Irreducible Complexity Debunked?

[busterdog]

And then there's how AiG treats Hugh Ross. Shooting our wounded is a fact of life.

True. I think the Church generally has a penchant for it.

I don't know why you guys can never get the difference between TE and ID even though we explain it over and over again. The first big difference is that, to be blunt, ID proponents get scientific facts wrong. And they deserve to be corrected every time that happens, quite irrespective of their theological beliefs.

The second difference is this. TE says God is in evolution. ID says He isn't.

Pause and digest that for a moment.

As far as I am aware, Behe has never offered an irreducibly complex example on the level of macro behavior. So all his IC systems are biochemical, but he has never been able to show that, say, a mouse's ear is IC, or a rat's tail. That means that, as far as he is concerned, the Intelligent Designer packed His bags and left us billions of years ago. He got the biochemistry going ("and we can show with scieeeeence that it wouldn't have gotten going on its own!"), but then He left it to evolution to use the components He left lying around.

To ID, God got involved in 1% of nature.
To TEs, God gets involved in 100% of nature.

Do you see the difference? If someone told you "I can prove to you that God exists and that He runs 1% of your life, but you need to admit in turn that He's not there in the other 99%", would you give him any time of day? I certainly wouldn't.

I dont really understand Behe's position. But, his thinking is still useful. But, I dont mind appropriating some of his thinking and ditching some of the rest.

However, I have a hard time seeing how Behe would be deist at all. Granted, it is not terribly logical to find the Creator working in the creation of the flagellum if he couldnt also miraculously moderate common descent. Behe, however, couldnt be that inconsistent. What you say is common sense.

The entire ID camp is of the position that evolution is godless, that we ought to acknowledge evolution where it occurred, but that we will fight it tooth and nail where we know for sure it didn't, so as to give God some kind of a niche (the thin end of a wedge?) so that intelligent people can still acknowledge Him. Are you kidding? That's like putting up a poster of Jesus of the Sacred Heart in a brothel and expecting a Christian whorehouse to materialize.

LOL I have to pause a moment on the metaphor. I havent quite got it worked out in my head.

 

[shernren]

LOL I have to pause a moment on the metaphor. I havent quite got it worked out in my head.

That's the whole point of the weird metaphor: to make this whole rhetoric thing fun-ner. Not necessarily more understandable. I haven't quite worked it out myself yet, but it may well turn out to be far worse for IDists than it ought to. In which case, here's a pre-planned apology.

I dont really understand Behe's position. But, his thinking is still useful. But, I dont mind appropriating some of his thinking and ditching some of the rest.

However, I have a hard time seeing how Behe would be deist at all. Granted, it is not terribly logical to find the Creator working in the creation of the flagellum if he couldnt also miraculously moderate common descent. Behe, however, couldnt be that inconsistent. What you say is common sense.

To clarify, I don't see anything theoretically wrong with showing that phenomenon X can't be explained by science. If you've got the guts and brains to prove it, by all means! After all, I have my own sneaky suspicions that somewhere in this whole "life happened / consciousness happened" business God stepped in and threw in fairy dust of some sort.

In that sense you could actually say I'm in agreement with the ID people. There are, however, three ways in which I differ with them, and they're the main reason why I (as well as, I'd suspect, most people in the TE camp) have trouble accepting them. It's not about the fairy dust per se. It's about:

1. Mandating an unwarranted position on fairy dust. It's one thing to have a private sneaky suspicion that there was fairy dust involved somewhere. It's another for a scientist to say it as a scientist. That takes some elaboration and philosophical finesse which I don't think I've seen in the ID camp as yet.

And again, it's another thing to teach children, as part of science education, that some scientists have a sneaky suspicion that there was fairy dust involved somewhere. Can an educationist of science say that with integrity? My personal thoughts lean towards no. He certainly can't say it as an educationist of science; in a sociology class, perhaps.

2. Using flawed scientific ideas to support a position on fairy dust. Even if I like the idea of fairy dust, if Behe tries to claim that systems X, Y and Z are irreducibly complex as defense of it - and if, I can show by his own definitions that those systems aren't - then as a matter of scientific correctness I ought to show how Behe is wrong.

