Balance of Truth as expressed in Biblical Scripture and Science

[DennisF]

This is pretty much incoherent. Can you give us an actual example of what you think random selection is?

Pardon me for not writing more clearly. I am using the word random in the mathematical sense as used in the statistics of the life sciences to mean that the outcomes of a probabilistic experiment have equal probabilities of occurring. Suppose a mutation occurs resulting in a slightly different organism. The environment then acts upon this mutation and affects whether it survives or not. The environment has many parameters that can affect the outcome of the mutation, and which (or which combination; this involves combinatorial math) acts on the mutation is not known a priori and is random. It is not even known in any deterministic sense which combination of environmental factors contribute how much probability of survival. Survival dynamics is in an early, formative stage in evolutionary biology.

Take the familiar textbook case of different colored moths in England, adapting to smoke darkening the trees from industrialization. The darker moths survive because they are not as easily seen by predators. In this case, the cause of selection has been identified, yet in most cases we do not know how the selection occurred. However, what is random was the soot on the trees from industry that did not necessarily need to occur in English history. The basic point is that we rarely ever know all the factors that affect selection, and when they interact to varying extents, the combinatorial possibilities explode. What is still significantly random is how these selection parameters affect the mutated organism, and that is a challenge of evolutionary biology.

What I am not saying is that the selection mechanisms - the causes for survival of a mutation - are not physical; they can be (and are) studied scientifically. What I am saying is that because there is much that we do not know about selection, it is treated probabilistically (statistically) just as the thermodynamics of gasses are because we cannot apply deterministic mechanics to the trajectories of a gazillion gas molecules. Instead, we calculate collective properties such as pressure. What is different is that in principle, enough is known of the physics of particle ballistics - Newtonian mechanics - to be assured of the mechanism, though uncomputable in practice, while in evolutionary biology, this is not the case; biochemical pathways and genetic dynamics are now exciting areas of biology under development but there is a long way to go before any kind of mature form of evolutionary biology emerges. Consequently, what we do not know about the subject is expressed by the word random.

 

[DennisF]

This is some rather desperate deflection on your part. Remember it is you who is claiming that selection is random, something I don't think any biologist claims. Why don't you give us an example of selection being random, at whatever level you wish.

Fair enough; see my previous reply to you.
As an engineer who knows something about control theory, I find evolutionary biology to be a field that could benefit significantly from knowledge of it. Are you familiar with the Santa Fe Institute in NM? They are not ID EC or anything like that but are an advanced-studies think-tank that mainly is involved in the study of nonlinear systems and their behavior. They have also applied some of their efforts to evolutionary biology.

 

[Gene2memE]

This is a common response by evolutionary-atheists yet it misses the point of ID. Anyone who promotes the mainstream view are accepted as true scientists, while those with an opposing view must have other motives, like theology ... and are thus not scientific

That's not true at all - there are plenty of heretics and rebels in the history of Evolutionary Biology and modern questioners who were/are "accepted as true scientists". From past luminaries like Ernst Meyer or Stephen J Gould, who's work transformed the frameworks of the field, to modern questioners like Massimo Pigulicci, Eugene Koonin, Kevin Laland and Gerd Muller. These are reptable scientists doing actual research, speaking at conferences, publishing in journals, presenting at conferences, lecturing to students and just, y'know, doing the work.

Most recently we've seen a flurry of activity from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis proponents. Defore that there were the evo-devo theorists (one who ended up with a Nobel Prize) and Gould/Eldredge and punctuated equilibrium. Highly controversial at the time, but no-one is writing them off as theologically motivated.

By contrast, SC Meyer and his ilk aren't doing actual research. They aren't publishing in peer review journals. They aren't even publishing in the Discovery Institute's in-house journal.

This year there has been a single research article in BIO-Complexity. In 2023 there were two. In 2022 there were zero (just three 'Critical Focus' papers). In 2021 there were three (but really one, as it was just a bigger paper split into three parts). In 2020 there were four. 10 research articles.

To put that into context Gerd Muller alone published five different research papers, two books and contributed to another two books in the same period. Eugene V Koonin published 18 research articles.

(though Meyer holds a degree in the life sciences as well as the philosophy of science and consequently has a deeper understanding of the foundations of science than too many scientists, atheist or otherwise).

Meyer has a Bachelors in Earth Science and a masters/PhD in the history of the philosophy of science. I have none of those, I'm just a bloke on the internet. But, I can also read and book titles like 'The Return of the God Hypothesis' tend to suggest a way of thinking.

What do you mean by "creationism"? There are young-earth creationists and there are also evolutionary creationists.

Generally speaking, the idea that some deity created the universe and life on earth.

It's not my fault that the various sects of theism can't get their stories and timelines straight. Maybe you could all get together and make life easier for the rest of us? The Rainbow Serpent seems like the best compromise, although I'd like to see a run being made at the Five Suns cosmology.

Perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of the ID movement. It addresses what are identified as fundamental weaknesses in the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution. Your criticism seems more accurately directed to YEC than to ID.

It doesn't. ID was devised as an end run around US judicial rulings banning the teaching of creationism in science classrooms. It's creationism pretending to be science. See, for instance, the term Cdesign proponentsist and the Wedge Document.

