Chance and regularity in the development of the fly eye

Another fascinating aspect of development is that all the intricate, precise steps are carried out without agency...It's teleonomy, not teleology.

TELEONOMY: the element of apparent purpose or possession of a project in the organization of living systems, without implying any vitalistic connotations. Frequently considered as a necessary if not sufficient defining feature of the living organization.

Steviepinhead,

I read the article and I know what teleonomy means.

PZ does a fine job of manipulating words like "chance" and "randomness" to imply "purposelessness". I tend to agree with quantum physicist Henry Stapp's assessment: "Chance is an idea useful for dealing with a world partly unknown to us. But it has no rational place among the ultimate constituents of nature."

The role of manipulating chance and randomness to imply purposeness has been assigned to the Intelligent Design movement. Did you not get the memo?

What PZ shows is that the concept of design or teleology is complicated by the fact that chance and regularity appear to be sufficient. In other words, the eliminative approaches sought by ID are once again found to be vacuous.

You and Stapp can think whatever you like. If you want to call that philosophizing, then indulge your penchant.

Do let us know when you have any actual evidence for the larger propositions you have put forth here, i.e.:

"The gig is up!"

" 'Chance is an idea useful for dealing with a world partly unknown to us. But it has no rational place among the ultimate constituents of nature.' "

Oh, and be sure to let us know what evidence you have that physicist Stapp was addressing emergent phenomena like biology when he was propounding upon the "ultimate constituents of nature."

Needless to say, I won't be holding my breath awaiting a reply that actually contains evidence for these hallucinations qualia of yours.

I don't get it -- Qualiatative is being self-defeating. So he wants to argue that there is some "purpose" behind the fact that a rhabdomere 2 ommatidia in from the posterior margin, 3 ommatidia down from the equator, is expressing Rh3 in Fly Alpha, and some other purposeful reason why the equivalent rhabdomere in Alpha's sister, Beta, is expressing Rh4?

That is remarkably stupid.

the eliminative approaches sought by ID are once again found to be vacuous.

Do let us know when you have any actual evidence for the larger propositions you have put forth here, i.e.: "The gig is up!"

Oh, and be sure to let us know what evidence you have that physicist Stapp was addressing emergent phenomena like biology when he was propounding upon the "ultimate constituents of nature."

PZ,

I am not the one making philosophic inferences here. It seems to me that you are advocating "randomness" as an irreducible constituent of nature. Is this true?

PZ:Except us developmental biologists, of course: the fly eye is an extremely well studied developmental system, and we know that it is assembled by unthinking cellular processes with no design or engineering required.

Except that no one ever said that flies are thinking with their eyes or that they think their own eyes into existence.

I know, it's all a little bewildering and complicated---intensely complicated with all kinds of interactions between cells.

Apparently Myers got out his special smarty pants that Mother Nature gave him, just for this post. It was probably her natural selection again.

Fortunately for any without naturally selected smarty pants Myer's own text just so happens by quite a happenstance to be assembled by unthinking cellular processes. Given a little historical narrative about how his text came to be (Darwinists shouldn't object to that!) his few attempts at a mixture of his personal philosophy about "unthinking cellular processes" in it probably reduce to neurosis derived from personal history, a sort of cosmic Oedipus complex that is typical to certain fellows.

However, when you dig into it and explore the literature, what you find is the successful application of a reductionist program of study, with each piece of the story a fully comprehensible and actually rather simple product of a molecular/cellular interaction.

Molecular/cellular? Even for those with the urge to merge blurring the difference between molecules and cells is pushing it.

ID, as I understand it, is not committed to everything in nature being the direct product of intelligence.

Accounts of causality are inherently metaphysical. Thus, PZ's attempt to use biology to demonstrate purposelessness on a "scientific level" is non sequitur. Ultimately, randomness only reflects our ignorance of the underlying system.

I am not the one making philosophic inferences here. It seems to me that you are advocating "randomness" as an irreducible constituent of nature. Is this true?

An interesting question: Is randomness an irreducible component of nature or is randomness reducible to deterministic forces?

