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Author
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Topic: Is ID theory falsifiable?
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Melvin H. Fox
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Member # 1684
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posted 02. December 2005 09:20
Remember, for the sack of the argument I am a materialist. My aim is to reject the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis. If I fail to reject the null, this does not show the null to be true. Here is an argument put forth by Eric Corty in his copy written manuscript of the book in progress Using and Interpreting Statistics [page 22 his emphises]:
quote:
Understanding that one can’t prove a negative is important, so let me give you another example. When a pregnant woman goes for ultrasound to determine the sex of her fetus, the ultrasonographer is looking for something very specific – a penis. Armed with the fact that boys have penises and girls don’t, the ultrasonographer uses hypothesis testing to determine the fetus’ sex. Specifically, the null hypothesis is that the there is no penis present [i.e., fetus is a girl] and the alternative is that there is a penis present [i.e., the fetus is a boy]. So, if the ultrasonographer sees a penis, that disproves the null hypothesis. As a result, the ultrasonographer rejects the null hypothesis and informs the mom-to-be that the fetus is a boy. But, what conclusion does the ultrasonographer draw if he or she sees no penis? Does that prove that there was no penis there? Remember, we can’t prove a negative, we can’t prove the absence of a penis. Thus, it is possible that the fetus was a boy and had his limbs arranged in such a way that his penis wasn’t visible. It’s also possible that the fetus was a girl and thus had no penis to be seen. The absence of a penis is inconclusive. It supports the null hypothesis that the fetus is a girl, but it does not prove it. Thus, if no penis is visualized, the ultrasonographer tells the mom-to-be that the fetus may be a girl, but that he or she isn’t sure, it’s also possible that it’s a boy. Do not confuse a failure to reject the null hypothesis with proving the null hypothesis!
So, here is my basic concern. When a sufficiently complex, specified event is observed, CSC infers design if design is more likely [better than 50-50] than chance. Also, if CSC fails just once to infer correctly, we scrap the whole device. How is this not a cloudy outlook for ID?
[ 02. December 2005, 09:21: Message edited by: Melvin H. Fox ]
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John A. Davison
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Member # 1425
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posted 03. December 2005 07:44
Intelligent Design is obvious everywhere in the universe both living and dead. It is a mandatory starting place for any understanding of the real world. The IDists, led by William Dembski, should never have introduced it as a subject for debate. We all know what happens when things are debated. The debate continues ad nauseum never to be resolved as this and so many other forums continue to testify. There is no role for chance in a determined universe.
Rather than run the risk of offending anyone, I will let others, far more knowledgeable than I, speak for me.
"Everything is determined... by forces over which we have no control."
Albert Einstein
"The laws of the organic world are the same, WHETHER WE ARE DEALING WITH THE DEVLOPMENT OF AN INDIVIDUAL (ontogeny) OR THAT OF A PALAEONTOLOGICAL SERIES (phylogeny). Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 134, (his emphasis)
"However that may be, the existence of internal factors affecting evolution has to be accepted by any objective mind..."
Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms, page 209
Finally and most to the point with respect to the current controversy that plagues scientific progress:
"Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beimgs in their THINKING, FEELING, AND ACTING ARE NOT FREE but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
Albert Einstein, (my emphasis)
Like Einstein I am a determinist, convinced that both ontogeny and phylogeny were predestined long ago, in a word - prescribed.
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Irving
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Member # 535
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posted 03. December 2005 17:12
It doesn't matter how cloudy or clear. One shouldn't run or hide from actual evidence if found.
We don't scrap the whole device..we scrap the framework. Plenty of theories have had to adapt when specific elements have been falsified.
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John A. Davison
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posted 03. December 2005 17:30
Neo-Darwinism can never be reconciled with reality. It is fundamentally and irrevocably wrong. So is Christian Fundamentalsm as applied to organic evolution. Absolute truth lies elsewhere and I think I know where.
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Melvin H. Fox
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Member # 1684
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posted 05. December 2005 07:13
Irving,
It is Dembski who suggests that CSC is “worthless” [Intelligent Design page 141] due to only one false positive. If CSC is shown to be worthless what else does ID have to offer? On what scientific leg would it stand? If we have a plan B, I suggest we get it ready.