As a matter of fact plenty of anti-creationists have openly voiced their likings for fairy dust. Have you ever read Finding Darwin's God? Ken Miller does take a lot of time to disembowel creationism, it's true, but in the second half of the book he liberally sprinkles creation with fairy dust of his own devising: he thinks God gets to cheat in every quantum event by hiding behind Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and all that. Now I'm still working through the implications of that (years after I read it, truth be told!) but whether that's a good argument or not, you can see that Ken Miller isn't opposed to fairy dust per se. He's just a bit annoyed when some people mistake ordinary pollen for the supernatural shiny stuff, and he feels like it's his duty to correct them. Can't blame him.

3. Believing God only deals in fairy dust. This to me is the biggest sticking point with the ID movement, and even sometimes with Ken Miller and other TEs (that's why I still have reservations about Miller's Heisenberg fairy dust). Those guys need to get it into their heads that just because you don't see fairy dust doesn't mean you don't trust God.

Statements like these get me worked up:

"I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed. [...] And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done - and he's not getting it."
[William Dembski]
​

This is my beef with them: Naturalistic approaches to biological evolution rule out fairy dust, yes. Or try to. But even if/when they succeed, they don't rule out God.

I want to see God get the credit for what He's done too. But I don't think this can be done by simply painting fairy dust over nature, especially not where it doesn't fit. For starters, fairy dust doesn't even necessarily imply God. Richard Dawkins could believe in fairy dust. He'd just have to believe in extraterrestrials. The Pastafarians would be comfortable with fairy dust. So would the Muslims.

And more importantly, if you equate fairy dust with the presence of God, then you are equating absence of fairy dust with the absence of God. And the ID advocates have demonstrated, with their reasoned retreats from arguing about macroevolution, that there's a lot of nature that just won't suit the color of fairy dust any more. What do we do with those? Earth doesn't orbit the Sun by miracle, it does so by gravity. Does that mean there is no longer the divine fiat holding the universe together, that we can no longer see it? Or does that simply mean that God diversified beyond fairy dust? Maybe He's as much in control of physics, chemistry, and even evolution as much as He'd be in control of fairy dust?

To summarise, my problem isn't really that ID is about fairy dust. My problem is that: as someone who makes a living off discovering God's alternatives to fairy dust, I (as with most other scientists) can't follow a movement that doesn't know how to deal with them.

 

[Chesterton]

You just said earlier that your inference of IC systems is based on little more than gut feelings. "If it walks like a duck...", etc. But so far you haven't been able to tell us just what a "duck" is -- only what it isn't. That's not tangible!

Yes, gut feeling/common sense/intuition is the basis for the inference; I didn’t claim anything more. If this were a long time ago, a flat earth might seem very common-sensical to me. If a scientist told me the earth was round, I’d say the same thing to him that I’m saying to you: show me; demonstrate it.

A “duck” is a machine whose individual parts have no previous or individual functions apart from being parts of the machine, but you knew that already.

Second, the answer to your question is exaptation. Exaptation, exaptation, exaptation! I've said this several times in response to similar questions lately, but people still don't seem to be listening. If it's simply that you do not know what exaptation is, here's a brief introduction:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIIE5cExaptations.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation
Best to understand an idea before you discredit it.

I think we talked about exaptation in a previous thread. Of course I wasn’t trying to discredit exaptation; I’m actually appealing to exaptation. Isn’t exaptation demonstrated in a system by demonstrating the previous separate functions of the several traits which comprise the system? Or is exaptation merely assumed for any and every system because we think we can imagine it more easily in some systems?

Again with the appeal to "common sense". Not a valid argument. Common sense tells me that because I have a degree in science and you do not, I shouldn't take you too seriously on matters pertaining to science. What do you make of that?

Appeals to common sense are out of bounds, huh? Common sense tells me that if a scientist can’t tell me what the function of each component of the flagellum was before they all became the flagellum, then it appears to be, and may be, an IC system. I can’t claim I know it’s IC, but I can claim it looks as if it probably were one. As I said before, your position is weaker than mine if you claim it cannot be IC simply based on the fact of your general belief that there can be no such thing as an IC system.

Hey, and no cheap shots about my edumacation. High school was the most rewarding eight years of my life.

I'm still not sure what you're trying to say here, but it's worth noting that evolution has a proven track record as an explanation for the origin for many biological systems. In fact, the theory of evolution is the working paradigm of biology today. If the theory is of any value, it certainly ought to be able to explain supposed irreducibly complex systems to some degree. And lo and behold -- it does! As I said earlier, all examples of IR systems that Behe has proposed so far have been shown with further study to have functional components independent of the system for which they have been exapted, as predicted by evolutionary theory. This is what I mean when I say the case for IC systems is based more on ignorance than positive evidence for such. The challenge I am putting forth is for the ID proponents to be able to distinguish between the two.

