Scientific Vacuity of ID: Evolution hypothesis requires that the genome be a "multiple independent collection of selectable genes"

I'm a scientist (geophysicist), and I agree almost all of the time with you and the other contributors here.

But, I have to point out that whenever I see the words "vacuity of ID", I know immediately who wrote the piece. It's kinda like hearing Kent Hovind talk about the "religion of evolution" . . . . . . .

No question that ID is empty of science, just hoping that you can expand your verbal pallet a bit. Makes things more interesting.

waldteufel: surely you mean "palette?" Or are you just trying to make things more interesting?

waldteufel: I'm a scientist (geophysicist), and I agree almost all of the time with you and the other contributors here. But, I have to point out that whenever I see the words "vacuity of ID", I know immediately who wrote the piece. It's kinda like hearing Kent Hovind talk about the "religion of evolution" . . . . . . . No question that ID is empty of science, just hoping that you can expand your verbal pallet a bit. Makes things more interesting.

In my argument against Intelligent Design Theory I will not contend that it is not falsifiable or that it implies contradictions. I’ll argue that Intelligent Design Theory doesn’t imply anything at all, i.e. it has no content. By ‘content’ I refer to a body of determinate principles and propositions entailed by those principles. By ‘principle’ I refer to a proposition of central importance to the theory at issue. By ‘determinate principle’ I refer to a proposition of central importance to the theory at issue in which the extensions of its terms are clearly defined. I’ll evaluate the work of William Dembski because he specifies his methodology in detail, thinks Intelligent Design Theory is contentful and thinks Intelligent Design Theory (hereafter ‘IDT’) grounds an empirical research program.1 Later in the paper I assess a recent trend in which IDT is allegedly found a better home as a metascientific hypothesis, which serves as a paradigm that catalyzes research. I’ll conclude that, whether IDT is construed as a scientific or metascientific hypothesis, IDT lacks content.

— Nichols

Things must be quiet in the ID world if you're reduced to taking apart bornagain77's stuff. Although I notice you've picked one of his shorter posts.

Bob

Why does Dave have such a problem with monkeys? They look a lot like people.

1) Look at monkeys.
2) Then look at people.

They look a lot alike! Shrug.

LoL. If you biologists bump in to something while you're rolling around on the floor laughing, it's probably a GA researcher.

But but if there aren't multiple independent genes then how on Earth will the IDers be able to naively multiply the probabilities in order to prove that Goddidit?

This study offers one of the most striking confirmations of the original interpretation of the hobbit as an island remnant of one of the oldest human migrations to Asia.

Interesting seeing people waisting so much time on something so "scientifically empty".

But, I have to point out that whenever I see the words “vacuity of ID”, I know immediately who wrote the piece.

Interesting seeing people waisting so much time on something so “scientifically empty”.

BornAgain77 is hardly a high profile target. He comes out with the Twelve Disproofs of Materialism for god's sake, in which theism triumphs over materialism by the power of words looking slightly similar to each other.

Defending the integrity of science isn't a waste of time. The reason why the people on Pandas thumb spend so much time refuting the intellectually dishonest claims of ID is because ID proponents refuse to take on board any refutations, they simply filter them out and carry on repeating fallacious arguments over and over and over. If you people would actually listen and learn no one would have to "waste time" on William Dembski's intellectually dishonest attempt at christian apologetics. As it stands someone has to be there point out the holes in the arguments lest this nonsense gain any kind of traction with people who don't know any better.

but if there aren’t multiple independent genes then how on Earth will the IDers be able to naively multiply the probabilities in order to prove that Goddidit?

It avoids the demarcation problem which is so often quoted by ID proponents

Interesting seeing people waisting so much time on something so “scientifically empty”.

It is incumbent on scientists and socially aware individuals to both promote scientific knowledge and demote threats to it.

Besides, it irritates biologists when creationists distorts their science,

The only ones we see being against the true scientific spirit of open debate of all theories are Darwinists.