One may be tempted to argue that randomness is real due to the chaotic nature of nature but chaos could be due to our inability to measure the relevant parameters continuously. In other words, randomness in chaos could be reduced to determinism IFF we had sufficiently accurate data.

More later

"But you don't seriously believe," Einstein protested, "that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?" "Isn't that precisely what you have done with relativity?" I asked in some surprise. "After all, you did stress the fact that it is impermissible to speak of absolute time, simply because absolute time cannot be observed; that only clock readings, be it in the moving reference system or the system at rest, are relevant to the determination of time." "Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning," Einstein admitted, "but it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put it more diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has actually observed. But on principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe."

Hi Bill...

But yes, randomness IS an irreducible constituent of nature. Or at least at the quantum level that is what it appears to be.

How remarkable. Usually, my science posts get almost no comment...I'd forgotten, though, that the word "random" throws creationists into such a tizzy.

Look at the title, you silly illiterates.

"Chance and regularity in the development of the fly eye".

Chance is involved in the determination of photoreceptor types. It's absurd to argue otherwise.

Regularity is also involved -- there are specific rules and patterns of interaction that set up the arrangements of rhabodmeres.

I'm certainly not arguing that everything in biology is just random noise. You'd have to be a major idiot to assume that.

It's also eminently clear that biology is not purely determinate.

Qualiative and mynym: what are you guys, some kind of dolts?

PZ,

I can engineer systems of dots in Conway's Game of Life that will spawn a potentially infinite series of generations. As the game flickers to proceeding generations the change could be misconstrued by a passive observer as "random". Yet we know that the game is contingent upon initial conditions acted upon by a repetition of rules.

So what is "random", PZ? Is it irreducible? Is it patterned determinism? Or is it something else?

I tend to agree with quantum physicist Henry Stapp's assessment: "Chance is an idea useful for dealing with a world partly unknown to us. But it has no rational place among the ultimate constituents of nature."

Now do you see why I quoted a quantum physicist?

"Now do you see why I quoted a quantum physicist?"

Not by any chance (oops I mean Design - there is no chance) a screwball one with his own version of QM?

In any case much is chance so far as the organisms are concerned.

I wonder what the stats would be like if KM Darwinists --- who believe in a designer, but won't admit to holding an ID viewpoint --- weren't afraid to fess up to their true inclinations

Qualiataliatedive,
Dork, it's "jig" not "gig".
You know, I have all the info you need on my blog.

Posted by Qualiatative on March 20, 2006 09:38 PM (e) PZ, I can engineer systems of dots in Conway's Game of Life that will spawn a potentially infinite series of generations. As the game flickers to proceeding generations the change could be misconstrued by a passive observer as "random". Yet we know that the game is contingent upon initial conditions acted upon by a repetition of rules. So what is "random", PZ? Is it irreducible? Is it patterned determinism? Or is it something else?

I have a question for 'Qualiatative' and Mynym. How come ID trolls who come here never talk to each other? You guys all pretend like the other trolls aren't here. You guys are all trying to defeat 'methodological naturalism', shouldn't you stick together? Or are you maybe embarrassed by your fellow trolls?

ID, as I understand it, is not committed to everything in nature being the direct product of intelligence.

PZ,

I appreciate what you have written, carefully qualifying your assertions and comments. I can tell that you are passionate about science.

Wouldn't it be neat if there existed a decent simulation of some complex biological process, with sufficient fidelity to show behaviour consistent with observation? I am not talking about microscopic systems such as 1,000 water molecules, or even the folding of a large protein. Rather, how about, say, a complete simulation of a small ecosystem based on Caenorhabditis elegans, the tiny worm that some people spent years studying in excruciating detail? ("In the beginning was the worm," Andrew Brown, Simon and Schuster, 2003.)

Such a simulator has not yet built, nor may it ever get built, if people lose interest in C. elegans as a model organism. However, wind the clock forward 1,000 years and who knows what science will have at its disposal? Perhaps then there might exist something akin to a "mathematical proof" of the detailed origin and explanation of some complicated biological process such as evolution in action within a colony of nematodes?