Are you asserting that the issues raised by Meyer, Gelernter and Berlinski are superfluous? Can you explain the solution to the problems they raise with the current neo-Darwinian theory?

I'm asserting that the issues raised by Meyer, Gelernter and Berlinski are not actually issues. And certainly not issues with 'current neo-Darwinian theory' I'm asserting that none of the answers to problems in biology have been resolved by the statment a creator intelligent designer did it.

I do not know the people you name above, but are any of them rethinking the presuppositions underlying evolutionary theory? Or analyzing evolutionary theory from an informational standpoint?

Everything you need to understand for the EES vs NDS debate (up to about early 2020).

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019

https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/EES_Review_FINAL_.pdf

https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Lewens-The-Extended-Evolutionary-Synthesis-what-is-the-d.pdf

Gelernter and Berlinski are both from the MIT AI Lab and have a computational perspective. It reveals that blind chance is inadequate to produce the existing complexity of life.

Cool, but no-one is arguing blind chance produced the existing complexity of life.

The plausibility of the random mechanisms of evolution are in question and nobody has really explained them.

I throughly disagree. Just because we don't have a full solution for abiogensis/diversification of early life, doesn't mean we don't have enough knowledge to come to a highly plausible account of what happened and how and when.

Unless some directed selection principles are introduced, purely random processes have a uniform probability distribution. (I won't go farther with this because I don't know how much probability theory you know.)

Is selection uniform in the face of systems with imbalances in energy gradients?

Why, hello Mr Sun and Mrs Radioactive Decay, I didn't see you there. Oh, and Senor DNA Transcription Error, what are you doing here?

Truly random processes cannot produce the present complexity of life;

Again, no-one is arguing the the present complexity of life is produced by truly random processes.

the probability is so low that it could not have occurred. Bill Dembski has written a book on this (and yes, he has a PhD in statistics). Consequently the hypothesis fails that mutation and selection are both random. Some form of directing principles must exist. The present mechanistic hypothesis of evolutionary theory based on blind chance is more in the category of philosophy than science. It falls short of identifying its own causes.

I don't have a PhD in Mathematics, but i do have a Masters in economics and I know enought statistics to know when someone is using them to lie to me. Here's a challenge: go and calculate the odds likelihood that your parents gave birth to you (or better yet, the chain of heredity that led to you being born), Then come back at me and argue about probablistic arguments about the impossibility of evolution.

Evolutionary theory also does not include the origin of life, only its development.

Yes, and?

What ID questions are the physical mechanisms attributed to that development. In the life sciences at present, there is simply no viable theory for explaining the origin of life. There have been attempts, but nothing that has held up.

There's plenty that 'holds up', but no full explanation. But, the gaps keep getting smaller. Have a look at NASA's astrobiology primer, for instance. That got updated this year, because there's been so much new abiogenesis research published since the last version came out in 2016.

There may never be a full explanation for the origin of life. But, that does not mean in any way that the door to a Intelligent Designer is opened up.



ID was basically dead-on-arrival as a scientific idea and if Google search trends are any indicator, it has been moribund as a popular alternative to creationism for the last decade (if not longer).

 

[Astrid]

That's not true at all - there are plenty of heretics and rebels in the history of Evolutionary Biology and modern questioners who were/are "accepted as true scientists". From past luminaries like Ernst Meyer or Stephen J Gould, who's work transformed the frameworks of the field, to modern questioners like Massimo Pigulicci, Eugene Koonin, Kevin Laland and Gerd Muller. These are reptable scientists doing actual research, speaking at conferences, publishing in journals, presenting at conferences, lecturing to students and just, y'know, doing the work.

Most recently we've seen a flurry of activity from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis proponents. Defore that there were the evo-devo theorists (one who ended up with a Nobel Prize) and Gould/Eldredge and punctuated equilibrium. Highly controversial at the time, but no-one is writing them off as theologically motivated.

By contrast, SC Meyer and his ilk aren't doing actual research. They aren't publishing in peer review journals. They aren't even publishing in the Discovery Institute's in-house journal.

This year there has been a single research article in BIO-Complexity. In 2023 there were two. In 2022 there were zero (just three 'Critical Focus' papers). In 2021 there were three (but really one, as it was just a bigger paper split into three parts). In 2020 there were four. 10 research articles.

To put that into context Gerd Muller alone published five different research papers, two books and contributed to another two books in the same period. Eugene V Koonin published 18 research articles.



Meyer has a Bachelors in Earth Science and a masters/PhD in the history of the philosophy of science. I have none of those, I'm just a bloke on the internet. But, I can also read and book titles like 'The Return of the God Hypothesis' tend to suggest a way of thinking.



Generally speaking, the idea that some deity created the universe and life on earth.

It's not my fault that the various sects of theism can't get their stories and timelines straight. Maybe you could all get together and make life easier for the rest of us? The Rainbow Serpent seems like the best compromise, although I'd like to see a run being made at the Five Suns cosmology.



It doesn't. ID was devised as an end run around US judicial rulings banning the teaching of creationism in science classrooms. It's creationism pretending to be science. See, for instance, the term Cdesign proponentsist and the Wedge Document.