Where I would dissent from the expression "scientific vacuity", it is about the need to restrict it to scientific. ID is empty, not only of scientific content, but - and deliberately so - of just about any content at all. That's no matter of dispute, for its advocates advertise, as one of the its benefits, that it doesn't have anything to say about Who or When; and it's quite apparent that there is nothing about What, Where, How, or Why. ID would not be acceptable as an expository essay in a high-school writing class.

Mats: Promotion of scientific knowledge is what everyone wants, not the propagation of naturalistic myths posing as "science".

ID is the thing "posing as science" since it contain no scientific content, is based around a religious belief that is contradicted by all the available evidence, and exists only in the form of blog postings and books that have not been peer reviewed. When these shortcomings are pointed out, Dembski just stick his fingers in his ears and makes up excuses, or constructs dishonest lists of peer-reviewed ID papers which are upon cursory inspection nothing of the sort. He repeatedly ignores solid refutations of his claims. This is the very definition of Pseudo-science, ie. "posing as science".

Mats: Creationist scientists, being themselves men and women with certified degrees from respectable institutions, don't want to "distort science".

The only ones we see being against the true scientific spirit of open debate of all theories are Darwinists. So I guess I should say, "physician, heal thyself".

James writes;
If the evidence supported a 6000 year old earth, or a flood, or a creation event, over the past 200ish years of geology and biology would have have found undeniable overwhelming evidence that this was the case.

In fact, the case for the literal truth of the Genesis story had already fallen apart by the end of the 18th century, before Darwin was born. Early scientists like Buffon, Cuvier, and Hutton had already shown strong evidence that the earth was very old; that it was inhabited by different species in ancient times; and that many species had gone extinct.
Scientists consequently viewed Charles Darwin's theory of evolution not as much as an attack on the bible as a way out of the difficulties they were having making theoretical sense of their data.
The one-on-one conflict, evolutionary theory vs. literal biblical creationism, has only been fought in the arena of public opinion. It was never a real scientific debate at all.

Mats:

Of course you try to answer. But you are back to your self adopted role of not making sense:

Per definition scientists decide what is science, however you as a lieman :-P feel about that. Do you have any peer-reviewed results that you care to share with us? How is it 'creationist'?

And in fact I have never heard an IDCer refer to demarcation. It is curious, but they are even worse on philosophy than on science, perhaps because philosophy isn’t as dangerous to their faith. But you can’t really be surprised by any expression of the depth of their ignorance.

Creationist scientists, being themselves men and women with certified degrees from respectable institutions, don’t want to “distort science”. What they want is what you said above,meaningly, the promotion of true science, not the indoctrination of their youngsters at public expenses.

— Mats

The only ones we see being against the true scientific spirit of open debate of all theories are Darwinists. So I guess I should say, “physician, heal thyself”.

— Mats

Mats spoke about "Creationist scientists" - a moron spouting an oxymoron !

The only ones we see being against the true scientific spirit of open debate of all theories are Darwinists.

Things must be quiet in the ID world if you’re reduced to taking apart bornagain77’s stuff. Although I notice you’ve picked one of his shorter posts.

Mats wrong as usual: Interesting seeing people waisting so much time on something so scientifically empty.

A yes or no question for Mats: Did God leave scientifically verifiable fingerprints on creation?

If you answer "yes," then we have evidence for God and faith has no role left to play. The history of religion and mankind's relationship with the almighty can be divided into "before" and "after" revealed truth was verified and faith was made superfluous.

If you answer, "no," then you acknowledge that Creation Science and ID and so on are useless endeavors.

And a follow-up question to Mats. Assuming that the answer is that God did not leave any scientifically verifiable fingerprints on creation, what does this mean for your faith?
Does it really matter that much? Isn't the power of faith that much amazing when it is reached not based on scientific evidence?

Interesting seeing people waisting so much time on something so “scientifically empty”.

contrary to Sanford’s claims, the Evolution hypothesis does not require that the genome be a “multiple independent collection of selectable genes”.