Still, I wonder what the future creationists will make of such a "proof". I suspect they will bang their war drums as loudly as ever before, and refuse to acknowledge such proof as may exist.

It's funny how nobody, creationist or scientist alike, would fault the solution I will give to a simple problem:

PROBLEM: Find the number y that makes the following assertion true ...

2y-4=0

SOLUTION: y = 2

No creationist will dispute this, as it has nothing to do with religion. This does not challenge any cherished notions. Even if I got the solution wrong, nobody's blood would boil. The most hardened advocate on either side of the fence would simply scoff at me, and nothing much more than that. But say something that threatens to step on the toes of that holiest of holies, GENESIS, and look out ... real listening stops and the argumentum ad hominem begins in earnest.

How come ID trolls who come here never talk to each other? You guys all pretend like the other trolls aren't here. You guys are all trying to defeat 'methodological naturalism', shouldn't you stick together? Or are you maybe embarrassed by your fellow trolls?

— Arden Chatfield

Apparently that's just a cover for a priori excluding design in order to better sell your atheistic worldview.

ID, as I understand it, is not committed to everything in nature being the direct product of intelligence.

I read the article and I know what teleonomy means.

— Qualiatative

PZ does a fine job of manipulating words like "chance" and "randomness" to imply "purposelessness".

I tend to agree with quantum physicist Henry Stapp's assessment: "Chance is an idea useful for dealing with a world partly unknown to us. But it has no rational place among the ultimate constituents of nature."

Fortunately for any without naturally selected smarty pants Myer's own text just so happens by quite a happenstance to be assembled by unthinking cellular processes. Given a little historical narrative about how his text came to be (Darwinists shouldn't object to that!) his few attempts at a mixture of his personal philosophy about "unthinking cellular processes" in it probably reduce to neurosis derived from personal history, a sort of cosmic Oedipus complex that is typical to certain fellows.

This paragraph is random, purposeless, and shows no sign of an intelligent designer. But it is mildly amusing...

Even if Bohm and Einstein and so on are correct, there is still another useful understanding of randomness - causal independence, which of course comes in degrees. Good random number generators are very independent of the programs they influence, for example. Similarly, in an ideal gas the positions and momenta of the particles are independent of each other. Philosopher Mario Bunge (for example) has written about this since 1959, and there are others.

PZ, does "the wave" occur in a Fibonacci Series? i.e. are the balancing rh's occurring in proportions of phi in a non-mutant eye?

what the heck *does* ID commit itself to? ID seems to me to try, very very hard, never to actually say anything at all.

No obvious fibonacci relationships: it's a single linear wave that sweeps once across the eye, from back to front.

"Apparently Myers got out his special smarty pants that Mother Nature gave him, just for this post."

They always get back to this one too, like the lumbering class bully who picks on the "brainiacs." The green haze of jealousy hovers over every ID nut who wants to bring them smart scientists down a notch.

So, according to ID, what are some things in nature that are the direct product of intelligence, and what are some things in nature that are NOT the direct product of intelligence?

Thanks for (once again) demonstrating so clearly that (1) ID is just religious apologetics, (2) IDers are lying to us when they claim it's not, and (3) Judge Jones was entirely correct when he concluded that it was.

Um, how do you propose we determine which are and which aren't?

I want to preface my reply by saying that I am not advocating ID as a scientific program. With that said, ID claims to be able to detect design via irreducible complex structures that exhibit complex specified information.

— Qualitative

Again, I was not advocating ID here. Religion extends beyond the ID community, as evidenced by PZ.

Um, how do you propose we determine which are and which aren't? For the ID position, see above.

You haven't answered my question. Why the dodge?

QUESTION TO ALL PTers: You cry foul when Creationists, IDers, or theistic evolutionists talk about their worldview. Yet you credulously accept PZ's vitriolic atheism. Why the double standard?