You just confirmed what I said: you deduce the specific from the general, the general being your acceptance that evolution is true. It’s very simple - instead of giving me links to help me understand exaptation, give me links that show how and from what the flagellum evolved, since that is your claim.

Sorry, I still don't understand you. I agree that God created life intentionally. And I agree that life is complex. What I don't agree with is that He did it all using His magic wand, because the evidence so far suggests that He created biodiversity using the natural processes He instated at the beginning of creation. Does that answer your question?

No. Again, if God used a magic wand at some point, why the rigid insistence that He could only use it at one point?

(But I have to add, all natural processes look like magic to me. I’ve yet to come across anything in creation that doesn’t look magical. But I guess that’s just a wonderful, useful trait which has evolved in some of us non-scientists. )

 

[Mallon]

Yes, gut feeling/common sense/intuition is the basis for the inference; I didn’t claim anything more. If this were a long time ago, a flat earth might seem very common-sensical to me. If a scientist told me the earth was round, I’d say the same thing to him that I’m saying to you: show me; demonstrate it.

So you admit, then, that what you might at first think of as "common sense" is not necessarily true (as was the case with the flat-earthers). You have to be able to substantiate common sense thinking with some sort of empirical evidence. On this we appear to agree.
So how can you argue that, on the basis of "common sense" alone, many biological systems are irreducibly complex, without first showing some form of positive evidence for it? This is, after all, what you are doing. And note that positive evidence of ID ISN'T the same thing as incomplete understanding of the evolutionary process.

A “duck” is a machine whose individual parts have no previous or individual functions apart from being parts of the machine, but you knew that already.

And how would you recognize such a machine (or "duck"), practically speaking? This is the answer I've been trying to get from you.

I think we talked about exaptation in a previous thread. Of course I wasn’t trying to discredit exaptation; I’m actually appealing to exaptation.

... yet you've never used the word.
Exaptation is the repurposing of a trait with one function for use in a system with a different function. (The panda's "thumb" is an oft-touted example.) We see it often in nature, and this is the answer most evolutionists will give when asked how such complex systems as the bacterial flagellum come to be. Why else, other than ad hoc appeals to God's creative laziness, would the flagellum contain evident "precursors" from other systems, such as membrane transport systems?
The problem with your appeal to exaptation -- if that is indeed what you are doing -- is that you are arguing that because you cannot yet understand how exaptation might have come to produce the flagellum, the system must therefore be irreducibly complex. And I hate to sound like a broken record, but this is simply an argument from ignorance. It's a logical fallacy -- an invalid form of argument. You are simply admitting that your inability to completely understand one scenario counts as evidence that some other scenario must be true, which is just absurd.

Appeals to common sense are out of bounds, huh? Common sense tells me that if a scientist can’t tell me what the function of each component of the flagellum was before they all became the flagellum, then it appears to be, and may be, an IC system.

OR it may be that we simply have not studied the system in enough detail to be able to say anything conclusive about how it might have evolved. THIS IS MY POINT!!! And given that the evolutionary framework has a proven track record of eventually being able to sort these things out, the onus is on ID proponents to provide some sort of positive evidence that theirs is the better-supported scenario. So far, the case for ID isn't based on what we know; it's based on what we don't know. It's fundamentally an argument from ignorance, as you've plainly put into words above.

You just confirmed what I said: you deduce the specific from the general, the general being your acceptance that evolution is true. It’s very simple - instead of giving me links to help me understand exaptation, give me links that show how and from what the flagellum evolved, since that is your claim.

I already suggested a book to read: Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God.
I should also point out that the level of detail you are asking for in order to confirm the evolutionary hypotheses -- that every evolutionary step and every function of each precuror component of a system must be accounted for -- is silly. Of course, we strive for that kind of detail, but the evolution of a particular system x can be inferred well before we've worked out every last detail. That system x contains even one functional precursor is a scanario that only the evolutionary theory predicts. ID predicts no such thing.

No. Again, if God used a magic wand at some point, why the rigid insistence that He could only use it at one point?

I'm not arguing that.