John,
I agree “Neo-Darwinism can never be reconciled with reality.” I disagree with your thoughts on Christian Fundamentalism. Now don’t get excited. The Bible is a just so story if there ever was one but I believe it. Therefore, my only option is to reconcile my understanding of reality to what the Bible says. This is not the venue for a religious discussion. Perhaps on your blog?
-Mel
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Irving
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Member # 535
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posted 06. December 2005 23:02
Perhaps this?
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/reality/RealityFrame1.html
Besides, there's always Irreducible Complexity...
Still one can't proclaim oblivian for a Theory until one actually sees the manner of the Falsification. Darwinism would have faded into oblivian long ago if a single falsification were always it's doom.
Still, I sort of like a Theory that really takes a stand...unlike some other Theories of Everything. If it's falsified, we all learn something and Science continues it's advance. If not? Well, the falsification, and it's Popperesque standing still remains.
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John A. Davison
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Member # 1425
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posted 20. December 2005 14:48
Mel
I agree this is not a venue for religious discussion. Neither is my blog. There is no place for sectarian religion in any scientific discussion and never has been. Yet that is precisely what has become the problem. We have Protestant fundamentalism pitted against another religion, Darwinian, chance-worshipping mysticism. I say a plague on both the houses. The truth lies elsewhere and I think I know where that is.
Commenting on ontogeny and phylogeny:
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance."
Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 134
"The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and science lies in the concept of a personal God."
Albert Einstein
It is even more true today than it was 50 years ago. It is little more than polarized mass hysteria.
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Melvin H. Fox
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Member # 1684
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posted 21. December 2005 15:46
John
Can't science be an objective study of a personal relationship? Design is personal. Chance is impersonal. At present even your position contains an element of faith. Correct me if I am wrong. Dosn't the PEH include a set of instructions presumably contained in the DNA coding but as of yet undiscovered? You believe it is there in the DNA without direct evidence. If I am forced to choose between science and a personal relationship with God, I choose the relationship. All of science has great faith in the set of real numbers. We believe the square root of two is real but we can't produce the square root of two of anything. We accept it because irrational numbers are reasonable constructions. Pythagoras went to his grave holding otherwise.
-Mel
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Atom
Member
Member # 1840
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posted 22. December 2005 15:27
Hey Irving,
That link is incredible! I'm about half way through reading it, and already I'm blown away with what they've discovered about how gaining knowledge of one thing will affect the outcome of another, even retrospectively.
This may be a dumb question, but has anyone in the ID literature studied these quantum effects? I mean, I hear all the time that immaterial causes such as intelligence (as understood by ID folks) are unscientific because we cannot explain how immaterial objects could affect matter. But it seems that quantum experiments short circuit this question; They don't explain *how* mind can affect matter, but they absoultely confirm that it can and does. Wouldn't this provide great experimental confirmation of intelligence's causal adequacy?
Just a thought.
Atom
[ 22. December 2005, 15:28: Message edited by: Atom ]
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John A. Davison
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posted 22. December 2005 22:50
The evidence for Intelligent Design is undeniable, just as is the evidence for a PAST evolution. There is absolutely no evidence now or ever for a personal God, yet that a God or Gods must have existed in the past cannot be avoided. I have called it the Big Front Loader (BFL) or plural of course. The evidence for such a past entity is before us right now and has already been discovered not only for phylogeny but for ontogeny as well. The nature of the BFL has nothing to do with the manifestation of its past existence. I have become a devout believer in dead Gods because that is mandatory to the understanding of anything in the living world and the inanimate world as well. Nothing more is required which is the proper application of the principle of parsimony.
I have rejected both extremes of an insanely polarized debate which should never have taken place. The truth is not subject to debate, only to discovery. A predetermined internally controlled ontogeny and phylogeny is obvious to me. That it may not be to others does not concern me. I have repeatedly published my conclusions beginning 21 years ago. They have yet to be recognized by the "establishment" as if there ever was one. The Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis (PEH) is finding support in both molecular biology and in the study of chromosome structure, gene silencing and gene activation (derepression). It was all anticipated over a half century ago first by Richard B. Goldschmidt, one of the most innovative and objective geneticists of all time. His reward has been villification even by his fellow geneticists, thoroughly seduced by the worshippers of blind chance, a faction still dominating the evolutionary scene. I have come to regard both camps in this ridiculous charade with a curious mixture of contempt and thigh-slapping hilarity. That creatures like Richard Dawkins can still be taken seriously boggles my mind yet he is the quintessential Darwinian and has even been knighted for his efforts. He has now found it necessary to quarrel even with fellow Darwinians like Ken Miller whose greatest sin seems to be his belief in a personal God. He picks his opponents carefully. I would love to take him on and have personally invited him to participate at my blog. None of the leading lights from either camp have responded to my overtures and only Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells even acknowledged my offer, both pleading they were to busy writing to present a 500 word summary of their undertanding of the MECHANISM of organic evolution. The collective silence of all concerned speaks volumes to the insecurity of either camp. Frankly I am delighted with it all.