I want to preface my reply by saying that I am not advocating ID as a scientific program. With that said, ID claims to be able to detect design via irreducible complex structures that exhibit complex specified information.

So what is the mechanism alerting the adjacent cell to begin its process?

With that said, ID claims to be able to detect design via irreducible complex structures that exhibit complex specified information.

— Qualiatative

I am not advocating that religion makes people stupid. With that said, religion seems to make people stupid.

This paragraph is random, purposeless, and shows no sign of an intelligent designer.

It contains the wisdom of the species simply through the use language, if nothing else. And that is the result of a lot of intelligent and many a designer using symbols and signs quite on purpose.

But it is mildly amusing...

Still no answer on how the Blind Watchmaker makes things see the light to keep an eye on time, I suppose?

Einstein said "God does not play dice with the universe." He was always opposed to the quantum in physics. Physicist, not quantum physicist.

Chaos is a property of some, but not all, deterministic dynamical systems. Randomness is a property of stochastic processes, never deterministic. So strictly speaking, a pseudo-random number generator is a non chaotic deterministic dynamical system. The resulting sequence of pseudo-random numbers, however, passes almost all known tests for randomness.

This means that the same data can often be viewed as representing the outcomes of a deterministic dynamical system or a stochastic process. Certain answers are easier to obtain one way or the other, for macro physical phenomena. In the microworld, only quantum mechanics, necessarily a stochastic process according to the vast majority of physicists, produces correct answers.

However, here on PT, I think molecular biologists ought to speak next.

How remarkable. Usually, my science posts get almost no comment...I'd forgotten, though, that the word "random" throws creationists into such a tizzy.

Look at the title, you silly illiterates.

For the person who simply slaps the label of natural on pretty much anything and everything and then claims that the notion is good enough to define a way a thinking which can define "naturals" who are supposedly enlightened and so on, your claims about buzzwords are ironic.

"Chance and regularity in the development of the fly eye".

Chance is involved in the determination of photoreceptor types. It's absurd to argue otherwise.

Chance is involved perhaps for no other reason that it is just a word that you are using as a sort of chance-of-the-gaps, a term that is slapped on any complex state of flux and the like in which the chain of cause and effect is not currently "understood."

Regularity is also involved --- there are specific rules and patterns of interaction that set up the arrangements of rhabodmeres.

And that, in all probability, has much more to do with evolution by orderly law than does "chance"....whatever it was that chance was supposed to mean. It is appropriate, though, for those whose explanation is ultimately meaningless to choose meaningless terms.

I'm certainly not arguing that everything in biology is just random noise. You'd have to be a major idiot to assume that.

It's also eminently clear that biology is not purely determinate.

What is it that you mean by "random noise," perhaps you are referring to causes without effects or effects without causes?

Qualiative and mynym: what are you guys, some kind of dolts?

I would think that a charlatan would prefer dolts. But thinking, would that be natural or "artificial"....I wonder, who is it that said that flies eyes are designed to see by thinking cellular processes, anyway? If no one thought that, then why are you taking the time to try to prove that flies eyes are organized by unthinking processes and the like?

They always get back to this one too, like the lumbering class bully who picks on the "brainiacs."

You read too much into my metaphoric fun. But it may well be that "community" forms a bit too tightly given the psychological dynamics involved, then the Herd all runs together. At any rate, my historical narratives that seek to reduce organisms to a supposed history are at least as likely as the little narratives typical to Darwinism.

The green haze of jealousy hovers over every ID nut who wants to bring them smart scientists down a notch.

So you are saying that scientists are intelligent, which is not always case, but for the sake of argument how would we go about detecting scientific intelligence in scientific ways?

Chance is involved perhaps for no other reason that it is just a word that you are using as a sort of chance-of-the-gaps, a term that is slapped on any complex state of flux and the like in which the chain of cause and effect is not currently "understood."

I never did get an answer to my question of why the ID/C folks here never acknowledge each other.

Often those opposing Darwinism seem to tend to the opposite psychological dynamics of the urge to merge, running with the herd, communalizing with the scientific community, etc. So expect the iconoclastic tendency, the curmudgeons, etc.