(But I have to add, all natural processes look like magic to me. I’ve yet to come across anything in creation that doesn’t look magical. But I guess that’s just a wonderful, useful trait which has evolved in some of us non-scientists. )

Many things in nature are certainly wonderful -- even magical -- to look at, and that beauty is largely the basis for many passages in the Psalms. Take fractals, for instance. But just because something seems magical or mysterious doesn't mean we should keep ourselves from trying to understand it by simply attributing it to a miracle of God. God promises to glorify those who search out those things He has concealed from us (Heb 25:2).

 

[Chesterton]

And how would you recognize such a machine (or "duck"), practically speaking? This is the answer I've been trying to get from you.

I've already told you - via common sense and intuition. If that carries no weight with your scientific mind, fine, you're certainly entitled to your opinion.
----------
It comes down to the fact that I don’t know if evolution is true. I look at the flagellum and say “I can’t imagine how natural selection could have incrementally built this, so it appears it could be evidence against evolution” whereas you look at it and say “I can’t imagine how natural selection could have incrementally built this, but I know evolution is true, therefore evolution had to have built this”. So what looks to me like evidence against the theory, cannot look like it you, because you already believe the theory, and once you believe it (as we’ve seen in another thread) there is no such thing as evidence which could possibly be contrary evidence.

I’d add that I think technically I could accept evolutionary theory and still not believe everything was a product of it. We both agree that gravity is the reason the earth orbits the sun. If I were to say “yes I agree with you about the earth, but theories of gravity don’t explain why Mars orbits the sun”, then I would be being silly. It should be common-sensical to see that both rocky spheres would exhibit the same action towards the same object for the same reason. But I don’t see that as analogous to your thinking. Even if I granted that whales came from reptiles, it still wouldn’t require me to grant that bacteria had to have come from something else.

 

[Drekkan85]

Chesterton - did you bother to watch CDK's video where he outlines how not only each individual piece of the flagellum has it's own use, but how those uses can build on each other leading to ever greater fitness?

 

[Chesterton]

No, where could I find that?

 

[shernren]

A “duck” is a machine whose individual parts have no previous or individual functions apart from being parts of the machine, but you knew that already.

I disagree. Peking duck.

 

[The Barbarian]

(Barbarian shows mathematically that any new mutation increases the amount of information ina population)

Not very convincing.

It's not just mathematically demonstrable. It works in real life. Shannon's equation can be used to predict sorting of alleles in a population, but it also explains how to use a low-powered transmitter to send a message over millions of kilometers with no loss of information, and how to make high-speed internet a reality. It's convincing to anyone who understands information.

Better not to be so confident, at least not to appear so confident.

Knowing how it works tends to give one a measure of confidence. Not knowing how it works, tends to give deniers a measure of confidence.

We all know that nylonase could easily be explained in terms of the origin of nylon

No. The specific mutation is known and documented.

-- ie, ancient organic compounds for which there were already known enzymes.

Never heard of an ancient enzyme that could digest nylon. Tell us about it.

Remember Pepper moth?

Yep. The faux pas that trashed Jonathan Wells' book. Tell us how you think Pepper moths apply. They kinda do, but not the way you seem to think.

By all means, tell us about that, too.

 

[The Barbarian]

As far as I am aware, Behe has never offered an irreducibly complex example on the level of macro behavior. So all his IC systems are biochemical, but he has never been able to show that, say, a mouse's ear is IC, or a rat's tail. That means that, as far as he is concerned, the Intelligent Designer packed His bags and left us billions of years ago. He got the biochemistry going ("and we can show with scieeeeence that it wouldn't have gotten going on its own!"), but then He left it to evolution to use the components He left lying around.

Good point, even if we already know IC can and does evolve.

To ID, God got involved in 1% of nature.
To TEs, God gets involved in 100% of nature.

Do you see the difference? If someone told you "I can prove to you that God exists and that He runs 1% of your life, but you need to admit in turn that He's not there in the other 99%", would you give him any time of day? I certainly wouldn't.

The entire ID camp is of the position that evolution is godless, that we ought to acknowledge evolution where it occurred, but that we will fight it tooth and nail where we know for sure it didn't, so as to give God some kind of a niche (the thin end of a wedge?) so that intelligent people can still acknowledge Him. Are you kidding? That's like putting up a poster of Jesus of the Sacred Heart in a brothel and expecting a Christian whorehouse to materialize.

Either God's in all of it, or He might as well be in none of it.

