Lizard

Athanasius wrote:

This is standard ID illogic. Yes, we can observe human designers, and we know how they operate. Yes, we can observe beavers building dams and arbor birds constructing elaborate arbors. We know all these designers and their ways, because we can *observe* them.

Who has ever observed the "intelligent designer," and how "it" works? We have no idea what intelligent design would look like in the biological realm. IDers who say they can figure out by probability calculations which things are "designed" and which are not are talking through their hats. IDers who say, "This is just too darned complex to have evolved" are making the familiar argument from ignorance.

Would intelligent design look like? The panda's thumb? The tse-tse fly? The bacterial flagellum? The ebola virus? Autism?

Behe says intelligent design doesn't necessarily mean optimal design. Gee, that leaves it kind of open, doesn't it? Anything that's awkward, clumsy, ugly, etc., could be intelligently designed. Anything that's nasty, harmful, and dangerous could be intelligently designed. And IDers think the inventors of all this is the Christian God! What hath God wrought, indeed?

What is the probability that you would be reading this at this moment in time? That you would even exist? Microscopically small, I would imagine. Yet here you are.

Again, I ask, what is one testable hypothesis of ID? In fact, what IS ID, besides criticisms of evolutionary theory? Nothing.

Starboy

Hi Patrick,

It has been a very long time since supernatural ideas have been taken seriously as explanations of natural phenomena. Perhaps there are some historians reading this thread that could answer your question. As to what science would look like, I suspect it would look like medieval science.

Starboy

Starboy

Athanasius,

What you have posted here is not a theory but a hope. It could be restated as “Come on boys, go on out there and look for it. We don’t know what it is you should be looking for, but you will know it when you find it!” You really are asking for an act of faith. Is there any other way to see it?

Starboy

Athanasius

Who has ever observed abiogenesis and how it works? Every attempt at experimentally repeating it has been an utter failure, in that it has come nowhere near to approximating the complex order of life. I could claim that life is what intelligent Design "looks like" - just as you could claim it is what the result of abiogenesis and macroevolution "looks like."
Intelligent design by humans takes a myriad of forms, but it is usually recognizable as orderly patterns not likely to have arisen by chance.

Behe is right. Humans often produce non-optimal things which are designed. But this recognition does not neccessarily lead to belief in an imperfect Intelligent Designer. The creation may have been optimal at first, but devolved and/or degenerated from it's pristine condition.

If I were to flip 1000 coins successively into the air, we could say that any combination of heads and tails would have a low probability of occurance. But some combinations would be much less probable than others. If the successive flips spelled out a message in binary code, you would immediately suspect that an intelligence was somehow behind this - probably that I was fraudulently manipulating the coins in some way.

Hmmm. If ID is true, then we would expect to observe an overall decrease in the complexity of biological systems over time. And that is exactly what we see. Can you show me just one provable observed example of an increase in order and complexity wrought by evolution? All we can find are losses of information - the toes of horses devolving from three to a single digit, vestigal organs, fish that lose their eyes - or fresh expressions of already existing genetic information that had been suppressed.

We would also expect that the highly complex order of life would not be observed spontaneously generating in nature, or during experimental attempts at abiogenesis. And that, too, is exactly what we observe.

We would expect as well that the works of an Intelligent Designer would give the appearance of having been designed - and biological systems do, exhibiting a complexity far beyond anything man has yet designed.

We would anticipate to find abrupt appearances of species in the fossil record, and that is what we find. Although we find examples of microevolution, there is not a single supposed record of macroevolution in the fossil record that is not filled with horrendous gaps and is not highly speculative and contested. That ID would predict as well.

What are you demanding? To observe the Intelligent Designer at work creating life? This is an event that would have happened in the distant past, just as abiogenesis and macro-evolution would have. Likewise, how could we ever duplicate the macroevolutionary process, since it would require billions of years? This cannot be tested, either. All that we have to work with are observations of the end-product of whatever agency generated life. I cannot think of much "testing" we can do besides imitative attempts like abiogenesis or synthesising biological systems, or looking for genetic evidence of evolution or design, or observing patterns in successive generations of life over a small period of time, and drawing inferences from that.

[ August 02, 2002: Message edited by: Athanasius ]

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: Athanasius ]</p>

WinAce

Sigh, the quality of our IDists is declining overall... I miss Randman and Eternal.

ps418

Really? Ignoring for the moment whether this is "what we see," Could you briefly explain how you derive this 'prediction' from the hypothesis of ID?

Why do you say that ID 'predicts' an increase rather than constancy of or a decrease in the complexity of biological systems over time? Because you say so? It seems to me that all three options [increase, decrease, constancy] are fully consistent with ID. Again, how do you decide between these competing hypotheses? And again, what observational facts and/or experimental outcomes would definitely be inconsistent with ID?


Again, how is this alleged 'prediction' derived from ID? Why would the (hypothetical) observation of spontaneous abiogenesis be inconsistent with ID? I see how it would be consistent with a naturalist hypothesis of the origin of life, but not how it would be inconsistent with a supernatural one? And why would this observation be evidence for supernatural causation rather than, say, an unknown natural mechanism requiring certain conditions that are not fulfilled in the lab or in nature (e.g. a prebiotic earth, a specific set of chemical environments, and so on)?