I agree. Promotion of scientific knowledge is what everyone wants, not the propagation of naturalistic myths posing as “science”.

Creationist scientists, being themselves men and women with certified degrees from respectable institutions, don’t want to “distort science”.

What they want is what you said above,meaningly, the promotion of true science, not the indoctrination of their youngsters at public expenses.

The only ones we see being against the true scientific spirit of open debate of all theories are Darwinists.

So I guess I should say, “physician, heal thyself”.

To use the same word, "vacuity," repeatedly like PvM does desensitizes the reader to it, and lessens its desired impact. People utilize synonyms in order to pique interest and to be able to emphasize the same concept by using a variety of words that mean either the same thing, or something close to it.

Using synonyms often will stimulate the mind of both blogger and readers to make different verbal and conceptual connections. A simple example is that "vacuity" might be associated with ID's utter lack of evidence for their purported "design", while "worthlessness" might be associated with the lack of fertility in science. Practically, however, the variety of synonyms and near-synonyms are more likely to be interchangeable yet to confer slightly different aspects of the vacuousness of ID in their use as modifiers.

I fear that PvM may be too focused on DaveTard's criticism of his overuse of the word "vacuity," and does not wish to allow him even the "victory" of varying his words as an apparent "response" to the Tard. To that possibility, I say forget about it. The Tard is a worthless, hateful, ignorant, prejudiced, and outright evil person, like many on that side (at least among ID's proponents). He is not the preferred target of any of the writing here, and is unworthy to affect anybody's deportment.

Varying one's description of ID will be more likely to affect fence-sitters toward a positive view of science. The Tard only cares about putting others down, since he is nothing, and that is almost certainly the main reason why he's opposed to science and its practitioners. Anything that he writes is flawed and evil in some manner (at least as well as we can discern), but others write for the good of science and the friends of Enlightenment. In that light, I agree with others that "vacuity" could be given a rest now and then.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

Torbjörn Larsson, OM said: If you had a persistent mosquito buzzing around your head, wouldn’t you take a whack at it frequently? Especially if you know it carries a disabling disease?

Apparently doing a copy/paste of non-English characters into another reply messes up those characters. Is there a way around that?

Long time lurker, first time poster

Mats Said

"Interesting seeing people waisting so much time on something so "scientifically empty"."

You know, I've never understood it either. And I'm sure the scientific community would be happy if the creationists and IDers giving up their mucking about and start doing something constructive for a change.

Yeah I know that's not what Mats meant but it's my take on the situation.

I do have a serious question though,

First, about me. I'm an Australian accountant, while not a scientist I have had a long fascination with various sciences. My work is more audit based and as such finding the evidence backing up various claims is what I do for a living. From this approach, I have reached the unavoidable conclusion, from my own search of the evidence, activities and outcomes, that creationism and ID are entirely without merit.

One of the YECers I've been debating with has started talking of "sophistication" as evidence of intelligent design. He's trying to persuade others that this is different from "complexity" by defining sophistication in terms of technical sophistication from a very human view point. Communication, control and moving parts etc. Have any of you come across this relabeling of terms before? I'm right that there is no real difference between complexity and sophistication and that he's just shifting the goal posts to favour his fantasy.

I've been using weather patterns as an example of undesigned sophistication and I was hoping someone here could point me towards a few other examples.

Thanking you in advance

Tenebrous

Tenebrous,

Never heard that one before. Seems to me a person can be sophisticated, but what would a "sophisticated" flower look like? Would it wear a tuxedo to social functions? A good clue is that if people use terms they can not rigorously define or parameters they can not measurw or even estimate, they are probably trying to pull a fast one.

By the way, is that impersonal unguided wheather patterns you study, or are they intelligently designed?

Apparently doing a copy/paste of non-English characters into another reply messes up those characters. Is there a way around that?

re: sophistication

creationists in general don't have actual arguments, so they rely on statements that "feel" right-ish, and hope that people will then accept them as right at face value instead of doing any careful analysis. This is also known as an "Intuition pump" or, ironically, sophistry.