Well argued. Never thought of it that way, by you're right.

 

[LightHorseman]

I disagree. Peking duck.

Duck parts? DUCK PARTS???

[biology content]

 

[Mallon]

I've already told you - via common sense and intuition.

But you've already admitted that argument carries virtually no weight. Remember your comment about a flat earth also being intuitive? Science requires more than just gut instinct. Evidence is particularly valuable. I hope you wouldn't argue that ID deserves a place alongside evolutionary theory in the biology classroom.

I look at the flagellum and say “I can’t imagine how natural selection could have incrementally built this, so it appears it could be evidence against evolution”

Right. This is a classic argument from ignorance. A logical fallacy.

whereas you look at it and say “I can’t imagine how natural selection could have incrementally built this, but I know evolution is true, therefore evolution had to have built this”.

No. I believe the flagellum is an evolved apparatus because there is positive evidence in favour of such an interpretation. For example, the flagellum is composed of smaller parts, serving different roles outside the functioning flagellum, that have evidently been coopted to produce a working motor. Nick Matzke has even proposed a model by which this transformation likely occurred:
http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html
So no, the evolutionary scenario is not an argument from ignorance, although you admit that yours is.

I’d add that I think technically I could accept evolutionary theory and still not believe everything was a product of it.

Very true. Again, though, where do you choose to draw the line? How do you distinguish between the non-continuity of the laws of nature and your own ignorance of it?

We both agree that gravity is the reason the earth orbits the sun. If I were to say “yes I agree with you about the earth, but theories of gravity don’t explain why Mars orbits the sun”, then I would be being silly. It should be common-sensical to see that both rocky spheres would exhibit the same action towards the same object for the same reason. But I don’t see that as analogous to your thinking. Even if I granted that whales came from reptiles, it still wouldn’t require me to grant that bacteria had to have come from something else.

Agreed. But the same principles are used to infer whale evolution and bacterial evolution. It would be pretty tough to argue that the hierarchical distribution of derived characters in whales is evidence of evolution, whereas it is not in bacteria. That's simply not an honest approach.
(By the way, whales evolved from mammals, not reptiles.)

 

[Drekkan85]

No, where could I find that?

I linked it embedded in a youtube link on page 5 or 6:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdwTwNPyR9w[/youtube]

 

[Buho]

Sorry, I'm not really following this thread closely. One comment, tho.

This is the Shannon equation for information as it applies to genetics.

Shannon's idea of "information" bears no resemblance to the common use of the word. According to Shannon, the more random the signal, the greater the information (I'm simplifying). Shannon didn't care whether the signal carried actual meaning, the sense we use the word. Invoking Shannon in a discussion on biological information is irrelevant, a red herring, and equivocation.

We're talking about how much "information" is in, say, Shakespere's Hamlet. Obviously, this is much harder to quantify (IDists still haven't done so), but the idea still works in a general sense: we know the play contains more than zero information, and still considerably much more than a random string of words from a dictionary would generate. In biology, we already know that a random string of A,C,T,G in DNA does not produce anything; it is meaningless, informationless.

 

[shernren]

Shannon's idea of "information" bears no resemblance to the common use of the word. According to Shannon, the more random the signal, the greater the information (I'm simplifying). Shannon didn't care whether the signal carried actual meaning, the sense we use the word. Invoking Shannon in a discussion on biological information is irrelevant, a red herring, and equivocation.

Well it's helpful because it's one possible definition of information. The reason it is invoked is because there are very few creationist definitions of information, and most of them could have been increased by the process of evolution.

Mathnerding time.

What we really need as a "definition of information", at the bare minimum, is some kind of a function (a mathematical machine) that, given two particular strings, will be able to tell us that string A has more / less information than string B. It needs to be definite (can't give an "I don't know" answer) and it needs to be transitive (if A > B, and B > C, then we can't have C > A). [/mathnerd]

Shannon's idea of information may not seem intuitive but it does make sense with some thought. He was, IIRC, an electrical engineer (heh), and he was investigating how you would send signal down a real-life channel. If your signal has low randomness, then it's okay if the channel is really bad and distortive (since you roughly know what you're supposed to get, already); but if your signal has high randomness, you need a high-fidelity channel.