I'm asserting that the issues raised by Meyer, Gelernter and Berlinski are not actually issues. And certainly not issues with 'current neo-Darwinian theory' I'm asserting that none of the answers to problems in biology have been resolved by the statment a creator intelligent designer did it.



Everything you need to understand for the EES vs NDS debate (up to about early 2020).

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019

https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/EES_Review_FINAL_.pdf

https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Lewens-The-Extended-Evolutionary-Synthesis-what-is-the-d.pdf

Cool, but no-one is arguing blind chance produced the existing complexity of life.



I throughly disagree. Just because we don't have a full solution for abiogensis/diversification of early life, doesn't mean we don't have enough knowledge to come to a highly plausible account of what happened and how and when.



Is selection uniform in the face of systems with imbalances in energy gradients?

Why, hello Mr Sun and Mrs Radioactive Decay, I didn't see you there. Oh, and Senor DNA Transcription Error, what are you doing here?



Again, no-one is arguing the the present complexity of life is produced by truly random processes.



I don't have a PhD in Mathematics, but i do have a Masters in economics and I know enought statistics to know when someone is using them to lie to me. Here's a challenge: go and calculate the odds likelihood that your parents gave birth to you (or better yet, the chain of heredity that led to you being born), Then come back at me and argue about probablistic arguments about the impossibility of evolution.



Yes, and?



There's plenty that 'holds up', but no full explanation. But, the gaps keep getting smaller. Have a look at NASA's astrobiology primer, for instance. That got updated this year, because there's been so much new abiogenesis research published since the last version came out in 2016.

There may never be a full explanation for the origin of life. But, that does not mean in any way that the door to a Intelligent Designer is opened up.



ID was basically dead-on-arrival as a scientific idea and if Google search trends are any indicator, it has been moribund as a popular alternative to creationism for the last decade (if not longer).

If who is or is not a “ true” scientist is even a topic, a person who
adopts a radical new idea despite zero data, and thinks it
overthrows a deeply established theory is probably not so
much a “ true” anything, as just another crackpot.

 

[DennisF]

That's not true at all - there are plenty of heretics and rebels in the history of Evolutionary Biology and modern questioners who were/are "accepted as true scientists". From past luminaries like Ernst Meyer or Stephen J Gould, who's work transformed the frameworks of the field, to modern questioners like Massimo Pigulicci, Eugene Koonin, Kevin Laland and Gerd Muller. These are reptable scientists doing actual research, speaking at conferences, publishing in journals, presenting at conferences, lecturing to students and just, y'know, doing the work.

Okay Gene, let's go through it.
First, you are right that not every contributor to science, especially since the Enlightenment (which was not science) began to infect the minds of some in the scientific community. In the context I wrote, I was objecting to those who reject anything from those who speak contrary to their worldview with the rebuttal that it is not science, whereas accept uncritically anti-creation non-science coming from scientists such as Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins.

Most recently we've seen a flurry of activity from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis proponents. Defore that there were the evo-devo theorists (one who ended up with a Nobel Prize) and Gould/Eldredge and punctuated equilibrium. Highly controversial at the time, but no-one is writing them off as theologically motivated.

You seem to be missing the point. ID is in itself not addressing the god-antigod issue but is addressing a limitation or weakness or fault in the neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE) theory about how life could develop incrementally. Gould might have been one of the first to recognize that incremental development not only does not work, the fossil record of the Cambrian explosion contradicts it. Yet Gould had no solution to the problem posed by ID about NDE. Can you stick to that? If you can, then you are addressing what the ID movement (by whatever name) is addressing.

By contrast, SC Meyer and his ilk aren't doing actual research. They aren't publishing in peer review journals. They aren't even publishing in the Discovery Institute's in-house journal.

Did Einstein do actual research? He did no "actual research" as experimental science, yet he is hailed as a great physicist. As for publishing, the prominent IDers have already addressed this and most of them have book-length publications. The issue they raise is controversial because those controlling the channels of mainstream scientific publication themselves have a bias on this issue and consider, as you do, that there is nothing of value that ID can contribute to the discussion. That is not a scientific but a worldview decision, a demonstration of confirmation bias that did not exist among scientists before the mid-19th century.

Gatekeepers of scientific publications are not merely scientists; they are humans who hold worldviews and this biases their gatekeeping. It is equivalent to the medieval Schoolmen rejecting the heliocentric theory because it clashed with their worldview. You show your own bias by using derogatory language like "Meyer and his ilk". The gatekeepers share your attitude.

This year there has been a single research article in BIO-Complexity. In 2023 there were two. In 2022 there were zero (just three 'Critical Focus' papers). In 2021 there were three (but really one, as it was just a bigger paper split into three parts). In 2020 there were four. 10 research articles.

To put that into context Gerd Muller alone published five different research papers, two books and contributed to another two books in the same period. Eugene V Koonin published 18 research articles.

All you are saying is that evolutionary biology is an active field of study. Great; I am glad that it is because the flaws in NDE need to be addressed, yet few of the mainstream participants are addressing the quite valid questions that the IDers have raised.

