness, tinkering, an engineer would look at it and say "if this is designed the guy is an idiot".
However, a teleological perspective would predict that we are missing something. So lets go back to the data, what do we find? Wow look at this! It's useful after all! Now the engineer would say "hmm why didn't I think of that?".
[ 08. July 2003, 22:56: Message edited by: Nelson-Alonso ]
IP: Logged
|
|
|
Topic Closed
Printer-friendly view of this topic