When you first get to know a friend you don't know what they're going to do or say. So you have to pay a lot of attention (high fidelity) in order to pick up every word, every gesture, and it's all new to you. After a while, though, you know what's coming. So, for example, whenever I'm on MSN my first line is "Hi", followed by "What're you up to?" My friends don't have to pay very much attention any more to know what I'm about to type. It's also why old, old friends can complete each others' sentences and communicate with just a raised brow or a single sweep of the hand: they've become low-Shannon-information signal sources to each other. It's why surprises make us pay attention (hi-fi channel), while doing the same old familiar thing makes you bored (low-fi).

Shannon information! ("How Mathnerds Make Friends and Win Influence".)

We're talking about how much "information" is in, say, Shakespere's Hamlet. Obviously, this is much harder to quantify (IDists still haven't done so), but the idea still works in a general sense: we know the play contains more than zero information, and still considerably much more than a random string of words from a dictionary would generate. In biology, we already know that a random string of A,C,T,G in DNA does not produce anything; it is meaningless, informationless.

Quite the contrary. In biology, all that is needed for a gene to successfully transcribe into a protein is for the first codon to be a start codon, for last codon to be a stop codon, and for the whole gene to be a multiple of three basepairs long. There are about one or two start codons (depending on your biological system) and three stop codons out of 64, so your chances of getting a well-formed string are about 3/65536, or one in twenty thousand. Those are pretty good chances on a molecular level; the average liter of vinegar has about 10^20 molecules of acetic acid, and the average liter of human body probably has about that many nucleic acid codons.

 

[lucaspa]

ISo the question in my mind is that if you can model the steps, how is that the same as saying that life can overcome the difficulties in real life? Is it fair to say that Behe is debunked if the process can be modelled?

Remember the claims. Behe's claim is that it is not POSSIBLE to have a stepwise construction of an IC system. As soon as you modell the process, you show it is POSSIBLE. And Behe is debunked.

Maybe I misunderstood, but frankly thinking this proved anything was nonsense.

Behe made a strawman version of natural selection and Darwinian evolution. Miller is showing that there is more than the way Behe stated for something to evolve. Miller is talking about "exaptation". That is, something evolves for one function and then, accidentally, has another function. Both insect flight and bird flight are examples of exaptation.

Basically, there are more ways to evolve by natural selection than Behe says there are. I suggest this paper: http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/articles/jtb.pdf
Ithink it's pretty clear but if you have problems, ask.

If Behe had said that you can never have a model for step wise development of the mousetrap or flagellum, I guess Miller would have a point that Behe is not that bright. But does anyone really think that this is what Behe meant?

That is exactly what Behe meant. If he did not mean it, his argument goes away. For Behe's argument to have any meaning and for us to reach the conclusion that the flagellum was constructed in its present form, there must be no possible way for it to evolve by stepwise changes, each of which would confer an advantage. As soon as Miller shows it is possible, Behe's whole argument goes away.

Of course, Behe himself destroyed his own argument:
"Let me inject a note of caution: some systems require several pieces but not ones that need to be closely matched. For example, suppose you were walking in the woods and came across an old log, where the wind had blown a tree branch onto it, and the branch was perpendicular to the log. Here you have an irreducibly complex system -- a lever and a fulcrum. If there were a boulder nearby, you possibly could use the lever and fulcrum to move it. So some systems require several parts but not closely matched ones." Michael Behe, Intelligent design theory as a tool for analyzing biochemical systems in Mere Creation, Science, Faith, and Intelligent Design edited by William A. Dembski, 1998, page 179

So, IC can arise by chance. But if that is so, then even Behe's strawman of natural selection can then make the system as complex and fine-tuned as we like. So Behe here refutes his own claim that only an Intelligent Designer could make an IC system.

Yes, you can model the steps from plague to flagellum, but I kind of want to see it in life not in a model.

There was a paper in Science retracing the evolution of an IC system. Not a flagellum, but a system that meets Behe's definition of being IC.
8. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/312/5770/97 JT. Bridgham, SM Carroll, J W Thornton Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation Science 7 April 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5770, pp. 97 - 101 PDF file and other papers here: http://www.uoregon.edu/~joet/pubs.htm

Long before Behe ever proposed IC, some researchers had demonstrated the evolution of an IC system:
2. BG Hall, Evolution of new metabolic functions in laboratory organisms. in Evolution of Genes and Proteins ed. by M Nei and RK Koehn, Sinhouer Associates,Sunderland, MA, 1983. Also described at http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Darwin/DI/AcidTest.html

Would Behe possible say that no intermediate and similar structures could ever exist in similar organisms?