And it is not only those who might be identified under the ID label. Have you looked at what the Santa Fe Institute has been doing? They too are raising the same kind of questions that the IDers have been raising, from a computational-complexity standpoint. That is what Meyer, Gelenter, and Berlinski also were discussing.

Instead of telling us how unscientific these people are, why don't you instead address the scientific problems they have raised? Or are you of the mind-set that anything coming from someone with an ID label is ipso facto not scientific? That is a philosophy of science judgement and not a scientific judgement.

Meyer has a Bachelors in Earth Science and a masters/PhD in the history of the philosophy of science. I have none of those, I'm just a bloke on the internet.

You are sounding like it!

But, I can also read and book titles like 'The Return of the God Hypothesis' tend to suggest a way of thinking.

Do Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer "suggest a way of thinking"?

Generally speaking, the idea that some deity created the universe and life on earth.

More specifically, the Genesis account is the target because it is the context for creation issues in the West. (Few people in this debate know anything about what Hinduism or the ancient Sumerians or Chinese, or the Mayas said about creation.) The Genesis account, despite what has been read into it, does not give the scope of the creation in that it does not tell us the scope of the shamayim ("heavens"). Genesis 1:1 can equally be read as referring to the skies (shamayim) and the land (eretz). By shamayim it does not necessarily (or probably) mean the modern cosmological model of what we call the universe. So to be more focused, for both myself and the IDers - all of them that I know except one or two who do not believe the genesis account - any reference to "creationism" means to the Genesis (or biblical) account of creation.

It's not my fault that the various sects of theism can't get their stories and timelines straight. Maybe you could all get together and make life easier for the rest of us? The Rainbow Serpent seems like the best compromise, although I'd like to see a run being made at the Five Suns cosmology.

This is like arguing that because there are competing theories in scientific fields, that "science" ought to get its story straight first! And you also appear to not recognize the antithetic relationship between the biblical worldview and Mystery Babylon, the source of the extant pagan religions of your two examples. That is a significant failure to distinguish!

It doesn't. ID was devised as an end run around US judicial rulings banning the teaching of creationism in science classrooms.

ID did not even exist as an identifiable movement back when Judge Overton gave his benchmark ruling against young-earth creationism (YEC) being taught in state-school biology.

It's creationism pretending to be science. See, for instance, the term Cdesign proponentsist and the Wedge Document.

What can partially confuse the understanding of the ID movement is the political component of Establishment science. Is there any political diminution of pure science? Where does most of the money come from nowadays to support scientific research? From government? Do you really believe government is objective in funding research grants, with "no strings attached"?

IDers are aware of this because the scientific issues they raise are ignored by mainstream Science. (By Science I mean politically-infested activity that is called science, whether it is or not.) I do not hear ID-bashers addressing this because to do so would not support their position!

I'm asserting that the issues raised by Meyer, Gelernter and Berlinski are not actually issues. And certainly not issues with 'current neo-Darwinian theory' I'm asserting that none of the answers to problems in biology have been resolved by the statment a creator intelligent designer did it.

Of course you are. The medieval Schoolmen made the same kind of assertions about Galileo's contention.

Everything you need to understand for the EES vs NDS debate (up to about early 2020).

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019

https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/EES_Review_FINAL_.pdf

https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Lewens-The-Extended-Evolutionary-Synthesis-what-is-the-d.pdf

Cool, but no-one is arguing blind chance produced the existing complexity of life.

It has taken 40 years or more (or maybe more like 140 years) for evolutionary biologists to realize this, and to also realize that incremental NDE is a failed theory - at least the developmental hypothesis of it. I am glad to see the flurry of activity needed to address it. What ID brings to it is in raising the larger questions about evolutionary mechanisms that are quite relevant to the current state of evolutionary biology (EB) if for no other reason than that most EBists do not know much of anything about control theory and how it applies to structural organic development. It is beginning to diffuse in but so far, only slightly. All the ruckus about "AI" will probably hasten it.

I throughly disagree. Just because we don't have a full solution for abiogensis/diversification of early life, doesn't mean we don't have enough knowledge to come to a highly plausible account of what happened and how and when.

The history beginning with Miller of the major efforts to address this question are generally recognized among EBists to have failed. That is, nobody has a scientific explanation for how life arose. (Do you? Publish it and win the Nobel Prize!) One might appear in the future, but it is not in the present state of knowledge.

Is selection uniform in the face of systems with imbalances in energy gradients?

Why, hello Mr Sun and Mrs Radioactive Decay, I didn't see you there. Oh, and Senor DNA Transcription Error, what are you doing here?

You are making the ID case, that both mutation and selection are not random. IDers would agree. So would I.

Again, no-one is arguing the the present complexity of life is produced by truly random processes.

Agreed, starting historically with Gould.

I don't have a PhD in Mathematics, but i do have a Masters in economics and I know enought statistics to know when someone is using them to lie to me. Here's a challenge: go and calculate the odds likelihood that your parents gave birth to you (or better yet, the chain of heredity that led to you being born), Then come back at me and argue about probablistic arguments about the impossibility of evolution.

Okay, wise guy. The video link I gave above has three people (plus host) discussing the mathematical challenges to NDE (Gelernter and Berlinski from the MIT AI Lab in the past) as was also discussed in an MIT symposium led by Murray Eden in the 20th century. It is known that there are serious mathematical problems with NDE (whether you think MIT is a sufficiently scientific institution or not). Maybe they can be solved. They will not be by being ignored.

