RBH

Principa,

Those are VERY nice examples of research in the MDT vein. Thank you!

I see several points of direct import for MDT:

1. The findings reported in the cited examples are at the right level of analysis, genetic and proteonomic, to be the logical locus of interventions by designers. Those are the levels at which there is the leverage to instantiate the designs that appear in phenotypes as parasitism, symbiosis, and so on.

2. Completely consistent with the MDT hypothesis as outlined in the ISCID thread I referenced above, they implicate a finite, limited number of designers. From the cited studies we can infer that there are on the order of a few dozen distinguishable designers.

3. The specific phenomena - for example the 34 cases of which the authors say they have independent evolutionary origins - form a database for beginning to develop design-discrimination methods and test the hypotheses concerning the skills, abilities, competences and purposes of the designers that I suggested was a vital research program for MDT.

All in all, those references provide impressive support for MDT and its associated research program!

RBH

Principia

RBH, thank you and Nic for coming up with the idea. There is more data to come along the way, of course, but one of you guys needs to start thinking about a book.

Anyways, there was a challenge of using computer code to illustrate MDT detection. I found this pdf on the web Software Forensics: Can We Track Code to its Authors? Purdue Technical Report CSD–TR 92–010
Eugene H. Spafford Stephen A. Weeber
19 February 1992

It looks like MDT will be a very fertile research endeavour indeed!

EDIT: Here is another report on software forensics,
EDIT2: Fixed broken link in second paper, and added this from Gray's Software Metrics Research Laboratory
EDIT3: Here's the link for the ITWA thread on IIDB.

MortalWombat

Not only that, but he apparently wrote about himself in the past tense after his own death (see Deuteronomy 34)

RBH

Thanks for the additional material, Principia.

Interestingly, the MDT discussion has been revived revived on ARN (not by me!).

RBH

Principia

I've got a response to Mike Gene's arguments in the works... stay tuned.

Principia

"Wide open"??? Now there's an interesting twist on Mike Gene's own stereotype. In fact, it sounds like he wants to dismiss MDT on the one hand, and then appear "open-minded" on the other. So, it is not surprising that the person who is employing cheap rhetorical tricks here is the one who seems most aware of the tactic and consequently (though hypocritically) most vocal against it.
Unless there is a larger issue here that I am not aware of, I think the "challenge" is fairly settled. Human beings are decidedly a class of multiple designers, across time and space. That we may group human beings together and refer them in terms of various classes or kinds of designers, or if we refer to them in the entirety for comparison with other hypothetical designers only serves to illustrate the point, which is that the universe does not presently appear to be limited in the number of teleological agencies (especially to one). In point of fact MDT does not validate SDT thinking. It subsumes SDT, with the recognition that SDT's own a priori assumptions are too restrictive. Remember the ID test is the "inference to the best explanation." Looking across the human race as an example of teleological agents, does it really make sense to say that we are not individual creators in this manner?

My, my, my, my, my. What a mess. For an open-minded individual, Mike Gene certainly has a rather hostile view of MDT now, doesn't he? So after we filter away all the irrelevant rhetoric and erected strawmen MG dishes out here, what specific argument are we left with? Well, it sounds like MG doesn't like our "myopic" view of the capacities of the single designer, should he/she/it exist. But, wait! One man's criticism is another's main thesis. The ID critics have always pointed out that there are no constraints on what this putative single designer can accomplish. MDT addresses this problem largely by extrapolating common sense notions of design features which we use to discriminate between different designers in real life. Whether or not MG has posed challenges that are presently indifferent to an SDT/MDT discrimination is irrelevant here. So there is presently insufficient information to tell whether one or more designers designed the osteoclast vs. osteoblast. So what? MDT would happily give one system (be it bone design, a simple computer code, a novel, etc.) its own specific designer, provided the evidence is there for such a discrimation. But, ascribe all of biotic reality to an SD? Methinks we give this Designer too much credit.

This is laughable, coming from ID. So now the goal posts shifts from not believing in the capabilities of an imaginary SD to one about depending too much on the capabilities of real-life MDs. How quickly he forgets the fact that most of his essays on his own website and elsewhere rely heavily on the logic of a designer's motives. Let's see some of his own opinions: http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi/ultimate...6;t=000212;p=4 http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi/ultimate...c;f=6;t=000276 http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi/ultimate...c;f=6;t=000269
http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi/ultimate...c;f=6;t=000175
And this is just a cursory examination. The point here is that Mike Gene depends heavily on the "design logic" and "design principles" evident in human design for his thesis. Mike Gene wants to say that on the one hand, the more we learn about life, the more evident design becomes, but when it comes to using that knowledge to infer design capabilities of the designers, suddenly it is off-limits. One of his parrots, nobody, is often fond of saying that life is "advanced programming" beyond the capabilities of human engineers. I am waiting (patiently) for the day when we show that the programming isn't so advanced after all. Better yet, I am waiting for the day when we show that the programming is of rather substandard quality.