As far as I'm concerned it's all in good fun. You have to make fun to have fun.

See, I'll say hello to Qualiative. Yeah, hi there...out gathering fertilizer, I see.

Note:I was being facetious here. PZ will, in all likelihood, be ranting until the day he days.

I know you meant on the day he dies and his own unthinking cellular processes recede into molecules, back into the womb of Mommy Nature again, finally, to be natural!

I would have added that he's metaphorically dead in the head already.

So you are saying that scientists are intelligent, which is not always case, but for the sake of argument how would we go about detecting scientific intelligence in scientific ways?

Often those opposing Darwinism seem to tend to the opposite psychological dynamics of the urge to merge, running with the herd, communalizing with the scientific community, etc. So expect the iconoclastic tendency, the curmudgeons, etc.

Silly fellow.

Oh just give me a chance, you seem to have plenty, after all...although I suppose I can always select to take a chance to have a chance. When cellular processes begin to think that they are thinking then in this craaazy way that they sometimes do, then perhaps I will have a chance.

It is chance as determined operationally...

What do you suppose the chances are that your operational determination of the chances has nothing to do with defining chance in such a way that it can be opposed to design?

Ah, but I know your type perfectly: the insecure, anal-retentive creationist who is utterly terrified that God hasn't nailed down every last grain of sand and every last molecule of every cell of every single individual in the universe, and that every choice might not have cosmic import.

Choice? I thought that only Nature selected things in the Darwinian way, naturally enough. If Darwinism is based ultimately more on chance than natural laws and chance opens the door to choice, then how long do you suppose that we have been guiding our own evolution by choice?

Choice? I thought that only Nature selected things in the Darwinian way, naturally enough. If Darwinism is based ultimately more on chance than natural laws and chance opens the door to choice, then how long do you suppose that we have been guiding our own evolution by choice?

The book begins (p. ix): "In my previous books... I tried to show that the currently accepted theory of evolution---called 'neoDarwinism' or 'the modern synthesis'---is false. Taking an interest in the history of evolutionary thought in the course of subsequent work, I made a very remarkable and unexpected discovery: nobody, not even Darwin and his closest friends, ever believed in Darwin's theory of natural selection: Darwinism was refuted from the moment it was conceived." And on its last page (p. 422): "I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science."

Well, I don't have time now. These tags are nonstandard.

Mynym, have you ever taken LSD? I think you could seriously benefit from a really powerful trip, preferrably out in nature somewhere.

I'm only taking him at his own words. He said that we could choose or select if given a chance, so I simply asked how long we have been choosing.

LSD would seem to result in natural selections, naturally enough, so Myers is probably all for it. I'm against it, I suppose I'm an "artificial." If you don't understand that it is because you have not read what Darwinists write.

What a maroon...

I want to preface my reply by saying that I am not advocating ID as a scientific program.

With that said, ID claims to be able to detect design via irreducible complex structures that exhibit complex specified information.

You cry foul when Creationists, IDers, or theistic evolutionists talk about their worldview. Yet you credulously accept PZ's vitriolic atheism. Why the double standard?

Hey Mynym, would you mind explaining to me what the scientific theory of ID is?

Thanks.

So, according to ID, what are some things in nature that are the direct product of intelligence, and what are some things in nature that are NOT the direct product of intelligence?

Hmm. Let's recap: your agenda here is to further the cause of a reactionary religious establishment...

The religious establishment has never had much of a problem with Darwinism, if it had then Darwinism would have never been accepted. See the book Darwin's defenders, it probably should have had more of negative attitude to Darwinism but it can be demonstrated historically that the attitude has been one of syncretism.

...and to reverse the last 100+ years of scientific learning...