One of the prominent IDers, Bill Dembski, has multiple doctorates, one in math, and his doctoral thesis was about probability theory as it applies to these same kinds of NDE problems. He has written a book, Intelligent Design, where he analyzes the problem about irreducible complexity in graduate-school detail from a probabliistic standpoint. Have you read anything Demski has written? You might start there before drawing any hasty conclusions.

There's plenty that 'holds up', but no full explanation. But, the gaps keep getting smaller. Have a look at NASA's astrobiology primer, for instance. That got updated this year, because there's been so much new abiogenesis research published since the last version came out in 2016.

Of course one can expect new ideas, but this is an expression of hope, not fact. If and when a credible theory arises, it will probably have implications that a 19th century Enlightenment worldview will find objectionable, and that is the worldview that has infiltrated science in the last two centuries and is why there is an ongoing, never-ending "creation-evolution" controversy.

There may never be a full explanation for the origin of life. But, that does not mean in any way that the door to a Intelligent Designer is opened up.

Again, you fail to understand ID. Have you ever talked to any of the leading ID proponents such as Steve Meyer, Bill Dembski, Mike Behe, Paul Nelson, ...? I have talked with all of them, sometimes into the early morning hours of a conference. You should recognize that when you write "that does not mean in any way the door to a Intelligent Designer is opened up" that this is not a scientific statement and cannot be supported by scientific methods. What if humanity were the result of a bioengineering project? Could that be detected scientifically? It is history, not science, that would give that answer. The scope of ID thinking is wider than your thinking and considers how we might detect such possibilities with our present scientific or mathematical methods. You might not want to consider such questions as falling within the limitations of the methods of science, yet if you've learned any philosophy of science, you would know that they overlap. There is no rigidly defined demarcation of science.

ID was basically dead-on-arrival as a scientific idea and if Google search trends are any indicator, it has been moribund as a popular alternative to creationism for the last decade (if not longer).

You should run for Congress.

 

[DennisF]

Your describing is a type of Panenthesim.

Not exactly. Panentheism is a particular belief that the relationship between God and the Creation is neither immanent nor transcendent, but some more complicated relationship combining both these concepts. I have not declared any position on this but stated that there is a wide range of meanings attributed to the linguistic symbol, the word "God". Because of this, confusion in its use abounds and we first must specify what we mean in using that very plastic word.

 

[sesquiterpene]

Pardon me for not writing more clearly. I am using the word random in the mathematical sense as used in the statistics of the life sciences to mean that the outcomes of a probabilistic experiment have equal probabilities of occurring.

Yes, we know what random mutations look like, because enormous swaths of our own genome are actually changing randomly in accordance with neutral drift. This is because it is junk DNA, and we know that because it is not being selected. The parts (genes) being selected are not changing randomly.

Suppose a mutation occurs resulting in a slightly different organism. The environment then acts upon this mutation and affects whether it survives or not. The environment has many parameters that can affect the outcome of the mutation, and which (or which combination; this involves combinatorial math) acts on the mutation is not known a priori and is random.

You are equating unknown with random. This is simply false; even if you can't identify all the restraints, even a posteriori, that doesn't mean it is random.

Like many creationists, you are confusing the actual random parts of evolution (mutations, more or less) with the nonrandom parts (survival, or more accurately reproduction). It is clear that reproduction is not random - for instance, any lethal mutations do not lead to reproduction. That creates an enormous bias in the actual results, which is statistically readily identifiable when you compare the regions which aren't under selection with those that are. If you are interested in that sort of thing, read the following wikipedia entries:
Linkage disequilibrium - Wikipedia
Genetic hitchhiking - Wikipedia

 

[sesquiterpene]

Did Einstein do actual research? He did no "actual research" as experimental science, yet he is hailed as a great physicist.

He published detailed reports (3) in the leading physics journal, in 1905. This is in sharp contrast to the ID "scientists", who don't even publish in their own journals.

As for publishing, the prominent IDers have already addressed this and most of them have book-length publications.

Yes, not in the scientific literature, not even their own journals.

The issue they raise is controversial because those controlling the channels of mainstream scientific publication themselves have a bias on this issue and consider, as you do, that there is nothing of value that ID can contribute to the discussion. That is not a scientific but a worldview decision, a demonstration of confirmation bias that did not exist among scientists before the mid-19th century.

This is something that came up in one of the earliest court cases regarding creationists (I'm not going to rely on my faulty memory right now). The creationists argued that the mean scientists were rejecting their articles because of their religion. The other side asked, naturally enough, where are your rejection slips? No, they didn't have any. The ID proponents are just the same: for the most part, they simply don't try to present anything to scientific journals, and rather surprisingly, not even their own journals.

 

[DennisF]

Thanks for your interesting response. I have a few comments in response to yours.

Yes, we know what random mutations look like, because enormous swaths of our own genome are actually changing randomly in accordance with neutral drift. This is because it is junk DNA, and we know that because it is not being selected. The parts (genes) being selected are not changing randomly.