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Melvin H. Fox
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posted 23. December 2005 12:35
John
I am captivated by your confidence. Two questions:
Doesn't the PEH include a set of instructions [prescription for phylogeny] presumably contained in the DNA coding but as of yet undiscovered?
And
By evidence do you mean laboratory experimentation exclusively or are personal testimonies and eye witness accounts acceptable not as proof but as evidence?
-Mel
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Irving
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posted 24. December 2005 16:54
Glad you liked it Atom. I find the whole website a great read. Mr. Rhodes does a good job of explaining the jaw dropping implications of uncertainty. Most people who think they understand the principle...probably don't.
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afonda
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Member # 1849
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posted 29. December 2005 12:08
The question, as Chris phrased it: quote:
Is ID theory falsifiable? (Or) Does a strictly materialistic evolutionary scenario or one involving intelligent agency or some other theory best explain the origin of biological complexity, given all relevant evidence?
As a New User I was referred to the Moderator’s ground rule that quote:
on the first page of a thread, participants are required to show that they have an interest in helping the argument to be developed and not just in shooting it down. After the first page of a thread, participants are then allowed to provide more forceful, “hole-picking” critiques.
This thread is past the first page.
While my earlier specialty was the design of new machinery, which is prospective analysis, I have long been engaged in retrospective (historical) analysis, specifically of prior collisions between moving vehicles. In such analysis there often is conflicting witness testimony, which in due course can be resolved into a best explanation as further historical evidence is considered. In the case of Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design, while much historical evidence is well known, resolution into a best explanation still escapes us. I wish to discuss the proposition that Intelligent Design is a natural phenomenon which operates in concert with Darwinian evolution. I suggest that:
1. As to Darwinian evolution, in opening this topic on 21 November 2005 11:00, Chris Beling remarked that quote:
William Paley's design argument was never negated, it was just superseded by what seemed at the time like a better theory.
True in Darwin’s time; but in his own time Paley did weigh the non-design hypothesis that “every animal, every plant, indeed every organized body which we can see, are only so many out of the possible varieties and combinations of being which the lapse of infinite ages has brought into existence; that the present world is the relic of that variety; millions of other bodily forms and other species having perished, being, by the defect of their constitution, incapable of preservation, or to continuance by generation.” (Paley, Natural Theology, 1802) But Paley speculated that ridiculous forms would once have existed, and dismissed this option with the remark that “No reason can be given why, if these deperdits ever existed, they have now disappeared.”
2. 150 years later, while Darwin’s speculations were less fanciful, he too could offer no mechanism to account for the appearance of variations. As to their disappearance, Darwin recast Paley’s suggestion of many species “having perished by the defect of their constitution” by suggesting that “each new variety or species when formed will generally take the place of and so exterminate its less well-fitted parent.” When Darwin considered his extermination in detail, it was local and gradual, as opposed to Paley’s supposedly wholesale and sudden extermination. Had this perhaps minor revision occurred to Paley, and had it overcome his awe of seemingly designed taxonomic order, we might now be considering not Darwin’s but Paley’s explication of evolution!
3. Darwin did not, as I see it, so much devise an explanation for evolution as observe it in action; it is what it is. Expressed in modern terms, living things are algorithmically configured so as to reproduce, survive, and propagate. But as to do so perfectly would release a plague, the absence of that plague indicates that the process is imperfectly executed. The more imperfect replicates more imperfectly survive and propagate. Thus, when chance variation is winnowed by environmental adversity, evolution follows.
4. Whereas Chris proposed on 22 November 2005 19:45 quote:
a very small and incredibly unlikely probability of some functional specification happening by chance,
according to Darwin - - and even Paley - - the accidentally nonfunctional, such as the siblings of our ancestors, must “perish by the defect of their constitution,” so that by a process of elimination the accidentally functional are sequestered.
