A scientific model of segmentation

A Scientific Case For Intelligent Input

http://www.charliewagner.net/casefor.htm

Charles's 'scientific' case for intelligent input can serve as an exquisite example of what Myers is arguing. Thanks for posting this Charlie.

As has been pointed out on previous occasions, there is a serious flaw in Nelson's Law, which must be corrected thusly: "It appears that all observed complex, highly organized machines whose origins can be determined with certainty are the product of intelligent HUMAN design."

On the basis of this necessary refining correction, it can be inferred that all objects containing CSI are the result of intelligent HUMAN design."

The creationist answer to all this is predictable: you can't get here from there, and we didn't evolve from a common segmented ancestor. Therefore, evolution is false, and we don't expect any necessary historical linkage between these different lineages. We can stop looking. The scientific answer is rather different. We need to explore other systems than flies, and dig a little deeper to see what their similarities might be. We should make testable predictions about possible linkages and do experiments to see how well they hold up. Interesting and complex differences are, well, interesting---they drive further research into the problem, not surrender.

— PZ Myers

It bears repeating, Charlie, that living organisms do not resemble machines in any but the most simplistic ways. No machine that I am aware can assemble another copy from surrounding matter using its own genetic code. Any machine I've seen has some purpose other than simply existing to assure more machines like it are produced.

It also bears repeating that while living organisms are complex, they also are bundled with flaws, structures co-opted for other purposes (I've mentioned the human knee and spine, which are still much more suited to quadrapedal locomotion), and structures which seem to serve little purpose at all (ie. atavistic limbs on whales). It's hard to imagine a designer that would do such a thing. Evolutionary theory nicely explains such things, and in fact, if they weren't there at all, then I'd say the theory might have a bit of a problem.

Living organisms, in their genes and in the way that their genes are expressed, show every indication of replication with modification over time. This is a critical prediction of evolutionary theory, and one that is bourne out again and again through observation. Your argument really boils down to nothing more than an argument from incredulity (as does ID itself).

Worse for ID is, of course, its inability to tell us anything about the designer, how the designer constructed living systems, what precisely (s)he/it/they did and the reason (s)he/it/they did it. Any scientific field of inquiry that does deal with intelligent designers (archaeology and forensics, for instance) deals with all these questions. Of course, ID has this implicit mechanism that points towards religious motivations, though that has to be completely excised in the hopes of fooling school boards, state education bureaucrats, courts and (ID advocates hope) SCOTUS itself.

Perhaps you can help here. Can you tell me who designed life, where they designed life, and how they went about building life? If not, can you at least tell me some means by which I could determine these things?

Hey, I can help you there! I can tell you who designed life, where they designed it, and how they went about building it. However, these things can't be derived empirically, but only by revelation. What we can determine empirically is that the first cause has what we might call "eternal power" - it is not restricted by the space/time continuum that we exist in; it is not restricted by limitations on speed, or mass-energy - and what we might call "divine nature" - since we have a moral sensitivity that doesn't seem to correspond with anything else that we see in the universe.

These things are, of course, obvious - although not measurable in an empirical way. You might call them invisible, yet clearly seen, I suppose. But even though people know these things, they choose to repress this knowledge.

Actually, I could save time by telling you that you can read the rest of this in the Bible.

BTW, creationism starts from revelation; ID starts from observation - that is one of the key philosophical differences between them. You might like to know that creationists don't consider ID to be creationism, and neither do proponents of ID. Of course, it is convenient to class them together as that allows you to continue to repress what you already know about where the universe came from.

Have a nice evening! :-)

"It appears that all observed complex, highly organized machines whose origins can be determined with certainty are the product of intelligent HUMAN design."

Perhaps you can help here. Can you tell me who designed life, where they designed life, and how they went about building life? If not, can you at least tell me some means by which I could determine these things?

Perhaps you can help here. Can you tell me who designed life, where they designed life, and how they went about building life? If not, can you at least tell me some means by which I could determine these things?

No. No. No. No.

Intelligence is not confined to humans. There are many life forms that exhibit considerable intelligence despite their non-human status. As it turns out, all of these intelligences that we are aware of here on the earth appear to be less than human, although we cannot be sure. It remains to be seen whether non-human intelligences exist that are greater than human. So the issue of whether the intelligence responsible for the design is "human" is irrelevant.

Charlie,

Is it not true that, "All observed complex, highly organized machines whose origins can be determined with certainty are the product of intelligent HUMAN design, and that this is true in every single observed case?"

Nelson's Law is, it seems to me, intentionally vague on this point.

Given the pinpoint KNOWN identity of the Designer in every instance where that identity has been determined, and having no credible knowledge of any other qualified candidate, it follows that the only legitimate hypothesis is that all complex machines, including those whose origins are unknown. are the product of intelligent HUMAN design.

I don't see any way around that conclusion.