Okay. (Whether DNA is "junk" or not is not conclusive. That assumes that the dynamics of DNA is well-understood and that is a long way from being true.)

You are equating unknown with random. This is simply false; even if you can't identify all the restraints, even a posteriori, that doesn't mean it is random.

I am using the mathematical meaning of random, whatever the biological definition for it is. In math, random means that the possible outcomes of an event have equal probability because we do not know a priori which outcomes to favor. If we did , we would adjust the probabilities. So yes, random is related to unknown in this way. If this is not what you mean by random, please define it so that I can understand what you mean by it since it is apparently not the mathematical meaning.

Like many creationists, you

Did I say I was a "creationist"? You are being presumptuous.

are confusing the actual random parts of evolution (mutations, more or less)

Definition of random?

with the nonrandom parts (survival, or more accurately reproduction). It is clear that reproduction is not random - for instance, any lethal mutations do not lead to reproduction.

I understand evolution from its two basic constituents: 1. mutation, acted on by 2. selection processes. Mutation is considered random in that it is unknown ahead of time where or to what it will occur. Selection is a set of deterministic physical processes for which some knowledge exists to know their probabilities of acting on a given mutation. What is random by selection is that the detailed circumstances cannot be known beforehand to determine which selection process will occur. You might say that selections with zero probability are ruled out (such as in your example).

But for the cases where multiple possible selections can apply to a given mutation, which (or which combination) will be applied is essentially random. After one or more are applied, it is possible to give selection probabilities for the outcome - in the simple boolean case whether survival occurs or not - but that is a different set of probabilities than those for which selection processes might occur.

It appears to me that this distinction is missing; it is not obvious, but if you think about it from the standpoint of Bayes' Rule, the selection is the conditional a priori probability B and the selection probability is p(A | B). in other words, given a set of selections that might be applied to a mutation, once a selection is made with probability B then the survival outcome of that selection applied to the mutation is p(A|B).

That creates an enormous bias in the actual results, which is statistically readily identifiable when you compare the regions which aren't under selection with those that are.

Where are the multiple kinds of selection processes on a given mutation taken into consideration. It isn't just a selection but a set of possible selections and maybe even their combinations with various probabilistic weightings.

If you are interested in that sort of thing, read the following wikipedia entries:
Linkage disequilibrium - Wikipedia
Genetic hitchhiking - Wikipedia

Thanks for the links; I'll look at them, but I must say that I have read through EB literature and have not found this distinction in probabilities in any of it.

 

[Gene2memE]

Did Einstein do actual research? He did no "actual research" as experimental science, yet he is hailed as a great physicist.

Don't have time to reply at the moment, but this point is egregious. Einstein published HUNDREDS of journal papers in his lifetime, covering everything from his famous unified field equations down to basic solar corona observations and postulations about the physics of weather, river meanders and radiometers.

He did do actual work as an experimental scientist (although rarely in isolation). This included multiple papers that validate or refute the equations of others, and papers devising methods to confirm/refute his theoretical points. Einstein did actually then go out and collaborate with others to see if they could validate the equations. The most famous of these are the Einstein-de Haas experiments on magnetism.

Einstein even went out and did some inventing. He collaborated with others on everything from refrigerators to hearing aids.

As for publishing, the prominent IDers have already addressed this and most of them have book-length publications.

In vanity presses, where they fear no peer review or pushback and can ignore critical voices.

The Return of the God Hypothesis and it's ilk are just the same arguments from the late 90s/early 2000s, re-written and re-expressed. There's nothing new there, it's just a rehash.

The issue they raise is controversial because those controlling the channels of mainstream scientific publication themselves have a bias on this issue and consider, as you do, that there is nothing of value that ID can contribute to the discussion. That is not a scientific but a worldview decision, a demonstration of confirmation bias that did not exist among scientists before the mid-19th century.

It's a conspiracy. Of course. Them/they/those won't let them.

If ID had something "of value" it would have brought it. But, all they do is mope about some element of evolutionary biology being so statistically unlikely that it is impossible. Where are formal, statistical tests providing a positive case that would ID? Where is the verification?

 

[DennisF]

Don't have time to reply at the moment, but this point is egregious. Einstein published HUNDREDS of journal papers in his lifetime, covering everything from his famous unified field equations down to basic solar corona observations and postulations about the physics of weather, river meanders and radiometers.

Do you believe that publishing papers (in peer-reviewed journals) is all that it takes to be a scientist? The ID people are also published; some have written multiple books on scientific topics.

He did do actual work as an experimental scientist (although rarely in isolation). This included multiple papers that validate or refute the equations of others, and papers devising methods to confirm/refute his theoretical points. Einstein did actually then go out and collaborate with others to see if they could validate the equations. The most famous of these are the Einstein-de Haas experiments on magnetism.

I am aware of what Einstein did; I am addressing the point you made that discounted ID people as scientific because their papers are not published (much) in the Established journals. Most of them have PhDs in science which requires thesis publication. Because they are dealing with some of the biggest issues that certainly entail science, some science journals will not publish their papers. Perhaps their papers belong in philosophy of science journals, but the content is too technical for such journals. So where are papers published that bridge the gap between scientific detail and wider issues? Consequently, they start their own journals. Then critics who miss this point criticize them for being outside the scientific mainstream.