5. This speaks to the credibility of the Darwinian explanation, despite (as confirmed by contemporary disputations) our inevitably incomplete knowledge of the process. Let us now likewise consider the credibility and adequacy of Intelligent Design as a superposition upon that process.
6. Replication in the life process is (we now know) accomplished by duplication of DNA, an interface matching process in which nothing foreign can participate. There can be no alternative; DNA is the only game in town. A game in which there already is intervention, since at the microscopic level the genes of a few nascent individuals are modified by chance environmental factors or by sheer physical or chemical fumbling.
7. How could DNA be purposefully rather than accidentally modified? Only by exquisitely delicate physical or chemical micromanipulation of the four nucleotides of pre-existing DNA, moving infinitesimal bits from one place to another or disassembling and reconstituting them, in a manner designed for the eventual extermination of less well-fitted siblings. The existence of such an exotic biomechanical micromanipulator and its direction by a superlative architect is implicit in the hypothesis of Intelligent Design.
8. While it is for each of you to estimate the odds, my conclusion is that the purportedly natural emergence eons ago of so competent a mechanism and so prescient an intelligence starkly contrasts with the well-documented and well-explained gradual emergence of complex from simple life forms. Far too much - - far too soon! It is not the Darwinian process but the Intelligent Design process which has “a very small and incredibly unlikely probability” of accounting for the functionality of the life we observe from without and experience from within.
In summary, it is malfunctions of the life process, namely stumbling replication and shuffling survival, which account for the gradual emergence of and intelligence in the animals and eventually man. Nothing conceptual or evidential either demands or credibly permits intervention in that process by a pre-existing and higher but natural intelligence.
Is ID theory falsifiable? Perhaps not, since at a far stretch it may evade occult assumptions; but even when technically explicable it is far from the simplest adequate explanation. Intelligent Design is a non-solution to a non-problem. The need it claims to fill is as fictitious as its ability to fill it. Within religion, whether relying on supernatural or incredibly unlikely means, intelligent design would be perfectly acceptable; but it is ludicrous as science.
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John A. Davison
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posted 29. December 2005 19:08
Melvin Fox
Pardon my delay but I have been busy at my own blog and over at "The Teleologist" and elsewhere. I am convinced that macroevolution is finished and at the Genus level has been for at least 2 million years. I join Julian Huxley and Robert Broom in that conclusion which also seems to be shared by Pierre Grasse. I still believe that Homo sapiens is the youngest mammal species to have arrived on this planet and have repeatedly requested evidence to the contrary.
I am inclined to agree with Robert Broom that there has been a plan and I further believe the plan has been executed. Phylogeny, like ontogeny is today, WAS a self-regulating self-terminating phenomenon driven entirely from within with no role for the environment beyond that of acting as a releaser or derepressor of contained information. I also know of no eyewitness accounts of true speciation in historical times and certainly none under controlled conditions. Quite the contrary, all we see is rampant extinction at a rate per annum unparalleled in geological history. Neverthless, the fact remains that my Semi-meiotic Hypothesis (SMH) has yet to be tested with suitable material, It is quite possible that new species could be generated through that means. Since the Darwinians no longer test their own hypothesis, the most failed in all of history, one can hardly expect them to consider one that could destroy their entire mythology with a single clearly defined controlled experiment.
I hope this serves to answer your questions.
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John A. Davison
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posted 29. December 2005 19:23
afonda
A past Intelligence with potentialities far beyond our capacity to comprehend is undeniable. For that reason I have always regarded Intelligent Design as a self evident mandatory starting place from which to begin to understand both ontogeny and phylogeny. I am now absolutely certain that chance never played any role in either process and I am certainly not the first to express that conviction.
"Neither in the one nor in the other is there room for chance,"
Leo Berg, Nomogenesis, page 134
I regard Leo Berg as the most penetrating evolutionary student of all time. I further predict that "Darwinian evolution" will one day be replaced by "Bergian evolution" as the ruling paradigm. If it were up to me it would already have occurred. Darwinism in all its manifestations never had anything to do with creative evolution beyond the production of varieties and possibly in some but certainly not all forms the generation of subspeceis. It is the most failed hypothesis in all of science dwarfing both the Phlogiston of Chemistry and the Ether of Physics.
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