Nic Tamzek

I was thinking about posting this on this ISCID thread, and then I thought, "why bother?" Besides I am too busy to start a big debate.

Here is the thread, started by Mike Gene:

Topic: Brainstorming Lessons
http://www.iscid.org/ubb/ultimatebb....c;f=6;t=000282

I quote the end of RBH's post:


I agree that it is ID that is squelching hypotheses, namely the details in origins scenarios that make them testable (strengthenable or weakenable, not always strict true/false).

There is nothing wrong with going out on a limb and proposing hypotheses with specifity that goes beyond the data; this is how science proceeds into the unknown. This is why OOL researchers propose specific hypotheses, test them, and then revise -- e.g. RNAworld has become pretty well supported as a stage preceeding the origin of modern life, but difficulties in prebiotic syntheses of RNA are provoking studies of RNA precursors, e.g NA or PNA "worlds".

The way science does *not* proceed is by maximizing vagueness, e.g. "a designer did something somewhere sometime for unhypothesized reasons by unhypothesized means". With ID, not even the laws of physics are considered legitimate constraints on the hypothesized IDer(s). I would argue that every successful (e.g. archaeology/forensics) or viable (e.g. SETI) "ID-detecting" discipline has hypothesized far more details regarding the IDer(s) than any hypothesis put forward by Mike Gene or anyone else in the ID movement.

The problem with ultravague hypotheses is that they are explanatorily unconstrained; the problem with an unconstrained hypothesis is that there is no objective way to strengthen it or weaken it by consideration of further data.

E.g., with Mike Gene's front-loading via mutational bias idea (leaving aside questions of what the actual biases are, which Art and others will have to work out), it seems to me that front-loading via evolution is approximately the most difficult and clumsy possible way to design something that I can think of. It would be like trying to type with your elbows even though you had fingers. Trying to get to, say, multicellularity through a nonspecific mutational bias would be rather like trying to convert from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution via a bias in the replacement frequencies of various letters.

Such a conversion could be accomplished either by intelligent or algorithmic selection of specific letters (in the case of biology we should convert this analogy to natural selection's *documented* ability to sweep specific beneficial nucleotide substitutions to fixation in the population, to avoid the usual Dawkins-METHINKS debates) -- but if these capabilities are in play, what's the point of the mutational bias? The mutations will happen slightly slower without the bias (well, assuming that the necessary mutations are those included in the bias, which seems completely unsubstantiated to me), but they will happen sooner or later and then can get selected. (In the case of an IDer, they would presumably not even bother with waiting for the mutations and just design straight-up whatever they wanted to design).

Do these considerations have any weight in weakening Mike Gene's hypothesis? Only if you hypothesize some things about the designer, which Mike Gene does not, because his hypothesis is basically "someone frontloaded something for no specified reason" and thus considerations of efficiency, effectiveness, etc. (even though these are often invoked by Mike Gene and others in support of ID in other situations) will just be brushed aside as "we don't know anything about the IDer".

IMO, this "unconstrainedness" of ID-movement "hypotheses" is their central weakness. This is a problem that supernatural hypotheses have, but is common to "superpowerful but unspecified aliens" "completely unspecified designer(s)", etc., as well. ("Unspecified natural processes" falls in the same boat, BTW) None of them predict or explain anything without further details. Full exhaustive detail is not necessary, but a least enough detail to make us expect some pattern in the data that we wouldn't otherwise expect, and which could be weakened by other patterns, is what it takes to get started.

Vagueness will insulate an idea from refutation but will also doom it to the land of non-explanation.

End of Saturday Night Sermon,
nic

Nic Tamzek

Ooops, I meant to post this on antievolution.org. Guess I'll do that now:

Here it is:

http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin...ct=ST;f=2;t=45

Principia

From my POV, Mike Gene's argument is that positing a rational, logical designer helps him ask the right scientific questions to produce a research program in the name of ID. His approach has relied heavily on guessing (i.e. "hypothesizing") what this designer would do in engineering various systems, then going into the literature to find examples of a system that exhibits the particular mode of design, and then dwelving on the logic of the design to support his hypothesis. There are two rather obvious problems, however.

First, the hypothesis varies from system to system in the sense that the designer's modus operandi changes from system to system. In his "degradosome" essay on his webpage, the designer was good at designing modular systems that could plug into various pathways. In his "error corrections" essays, the designer thought carefully about preventing error catastrophe. In his latest essays, the designer employed the error-prone nature of cytosine in unpackaging key front-loaded systems. Now, granted, it is within the realm of possibility that a designer has a particular design strategy for every design problem, even apparently contradictory strategies. But then that brings the logic and motivations of the designer squarely into the discussions. MG has always argued for a rational designer, but that comes from cherry-picking systems where rational design was apparent. What happens if we threw, say, Oolon's (now DT's) thread of illogical designs at the designer and his apologist? What is the point of debating the rationale of a designer whose existence is itself in doubt? But, let's suspend our disbelief mometarily -- I will remind myself that Mike Gene is, after all, arguing for the utility of positing a designer in generating research ideas. This leads me to the second problem I see...

His method for supporting his hypothesis, AFAICT, is to scour the literature for an article that fits a particular hypothetical design strategy. A common argument of his is to spend a good part of his essay talking about some design strategy, S, and how S would lead him to "predict" some state B from state A. Then he finds an article that illustrates state B (whether it is an apparently modular enolase, or error correction in genetic code, or whatever), and design method S is seemingly supported. But, his perfect record at fulfilling his own predictions ought to raise some eyebrows. The reason is that it is not clear if he found states B and A, and then wove them together with some strategy S, or if he found A, posited S, then found B. The former entails strictly ad hoc explanations for biotic reality, and thus the utility is at best questionable, especially if one needs a different strategy for explaining every unknown phenomenona. The latter approach is also dubious because MG conveniently ignores the possibility that one may err when guessing about a designer's motivations. Given that there are no constraints on the designer, the number of strategies that one may use to go from some state A to state B is unbounded. In other words, the design strategy seems underdetermined by the factual data.

Now, the point of MG's essay seems to me to say that the same data also underdetermines the natural processes by which the OOL may have arisen. So, MG would like us to believe that the only apparent difference is the initial (metaphysical) assumptions from which one holds. In the thread linked above: But the scenarios are not equal. Mike seems to be saying that his approach could lead as easily to the research program that his so-called "non-teleogists" developed. But, as we see from the previous paragraph, his approach has not yet been used to do predictive science in any rigorous manner. Further, one has to wonder how long his streak of making accurate predictions can really hold up? Is there a foolproof way of guessing at the designer's intentions? Furthermore, if a naturalistic OOL scenario can be demonstrated, it seems to me that it would trump an MG-ID scenario since the designer becomes unnecessary. MG also refuses to go the route of Dembski in proving natural insufficiency.

OK, I think I'll end my rant here.

PS: It seems to me that Mike Gene has had quite a while to work on his version of ID apologetics. Going through the talk.origins archive, I noticed that he posted as Julie Thomas for several years... Either that, or he's picking up JT's arguments. Anybody else notice the striking similarities in the style of argumentation?

KC

Nic writes:

I couldn't agree more. It makes me want to invoke a chant, 'What Would the Designer Do?". Heck, maybe make it into a button or key lanyard doohickie.

Cheers,

KC

ps418

That's a very interesting analogy.