Usually this takes the form "I can't imagine how X would evolve. So, seeing as X can't evolve, we know evolution is wrong". But another common form of pump priming is to describe things with words that suggest connotations beyond what is already demonstrated. Usual case: biological mechanisms can have a specific but complicated function; but it doesn't advance your argument at all to state that a thing has a function. So you say it has a "purpose", and voyla! it sounds like you have some evidence for intelligent intention. Note the process: you assign the word purely on the same criteria that justify the word "function", but once people have accepted that "purpose" is a valid description, you allow them to lose track of the fact that common nuances involving intention haven't been justified. Your line of argument rhetoric has now acquired statements that are useful to your cause without passing through a point where people stop you for making a sudden leap.

This seems to be the case with "sophistication". All you really have is biological complexity, as agreed by everybody. But you call some example sophistication, on the basis that sophistication can be used in the simple sense of complexity, and then you start talking like the word always conveys connotations like advanced culture and the artifacts of civilization.

Creationism is nothing if not the discipline of flexible language. When a creationist describes something, you need to persistently stop them with the challenge: "what do you mean EXACTLY when you apply that term", and then force them to be consistent with that meaning. Remember, if someone can't supply an exact meaning for a word they are using, then a sentence they construct using that word doesn't have an exact meaning (is incoherent) and doesn't do much to advance a rigorous argument.

Tenebrous,

it sounds like your 'sophisticated creationist' might be better described as a sophist.

As for a natural example of communication, control and moving parts, I always find a venus fly trap does the trick. It's also a nice counterpoint to Behe's mouse trap.

Could it be that by "sophistication" creationists mean highly specialized-- as opposed to generalized-- adaptations? I'm thinking of things like plants that only attract certain pollinators, snake fangs that are adapted to shoot venom, not just bite, and so on.

If you're talking to a creationist who isn't totally beyond the reach of reason-- I'm going out on a limb and assuming such people exist-- talking about specialized adaptations and how they arise might be less emotionally loaded than trying to discuss "sophistication."

One of the YECers I've been debating with has started talking of "sophistication" as evidence of intelligent design. He's trying to persuade others that this is different from "complexity" by defining sophistication in terms of technical sophistication from a very human view point.

Richard Simons said: What I've been doing is deleting the quote marks, apostrophes etc in the quote and substituting my own, but there's probably a better way. I've also been hoping that it's easily fixable from the PT HQ end but I wouldn't know.

Well, that's sort of what I figured would happen. (*sigh*)

You can usually force the desired character by using HTML character encoding. To get a lowercase 'o' with "dieresis" or "umlaut" marks you insert an ampersand (&) followed by lowercase 'o' and 'uml' and semicolon (;), like this: "ö" (minus the double quote marks) where you want the character to appear, producing 'ö'.

This can also be done using the HTML character encoding decimal values for that character, which is "&#214:" and also produces 'ö'.

A bit cumbersome, but workable.

Yes, however cut and paste often leads to unexpected results ‘ö’

Hmm that was unexpected...

I suppose that with cut and paste the results may depend on the machine and/or its settings, on which the cut/paste was done?

This method uses what are called HTML "character references." They are intended to be valid for all HTML renderers (such as web browsers) that make use of the Universal Character Set, which all modern web browsers should support.

While all modern browsers support UCS, they may not display all UCS characters. Many allow users to specify subsets of UCS for use. So, if your browser is told to use US-ASCII, it will not normally display any characters above character number 127.

Similarly, web servers should support UCS but they can be restricted to subsets of UCS. If so, they will either drop characters not in their specified subset or replace them with character from that subset.

HTML character references are intended to provide a character set independent way of specifying characters. They should work in almost all modern browsers, even when using "cut and paste.'

I should have been clearer: the basic set of HTML character references, those defined using   through  and   through- ÿ, should work even when using cut and paste. Character references encoded above decimal 255, such as Є (Cyrilic capital И) seem to be somewhat less reliable.