Einstein even went out and did some inventing. He collaborated with others on everything from refrigerators to hearing aids.

That's news to me - and probably to almost everyone else since he is not renowned for these accomplishments!

In vanity presses, where they fear no peer review or pushback and can ignore critical voices.

Can you name an example or two of such vanity presses? The ID leaders have not ignored criticism but have answered to it. You must be unfamiliar with the exchanges. You can start, in a more popular way, with Phil Johnson and Will Provine that addresses how the evolution topic expands into worldview issues, with Johnson demonstrating how and Provine denying it. At a more detailed (mathematical) level, there is Bill Dembski and Jason Rosenhouse.

The Return of the God Hypothesis and it's ilk are just the same arguments from the late 90s/early 2000s, re-written and re-expressed. There's nothing new there, it's just a rehash.

Ilk? This shows your disdain for certain important questions having a bearing on the life sciences.
Look, until life is fully understood, there will be ongoing unresolved issues about it remaining to be settled eventually, if ever. Is that not obvious? In my opinion, the creation-evolution debate should be shelved for a century and taken up again when far more is known about life. But that is not how society and its battle of worldviews works.

It's a conspiracy. Of course. Them/they/those won't let them.

It's an inspiracy - a mind-set that disallows asking wider questions and addressing them - what Eric Weinstein (1:07:41 Science’s Big Problems) calls "anti-interesting" (at 1:10:00): interesting questions to be avoided. This is the unscientific attitude that has come to infect Science. Why?
Because for some people, as Richard Dawkins has clearly pointed out, evolution is a default religion. And to threaten their religion causes a response that goes beyond any objectivity attributable to science. In many, it is manifested as a mean-spirited response, replete with name-calling (like "ilk").

If ID had something "of value" it would have brought it. But, all they do is mope about some element of evolutionary biology being so statistically unlikely that it is impossible. Where are formal, statistical tests providing a positive case that would ID? Where is the verification?

Are you accusing fellow atheist Gelernter of this? The problems with neo-Darwinian theory goes beyond worldview proclivities. Those who make it their religion cannot tolerate these issues, though rational scientific thinking will ponder them. MIT computationists Gelernter and Berlinski are thus demonstrating scientific attitudes. They are atheists challenging evolution as the religion of atheism.

 

[BCP1928]

This is a common response by evolutionary-atheists yet it misses the point of ID. Anyone who promotes the mainstream view are accepted as true scientists while those with an opposing view must have other motives, like theology (as though atheism is not its own kind of theology as an "anti-theology") and are thus not scientific (though Meyer holds a degree in the life sciences as well as the philosophy of science and consequently has a deeper understanding of the foundations of science than too many scientists, atheist or otherwise).

What do you mean by "creationism"? There are young-earth creationists and there are also evolutionary creationists. Perhaps you misunderstand the purpose of the ID movement. It addresses what are identified as fundamental weaknesses in the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution. Your criticism seems more accurately directed to YEC than to ID.

Are you asserting that the issues raised by Meyer, Gelernter and Berlinski are superfluous? Can you explain the solution to the problems they raise with the current neo-Darwinian theory? I do not know the people you name above, but are any of them rethinking the presuppositions underlying evolutionary theory? Or analyzing evolutionary theory from an informational standpoint? Gelernter and Berlinski are both from the MIT AI Lab and have a computational perspective. It reveals that blind chance is inadequate to produce the existing complexity of life. The plausibility of the random mechanisms of evolution are in question and nobody has really explained them. Unless some directed selection principles are introduced, purely random processes have a uniform probability distribution. (I won't go farther with this because I don't know how much probability theory you know.)

Truly random processes cannot produce the present complexity of life; the probability is so low that it could not have occurred. Bill Dembski has written a book on this (and yes, he has a PhD in statistics). Consequently the hypothesis fails that mutation and selection are both random. Some form of directing principles must exist. The present mechanistic hypothesis of evolutionary theory based on blind chance is more in the category of philosophy than science. It falls short of identifying its own causes.

Yes, that's the point made in the podcast (I assumed it was a video, if I had known it was only a podcast I would have listened to it sooner on my phone.) But anyway, there is nothing new there; people have been making that argument against the theory of evolution all they way back to the days of imagining generations of creatures dragging around useless, half-formed limbs waiting for just the right mutation to come along by chance to finish the job.

You are right; the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' is vanishing small, but the only probability important to evolution is the probability that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce. Thus, the reality is that the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' or some other complexity of life altogether may actually be quite favorable--without the necessity of outside direction.

 

[Astrid]

Yes, that's the point made in the podcast (I assumed it was a video, if I had known it was only a podcast I would have listened to it sooner on my phone.) But anyway, there is nothing new there; people have been making that argument against the theory of evolution all they way back to the days of imagining generations of creatures dragging around useless, half-formed limbs waiting for just the right mutation to come along by chance to finish the job.

You are right; the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' is vanishing small, but the only probability important to evolution is the probability that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce. Thus, the reality is that the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' or some other complexity of life altogether may actually be quite favorable--without the necessity of outside direction.