BTW, creationism starts from revelation; ID starts from observation - that is one of the key philosophical differences between them. You might like to know that creationists don't consider ID to be creationism, and neither do proponents of ID. Of course, it is convenient to class them together as that allows you to continue to repress what you already know about where the universe came from.

creationism starts from revelation; ID starts from observation - that is one of the key philosophical differences between them. You might like to know that creationists don't consider ID to be creationism, and neither do proponents of ID. Of course, it is convenient to class them together as that allows you to continue to repress what you already know about where the universe came from.

We take human design too deeply for granted to entirely get around it. I confess I find it much easier to imagine landing on an alien planet and not being able to tell ordinary alien geology from an alien sculpture, than to imagine that alien landing in front of Mount Rushmore and being unable to deduce the application of intelligent design. The distinction is, I *know* it's design; how could the alien not know it? And the ID proponent equally is handicapped by knowledge - he *knows* we were designed for a Purpose. We can suspend our disbelief only so far before our trained BS meters kick in. What matters is how those meters were trained.

Given the pinpoint KNOWN identity of the Designer in every instance where that identity has been determined, and having no credible knowledge of any other qualified candidate, it follows that the only legitimate hypothesis is that all complex machines, including those whose origins are unknown. are the product of intelligent HUMAN design.

1) This organism looks designed; 2) My only experience is of human designers (or more strongly, I am excluding the possibility of non-human design); 3) This organism was not designed by humans; 4) Therefore this organism was not designed.

I think it's interesting that Dembski, with a background in both biology, maths and theology, should be convinced by ID. (emphasis added)

Huh? Dembski's "background in biology" appears to consist of cribbing propaganda from other (crypto)creationists. Care to expand on this, Mr. Troll?

Mr Troll also seems to be oblivious to the fact that most biology programs require calculus and statistics, at a minimum, and that many of us have significantly more math and quantitative methodology under our belts than that. Evolutionary biologists are among the biology disciplines that demand significant mathematical knowledge.

I find Troll's post rather riddled with assumptions:

ID is basically based on observation of the amount of specified information contained in something, and then a calculation as to the likelihood of this information appearing at random, or by natural process.

In fact, nearly everything in the world around us has almost zero chance of occuring at random. Drop a glass on concrete an infinite number of times, and the shard pattern will never be the same twice. Since the probability of each pattern is infinitesimal, does this mean a miracle happened every time? Most phenomena are like this. To find design, then, the specification must exist first. But if it does, then we are not "finding" what we already specified, we are only ratifying foregone conclusions. Even Dembski admits his specification is subjective, rendering his explanatory filter nothing more than a smokescreen around finding what he chooses to find.

Creationism starts from the proposition that the Bible is the infallible word of God, and then (broadly) uses it as a science textbook.

This seems to be true generically of definitional systems. The conclusions are predetermined, and the evidence (being defined as fitting the conclusions no matter what) are "discovered" to fit the conclusions. How else could it be? This approach trades correctness for certainty.

Evolutionism (or neo-darwinism, to be more precise) starts from the proposition that there is no external absolute - not God, not humans not anything except matter. The conclusions to which it come are not that God isn't there - because that was the presupposition - but that we are the product of time and chance and have no significance at all. All we are is a heap of molecules arranged by chance.

Some fairly subtle misunderstandings here. Scientific investigations don't make ANY suppositions about the supernatural, except that the scientific method itself assumes natural phenomena have natural causes, otherwise the method could not work. This method does not "conclude" that people (or anything else) are the product of time and chance, exactly. Instead, it explains evidence in natural terms. Anything else lies outside the bounds of science. Finally, I'm uncomfortable with this usage of "chance", since evolution is a directional process, and selection is the antithesis of chance.

The notion of us having "no significance" is circular. Significance is a psychological attribute projected onto life to meet psychological needs. Troll might equally say that because how the dice come up isn't predetermined, the numbers have no significance. But the significance is clearly related to the overall game - if he loses his shirt, that's significant. Our lives are maximally significant to all of us; no external gods are required for us to appreciate this. The necessity of survival IS required.

This is flawed logic. The assumption is that, because our only experience is of human designers, it is impossible to conceive of there being non-human designers.

This is not my reading. We can easily conceive of non-human designers, we simply have no way to be sure we can distinguish their designs from the noise, EXCEPT insofar as they resemble what WE might design. Even if the aliens are much like us, our identification "hit rate" would most likely be fairly low, with as many false positives as negatives.

the SETI project is searching for radio signals from extra terrestrial intelligence, and the people carrying out this project are convinced that certain patterns of transmission will demonstrate that they have been transmitted by a non-human intelligent agent

Only by source, not by content. The SETI people are searching for patterns WE might broadcast, which could not have originated from our known broadcasts. They may, for all we know, be listening in on multiple alien signals all day long.

In fact, the failure of logic in this quote runs to the heart of the failure of evolution as a theory:

I also disagree with item (4) in this sequence. It should read, "This organism was not intelligently designed. The evolutionary process as we understand it IS a design process, like any complex adaptive system. The superimposition of intelligence onto this process is an anthropomorphic projection, necessary only to meet the requirements of pre-existing doctrine.