The last 100+ years, eh? Would you include the eugenics movement in that, or just everything that you currently think is beneficial or progressive? It would seem that most who believe in scientism these days include every single advancement, all technology and all that is good and right under the term "science." So everytime a creationist engineer makes use of some intelligent design and creativity to invent something that leads to technological progress and so on, that is argued to somehow support the Darwinian creation myth. It's gotten so bad that some associations for the advancement of science define support for "evolution"/Darwinism as "natural" and so everytime creationists step outside and experience the natural world, well, then they must be agreeing with the whole Darwinian creation myth or somethin'. Not to mention that they experience gravity, naturally enough, which is a theory just like Darwinism or somethin' too.

...and replace it with unchangeable 2,500 year old religious dogma.

If you think that religious dogma has not changed then you're ignorant of religion.

And this makes you some kind of iconoclastic 'rebel'.

Well, I'M impressed.

I never claimed to be anything. I'll run with a herd if there's a good herd to run along with. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with the urge to merge, even now your brain is blurring things together to paint a picture and an image for you to see.

If you want to see 'urge to merge, running with the herd', I suggest you check out Uncommon Descent.

What do you expect, they're beginning to form their own community. It's the establishment's lose because ID is a tool that is already in use that only needs to be formalized so that it can be used even more. In the end, no one is going to care what is called "scientific" as long as it works.

Hey Mynym, would you mind explaining to me what the scientific theory of ID is?

In the instance I have in mind it would be taking a specification or definition of what you think a work of malevolent intelligence would look like in patterns of information and then testing if the data for it. I don't really care if you call that scientific or not, as long as the results are correct and the pursuit of truth is furthered.

What's the scientific theory of evolution? Where has the definition that you refer me to been published in the peer reviewed literature as the scientific theory of evolution?

It's the establishment's lose because ID is a tool that is already in use that only needs to be formalized so that it can be used even more. In the end, no one is going to care what is called "scientific" as long as it works.

Where has the definition that you refer me to been published in the peer reviewed literature as the scientific theory of evolution?

Hmm. Let's recap: your agenda here is to further the cause of a reactionary religious establishment...

if it had then Darwinism would have never been accepted. See the book Darwin's defenders, it probably should have had more of negative attitude to Darwinism

...and to reverse the last 100+ years of scientific learning...

...and replace it with unchangeable 2,500 year old religious dogma.

And this makes you some kind of iconoclastic 'rebel'.

If you want to see 'urge to merge, running with the herd', I suggest you check out Uncommon Descent.

It's the establishment's lose because ID is a tool that is already in use

that only needs to be formalized so that it can be used even more.

In the end, no one is going to care what is called "scientific" as long as it works.

Ya know, thinking about "evolutionists" "running with the herd", I've thunked up a hypothesis as to why that might be the case:

Consider several people who pay attention to reality, and then describe the same aspect of nature.

I hypothesis that while they may use different phrasing, what they say is quite likely to sound like it's describing the same stuff.

Henry

Hey Mynym, would you mind explaining to me what the scientific theory of ID is?

In the instance I have in mind it would be taking a specification or definition of what you think a work of malevolent intelligence would look like in patterns of information and then testing if the data for it. I don't really care if you call that scientific or not, as long as the results are correct and the pursuit of truth is furthered.

Mynym is like Homer Simpson in that episode where he was trying to be a hippy. "Never fear, the Cosmic Jester is here!". He thinks he's freaking with people's minds and being really profound. Everyone else just thinks he's annoying. And smelly.

What's the scientific theory of evolution?

— mynym

Chance is involved perhaps for no other reason that it is just a word that you are using as a sort of chance-of-the-gaps, a term that is slapped on any complex state of flux and the like in which the chain of cause and effect is not currently "understood." - ID is a tool that is already in use that only needs to be formalized so that it can be used even more. In the end, no one is going to care what is called "scientific" as long as it works.

In the instance I have in mind it would be taking a specification or definition of what you think a work of malevolent intelligence would look like in patterns of information and then testing if the data for it. I don't really care if you call that scientific or not, as long as the results are correct and the pursuit of truth is furthered.

Why am I not surprised that mynym has failed utterly to engage with the literature on randomness even when prodded? Another ignorant creationist, for sure, if I can be forgiven the redundancy.