While figurin’ odds, try the chance of ever having been
born, and then falling for “ID“, Di- style or, otherwise.

 

[DennisF]

Yes, that's the point made in the podcast (I assumed it was a video, if I had known it was only a podcast I would have listened to it sooner on my phone.) But anyway, there is nothing new there; people have been making that argument against the theory of evolution all they way back to the days of imagining generations of creatures dragging around useless, half-formed limbs waiting for just the right mutation to come along by chance to finish the job.

You are right; the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' is vanishing small, but the only probability important to evolution is the probability that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce. Thus, the reality is that the probability that evolution would result in 'the present complexity of life' or some other complexity of life altogether may actually be quite favorable--without the necessity of outside direction.

You write: "... the only probability important to evolution is the probability that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce."

You must know how the probability of multiple trials that contribute to an outcome combine by multiplication. With enough generations - and by the present understanding of how long the time-scale is for the development of life - the (equal) probability p for n generations shrinks toward zero: p^n, p<1 as n -> infinity = approx 0.

There is another probability consideration; for each generation, the selection process(es) produce a beneficial (that is, a survival-enhancing) outcome with a near-zero probability. Nobody has given any convincing explanation of selection processes that are beneficial or that they occur often enough to produce believable probabilities. The possible exception is for bacteria (but I don't know of any for it). At the more complex levels of development, for major body subsystems, the understanding of life is not yet itself developed to where such evolutionary processes can be hypothesized (except as wild guesses). This lies at the center of the difference between NDE and ID, the MIT symposium thread biomathematicians, the Santa Fe Institute, and other groups. Recognition of the problems with NDE is wider than the IDers.

 

[BCP1928]

You write: "... the only probability important to evolution is the probability

You must know how the probability of multiple trials that contribute to an outcome combine by multiplication.

There is only one outcome--that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce. The probabilities multiply only in hindsight.

 

[DennisF]

There is only one outcome--that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce. The probabilities multiply only in hindsight.

This is just basic probability theory. To produce the survival of organisms over millions of years, with many mutating generations of them, each mutation having some probability of survival and with a generation in time being much less than those bygone eras, then the number of generations is very large and the multiplication of the generations of probability p < 1 (where p = 1 means that the survival of a given mutation is certain), the resulting probability that the many mutated generations survive is essentially zero.

For instance, to be wildly optimistic, suppose that the average survival rate of a mutation is 1 % (0.01) and that there have been a million (10^6) generations of mutating organisms developing toward greater complexity. Then the probability that they will succeed after this many generations is (10^-2)^6 = 10^-12, or one in a trillion. But this is highly optimistic in that the geologic eras are longer than this and whether the generational survival rate is 1 % is up for discussion. Some arguments indicate that it is much lower.

 

[Astrid]

There is only one outcome--that the next generation of a species contains at least some individuals sufficiently well adapted to the environment in which they find themselves that they live long enough to reproduce. The probabilities multiply only in hindsight.

So you say only to be defeated by the mighty argument from authority,

The above mentioned August Authorities we supersede with Dr. k Wise,
who unlike the august ones, is actually PhD holder in the
mostvintimstely related sort of study, paleontology.

He is a YEC.

Which blows your silly Evolutionariabism spinning in the dust,
and the DI people wondering what happened.

 

[BCP1928]

This is just basic probability theory. To produce the survival of organisms over millions of years, with many mutating generations of them, each mutation having some probability of survival and with a generation in time being much less than those bygone eras, then the number of generations is very large and the multiplication of the generations of probability p < 1 (where p = 1 means that the survival of a given mutation is certain), the resulting probability that the many mutated generations survive is essentially zero.

For instance, to be wildly optimistic, suppose that the average survival rate of a mutation is 1 % (0.01) and that there have been a million (10^6) generations of mutating organisms developing toward greater complexity. Then the probability that they will succeed after this many generations is (10^-2)^6 = 10^-12, or one in a trillion. But this is highly optimistic in that the geologic eras are longer than this and whether the generational survival rate is 1 % is up for discussion. Some arguments indicate that it is much lower.

Why do you assume that evolving organisms are "developing towards greater complexity?"

 

[Astrid]

Why do you assume that evolving organisms are "developing towards greater complexity?"

It’s typical of those clueless about evolution, not an original mistake at all.

 

[DennisF]

So you say only to be defeated by the mighty argument from authority,

The above mentioned August Authorities we supersede with Dr. k Wise,
who unlike the august ones, is actually PhD holder in the
mostvintimstely related sort of study, paleontology.

He is a YEC.

Which blows your silly Evolutionariabism spinning in the dust,
and the DI people wondering what happened.

It would improve the tone of the discussion if you were to address others in a more civil (Christian) manner.

Now to the content of your comments. Who are you referring to as "Dr. k Wise", possibly Dr. Kurt Wise, a former professor in Oklahoma and past President of the American Scientific Affiliation? If so, I knew Kurt Wise, and he was not a paleontologist but a medical doctor and surgeon. I do not recall that he was a YEC, and from what I remember of him, he would not have been. Maybe this is another "K. Wise".

Even so, since nobody (except you?) knows what "Evolutionariabism" is, I suppose it does blow it to dust!