Patrick

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

ps418

How about the <a href="http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm" target="_blank">Nylon Bug, Flavobacterium sp.K172</a>? Does that count as an example? Or what about any of the examples on <a href="http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html" target="_blank">this page?</a> Why or why not?

Can you cite a few examples of an "provable observed" increase in order and complexity wrought by a supernatural agent?

Patrick

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

Bubba

Exactly. It's not enough just to say..."gee, this looks like design." Even Dawkins suggests the appearance of design in the Blind Watchmaker. Science needs testable hypothesis and working models.

Bubba

Principia

This statement is vague, and dangerously close to a circular argument. Just who are these 'intelligent designers' that we observe? Human beings? Chimps? Beavers? Ants? Bees? How 'intelligent' need these designers be, before they are merely nonintelligent designers or not a designer at all? It sounds like there is no formalism here for what qualifies for intelligence or design, but rather a direct appeal to intuition. The argument for ID is beginning on shaky grounds indeed.
Without the formalism, this question is misleading. First it assumes that there are indeed objects that are not designed. But why make such a distinction when there is no reason to suspect it? Perhaps, what we have in the universe are merely designed machines working on designed machines -- replicating, evolving, dying a slow entropic death. Second, by studying of only 'those designer' 'that we can observe' you bias your conception of the unseen designer. Are you ready to declare that the designer has certain intents/motivations? has human features of imperfection and shortsightedness? can only work through physical means? Indeed, let's take a look at the examples you cite for your case:
In every case, the scientific field of study makes certain assumptions about the designers. In particular, they all share the assumption that the designer share human intents and knowledge. This is even true in SETI, in which the scientists assume that the ETs intend to communicate (not to mention that they do communicate in a symbolic/transmissive manner), that they have similar technology to our own, that they are aware of the nature of the universe, etc... Once again, are you willing to concede that in making such arguments by analogy that your designer of ID share these qualities? If not, then observing the 'handiworks of these observers' brings us to no better understanding of the OOL. At best, we can conclude that if we were to design life, the current design we see is probably what we'd come up with.
This is an argument from ignorance, and illustrates nicely how ID is a negative thesis. That human designers do not (regularly) employ 'chance' in their designs is no indication that 'chance' is incapable of accomplishing certain designs. For that matter, human designs have in fact recently employed stochastic schemes to search for globally optimum solutions to engineering problems (e.g. recombinant protein design, TSPs, any number of nonlinear root finding problems, etc.)
This statement betrays the Christian heritage of ID. It also reveals more assumptions about the Designer:

• there is apparently one Designer
• she is (preferably) perfect
• her design was (preferably) perfect/'pristine'
• yet she did not have the foresight to realize her design would 'devolve' or 'degenerate'
• her design devolved/degenerated by evolution -- and thus placing a value judgment on the mechanism of evolution
• she has not bothered to intervene since long ago

And here we have an appeal to Dembski's vague notion of 'specified complexity,' one that he himself admits is ontologically subjective. Enough said. If you are interested, I can point you to discussions that have beat this subject to death.
Yes, your lack of formalisms about the nature of the Intelligent Designer requires at the very least this evidence.
Scientific 'testing' is indeed inductive. It only requires that the evidence fits aspects of the hypothesis being tested. The theory of evolution in fact does not require abiogenesis and vice-versa. Nor does abiogenesis insist that it is an absolute historical account of origins. However, I fail to see how even such historical science requires teleology, until someone does the work.

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: Scientiae ]</p>

Xyzzy

We have intelligent designers that we can observe. We have the handiwork of those designers to study as well. What distinguishes an object of intelligent design from one that is not?

Difference between intelligently designed objects and evolved objects.

1. Intelligently designed objects are typically designed for manufacturing or construction. Evolved objects self replicate.

2. Intelligently designed objects are used as tools to improve the functioning of life forms. Evolved things "are" life forms.

3. Intelligently designed objects show ordered simple construction, smooth surfaces, and elegant top-down design. Evolved objects show complex ad-hoc jury rigged design.

4. Intelligently designed objects are engineered with top-down closed form design. Evolved objects show evidence of bottom up iterative trial and error design.

5. Intelligently designed objects never have vestigial structures. Evolved objects typically have vestigial structures.

6. Sequences of intelligently designed objects show dramatic leaps in structure and function. Evolved objects show only modification of existing structure.

8. Intelligently designed objects typically can be traced to a known designer. Evolved objects have no known designer.

9. Intelligently designed objects plans or blueprints are stored externally in files or the minds of the designer, and are revised through engineering. Evolved objects each contain their own blueprints, and these coppy imperfectly from generation to generation.

10. Intelligently designed objects are limited to systems which can be tested and proven using closed form top-down design techniques. This does not include np type multi-variable optimization on a large scale. Evolved things can solve large multi-variable np problems using iterative genetic algorithms.