ID doesn't know any such thing about why we may have been designed a priori - it just observes that we could not be the product of chance.

But it doesn't, it ASSUMES we could not be the product of chance, and then confects a specification necessary to ratify the assumption. Of course it is true that we MIGHT have been designed; this can never be ruled out. A technique that can be used to find design in everything finds design in nothing; it has no constraints. Magical explanations have no limits. Can anyone imagine Dembski actually APPLYING his filter to some organism, and saying "By golly, this organism wasn't designed!" I can't.

Actually, it assumes that we could be the product of chance, and then demonstrates that this is an absurd assumption.

Behe in Darwin's Black Box argues that biology could continue under an ID regime determining the relative extent of design and chance, for a start.

... however, I agree with your preceding disagreement, that evolution concludes "this was not intelligently designed." (Presumably you were happy with the premises, then?)

ID would then assert that "unintelligent design", where design is equivalent to an abundance of specified complexity, is an oxymoron.

Troll:

ID would then assert that "unintelligent design", where design is equivalent to an abundance of specified complexity, is an oxymoron.

I don't think this position follows. What ID does, unfortunately, is decide FIRST whether whoever applies the technique prefers to find design, and THEN fabricates the specification necessary to establish design, and THEN decrees that the design, being specified, derived from an intelligent source.

Evolutionists, of course, do not presuppose intelligent design, and in this I agree. If we assume our conclusions, why bother introducing messy evidence? Where I seem to disagree is in the equation of intelligence with design, so that if something was designed by a complex natural process, it therefore wasn't designed! You seem to be saying that this is a semantic issue: that if the designer does not exhibit "intelligence" as YOU define it, then there is no design. But your designer is itself a process. Human beings are processes in a biological sense. Just how bright does a designer need to be to qualify as intelligent? And by what method should this intelligence be measured? Who gets to administer the IQ test?

I'm not sure what you mean by premises. This wasn't a syllogism, it was a train of thought. The first item was that an organism "looks designed". Surely we can all agree that this is a subjective assessment?

Dawkins uses (perhaps coined?) the term "designoid" to describe the results of complex adaptive processes over time. Adam Smith used the term "invisible hand" to describe the same epiphenomenon. We (and an unmanageably complex global economy, though there have been attempts to "intelligently design" economies, with disastrous results) are the result of the natural operation of complex systems. This isn't "chance", systems act according to rules. But CSI is a method for placing a bet after the race results are posted, and the winner is already "specified". This is simply cheating. At least Dembski admits that theology lies at the foundation of intelligent design.

No - I don't believe that you have to accept that "looks designed" is a subjective assessment. If you find a watch in a field, you don't assume that it has always been there - Paley was right in that regard. Darwin would have been right if as you looked at smaller and smaller scale, things got simpler and simpler. But they don't - the lowest level of life is the cell, which is already substantially more complicated than (say) an oil refinery. If we were on the surface of an alien planet, and came across an artifact of the scale of an oil refinery, we would have no doubt that it had been designed.

At the end of the day, I think that belief in atheistic evolution is based on a naive grasp of improbability and statistics. People are repressing the knowledge that they have. They are either ignorant, stupid, or insane. Or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that.

Bye!

If you find a mouse in the field, do you also assume it was manufactured? It's much more complicated than a watch, after all, so it must have been assembled by a supernatural being of godlike intelligence.

We ignorant, stupid, insane, wicked biologists tend to assume that a mouse was 'constructed' by other mice using processes that require no intelligence whatsoever. We've always been misled by the fact that we can watch those processes in progress, and haven't yet seen any gods stalking the fields, pointing their fingers and conjuring mouselings into existence with a mighty "zot!"

the lowest level of life is the cell

— a Creationist Troll, apparently

One of my favourite lines is "You can't get life from non life."

If you find a mouse in the field, do you also assume it was manufactured? It's much more complicated than a watch, after all, so it must have been assembled by a supernatural being of godlike intelligence.

We ignorant, stupid, insane, wicked biologists tend to assume that a mouse was 'constructed' by other mice using processes that require no intelligence whatsoever. We've always been misled by the fact that we can watch those processes in progress, and haven't yet seen any gods stalking the fields, pointing their fingers and conjuring mouselings into existence with a mighty "zot!"

the organization of these structures ... could not have been accomplished by random, accidental fortuitous occurrences.

ID is basically based on observation of the amount of specified information contained in something, and then a calculation as to the likelihood of this information appearing at random, or by natural process.

Why must "intelligence" always equate to "human intelligence, except maybe moreso?" Is there no debate at all about our ability to recognize nonhuman intelligence(s)? Why doesn't natural selection or the free market count as a "natural intelligence" producing a designed system as the output?

The nature of the "designer" seems pretty straightforward: for all intents and purposes, that designer was human. Otherwise, we would never suspect design at all. And postulating a "human" designer is the default; we ascribe human motivations to everything from dogs to floods.