I think RBH addressed this last section beautifully, here. No need to tag team on this simple intuitive matter. But I want to address specifically the complaint that MDT ought to pinpoint the exact number of designers. We make no such claim. As one of the ISCID posters mentioned, it suffices to demonstrate that there is logically more than one, just as ID only claims purportedly to detect the actions of the designer, and nothing more. Perhaps we should remind Mike Gene that unless he can specifically cite when his cells were front-loaded, and how many times interventions had to occur, etc... that his thesis crumbles to the ground? In fact, the kinase data and proteomics articles were cited as a reaction to Mike Gene's assertion: http://idthink.net/biot/code/index.html Now, why would an engineer have use of multiple redundant systems that have been reinvented 34 different times? The main point here is more subtle () -- Mike Gene wants to dictate for MDT what research it ought to do. We simply won't let him. Let's end with a reminder from Mike Gene: EDIT: to add another self-contradictory quote from Mike Gene

Principia

<puts in pocket, for later>

Nic Tamzek

It is quite interesting how hostile and demanding "open-minded skeptic" Mike Gene is towards MDT given his continual begging for leniency regarding the almost unbelievably vague and subtle form of ID that he advocates. It is clearly a result of his uniteleological bias, and once this is exposed we can see the reason of his persecution of us.

But MDT follows quite naturally from several premises followed regularly by Mike Gene:

1) Loosen up on science's preference for parsimony

2) Take "it looks as if it were designed for..." intuitions seriously

3) Always keep in the front of one's mind the perceived biases of your opponents

The central insight of MDT is that an awful lot of things "look like they were designed for" subverting other designs. If this intuition is to be taken seriously, then MDT is the obvious outcome -- and a revolutionary one given the SDT-focus of the ID movement to date. There are, to be sure, some cases in things like development where "conflicting" designs may appear to result in a larger goal, but in all these cases both designs are explained by co-replicating genomes that have the same interest in survival, so this is easily identifiable.

In that ARN thread, MG also points to some of the widespread commonalities amongst life. Does this point to SDT or MDT? Neither; it points to common descent. As Dembski and others have pointed out, SDT is fully compatible with common descent; so is MDT.

Of course MDT advocates believe, in common with all other ID theories, that the first life was designed; however, the great thing about MDT is that it gives us much more insight into *how* it was designed compared to MG ID or SDT in general, which all advocate the "poof" model.

If I might for a moment advocate my own subspecies of MDT, namely ITWA theory (Invisible Tinkering Warring Army theory), this point will soon become clear. The basic biochemistry of life has been shown by nonteleological scientists to have several peculiar features:

1) A strange dependence on RNA for core processes, which just happens to have both self-replication and enzymatic capabilities, unlike DNA and proteins

2) A considerable degree of optimization, but optimization that appears to have simpler precursors -- e.g. the genetic code is thought to have started with just a few amino acids, which happen to be the most common ones in various core protein processes

3) A limited number of "basic" protein folds, DNA motifs, etc.

This list could be greatly expanded.

The point of all this is that it appears that the last common ancestor (not necessarily a single cell, perhaps a "gene pool" of laterally-transferring bacteria) was not itself a "design from scratch", but instead the product of a tinkering of earlier, simpler designs. ITWA theory assimilates all of the work of nonteleologist scientists on RNAworld etc. and incorporates it into its own theory. Some version RNAworld existed at some stage, but in order to gain an advantage over other ITWAs, one ITWA added DNA to store genetic information. This allowed for much longer genomes and greater complexity. Further tinkers expanded the genetic code, etc.

One of these variants was so superior that all competitors, except perhaps things like parasitic viruses and RNA viroids, were exterminated. And this is the LCA of life. (this may be a somewhat oversimplified picture, extermination was not necessarily a sudden process and we could have had multiple "tinker sweeps to fixation" as various innovations took over; but I am just exploring here).

So one of the ITWAs "won" the battle. So why, a skeptic would ask, did the process not stop here? Victory had been had!

Well, as anyone who studies the history of combat knows, once one army triumphs, a common result is for the army to split up and fight over the spoils. Repetition of this process results in the modern world of innumerable battling (and sometimes self-serving cooperating) ITWAs.

This is a far more detailed and testable explanation than "somebody designed some things for no detailed reason a few billion years ago", which appears to be what the more subtle forms of ID amount to.

Principia

ibid:
<puts in other pocket, for later>

I think we've hit a nerve.

lpetrich

Thanx for all that discussion.

I wonder if anyone has tried actual experiments in automated coding-style detection. The way I'd guess that this could be done is to calculate various indices and then see how different programmers' indices compare.

And Mike Gene's bluster is curious -- I wonder why the idea of multiple designers gets his goat.

I wonder what William Dembski thinks of the multi-design inference.

Reading that thread, someone brought up the question of osteoblasts (bone-building cells) and osteoclasts (bone-destroying cells), and whether they had had more than one designer, despite being part of a single bone-maintenance system. I propose the following hypothesis:

The team that decided to design vertebrate bone had some members who would get sore if the team leader assigned some work to someone else. So the team leader developed a Solomonic way of pacifying his/her/its team. He/she/it split the bone-maintenance task split in two, assigning the bone-construction design to one subteam and the bone-destruction design to the other subteam.

Isn't petty organizational politics fun?

Also, calling predator-prey systems a kind of symbiosis, as some IDers do, is a rather serious stretch. That might be justified if prey animals offered themselves to predators in the fashion of Andy Capp's Shmoos. But they don't, and the adaptations of predators and prey have a suspicious resemblance to cross purposes.

And here are some additional trophic levels in my grass-deer-wolf example.

The wolf can be afflicted with fleas, heartworm, and canine-distemper viruses, among other parasitic organisms. However, a flea's biting can provoke the wolf to scratch the bitten spot, and the wolf has an immune system that can attack heartworms and distemper viruses.

Also, the deer can be afflicted with ticks and perhaps also Lyme-disease bacteria. Among others.

And the grass can be afflicted with Fusarium fungi.

Suggesting some additional designers.