Thanks for your comments, you've given me what I need to counter the new mutation of the complexity argument.

David Stanton

Is it possible to intelligently guide weather patterns? If so, then no I was referring to "classic" weather patterns.

Snaxalotl

Tell me about it. I've learned the hard way that it is best to get the Evolution denier to state the form that their denial takes early on. YEC/OEC, Bible literalism etc so as to reduce the amount of ambiguity in which they can maneuver.

Tim Hague

Labeling him a sophist might be correct in terminology but I doubt it will useful in debate. One thing I've noted is that Christian Creationists tend to be falling over themselves to play martyr. Even Dawkins' gentle rebukes are perceived to be scathing vicious attacks by these people.

hoary puccoon

I've had some success, I've been able to convince 2 or 3 people that evolution is real even if you believe in gods. Given that I'm blogging on a theistic themed site I consider that to be pretty good. But even with the most fact resistant, I continue to post refutations of C/ID rhetoric and of developments in evolution because I don't want other lurkers to think the debate is one-sided. Challenging falsehood might not convince everyone but letting it go unchallenged is disastrous. I particularly enjoy pressing the die-hard C/IDers for any evidence for their claims, the resulting silence is deafening and telling.

raven

Excellent points. I'll point out the differences between science and C/ID that you demonstrated.

Thanks again for your responses. I appreciate it.

Defending the integrity of science isn’t a waste of time. The reason why the people on Pandas thumb spend so much time refuting the intellectually dishonest claims of ID is because ID proponents refuse to take on board any refutations, they simply filter them out and carry on repeating fallacious arguments over and over and over. If you people would actually listen and learn no one would have to “waste time” on William Dembski’s intellectually dishonest attempt at christian apologetics. As it stands someone has to be there point out the holes in the arguments lest this nonsense gain any kind of traction with people who don’t know any better.

Creationism is nothing if not the discipline of flexible language. When a creationist describes something, you need to persistently stop them with the challenge: “what do you mean EXACTLY when you apply that term”, and then force them to be consistent with that meaning. Remember, if someone can’t supply an exact meaning for a word they are using, then a sentence they construct using that word doesn’t have an exact meaning (is incoherent) and doesn’t do much to advance a rigorous argument.

Darwinsts are not guiltless when it comes to employing flexible language. Their terms can be very elastic depending on the situation. The very term evolution can have multiple meanings and change the nature of an argument depending on how its intepreted.

Donald M wrote:

"There seems to be a few typos in this comment, so some editing is in order:"

Defending the integrity of science isn't a waste of time. The reason why some people on Pandas thumb spend so much time challenging the intellectually dishonest claims of creationists is because creationists refuse to take on board any refutations, they simply filter them out and carry on repeating fallacious arguments over and over and over. Even after they admit they are completely wrong, they go on makiong the same claims over and over. If you people would actually listen and learn, or maybe take some college courses in biology, no one would have to waste time refuting your nonsense over and over. If you would just stop obsessing over Richard Dawkins, as if he were some kind of god in the world of evolution, then perhaps you could get around to doing some real science in the laboratory. Why don't you ever present any evidence for any of your claims? Your intellectually dishonest attempts at theistic apologetics convince no one. As it stands, someone has to be there to point out the holes in the arguments used by creationists, lest this nonsense gain any kind of traction with people who don't know any better.

There, now I think its about right.

How about this one: All complex life forms evolved from simpler pre-cursor life forms B is a complex life form Therefore B evolved from a simpler pre-cursor life from.

Perhaps Donald M can show us how ID defines Design and Information?

Although this is discussion about scientific theories and their merits (or lack thereof), I find it helpful to point out that Intelligent Design and New Earth Creationism is exactly what happens when folks interpret faith and the Bible on their own without giving a second thought to the one institution that has been giving a lot of thought to these things for the last 2000 or so years. This is what they have to say:

Intelligent Design Not Science

I just wanted to point out that not all people of faith have a need to mess with established science in order to make sense of their beliefs...