He said that in Darwin's Black Box.

But, we all have the same question, dont we? How do you put them together and make them work all at once?

The flagellum evolution shows how. I suggest you go back and read it.

"Any precursor to an irreducibly complex system missing a part is nonfunctional." This is a word game. If you take out part of the flagellum, it doesnt work.

It's Behe's criteria. But yes, if you take out part of a flagellum, it does work, because it works in another animal.

Now that the evolution of a flagellum and other IC structures are POSSIBLE (and that some have evolved), what Behe and IDers have to show is that the individual structures did not. So far, they haven't even tried. They've only tried the rhetoric game that AiG tried.

BTW, AiG is not going to like Behe, because Behe accepts both an old earth and much of evolution. So it's interesting to see AiG "defending" part of Behe but remaining silent about Behe's assertions and arguments of an old earth and evolution.

 

[lucaspa]

What we really need as a "definition of information", at the bare minimum, is some kind of a function (a mathematical machine) that, given two particular strings, will be able to tell us that string A has more / less information than string B.

We have that and, ironically, it is one used by an IDer - William Dembski.

"Suppose that an organism in reproducing generates N offspring, and that of these N offspring M succeed in reproducing. The amount of information introduced through selection is then -log2(M/N). Let me stress that this formula is not an case of misplaced mathematical exactness. This formula holds universally and is non-mysterious. Take a simple non-biological example. If I am sitting at a radio transmitter, and can transmit only zeros and ones, then every time I transmit a zero or one, I choose between two possibilities, selecting precisely one of them. Here N equals 2 and M equals 1. The information -log2(M/N) thus equals -log2(1/2) = 1, i.e., 1 bit of information n is introduced every time I transmit a zero or one. This is of course as things should be. Now this example from communication theory is mathematically isomorphic to the case of cell-division where only one of the daughter cells goes on to reproduce. On the other hand, if both daughter cells go on to reproduce, then N equals M equals 2, and thus -log2(M/N) = -log2(2/2) = 0, indicating that selection, by failing to eliminate any possibility failed also to introduce new information. " http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/ntse/papers/Dembski.html

Now, look what happens with natural selection:

One of the fundamental premises of natural selection (documented by Darwin and others) is that more individuals are born than survive and reproduce. Let's do some calculations on Dembski's equation looking at these numbers.

1. In a population, there are 4 offspring born but selection eliminates 3 and only one reproduces. So we have N = 4 and M = 1. -log(2) (M/N) = -log(2) (1/4) = -(-2) = 2. We have gained 2 "bits" of information in this generation. Selection does increase information.

2. Let's take a more radical example. An antibiotic kills 95% of the population. So we have 5 bacteria that can reproduce out of 100. N = 100, M =5. -log(2) (5/100) = -log(2) (.05) = -(-4.3) = 4.3. Now information has increased 4.3 "bits". The more severe the selection, the greater the increase in information.

3. Let's take a less severe example. A selection pressure such that of 100 individuals, 99 survive to reproduce. -log(2) (99/100) = -log(2) (.99) = - (-0.01) = 0.01.
So now we have only an increase of 0.01 "bits" in this one generation due to selection. But remember, selection is cumulative. Take this over 1,000 generations and we have an increase of 10 "bits". Now, Nilsson and Pelger have estimated, using conservative parameters, that it would take 364,000 generations to evolve an eye. D-E Nilsson and S Pelger, A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B. 256: 53-58, 1994. Taking that over our calculations shows that the eye represents an increase of 3,640 "bits" of information.

Finally, note that selection must result in an increase of information by Dembski's equation. Any fraction always has a negative logarithm. With the negative sign in front of the logarithm (-log) that means that the value for information must be positive as long as selection is operative. The only way to get loss of information is for the number of individuals that reproduce (M) to be greater than the number born (N). This is obviously not possible.

 

[lucaspa]

I've already told you - via common sense and intuition. If that carries no weight with your scientific mind, fine, you're certainly entitled to your opinion.

Actually, Behe and Paley gave us the criteria:
"For a simple artificial object such as a steel rod, the context is often important in concluding design. If you saw the rod outside a steel plant, you would infer design. Suppose however, that you traveled in a rocket ship to a barren alien planet that had never been explored. If you saw dozens of cylindrical steel rods lying on the side of a volcano, you would need more information before you could be sure that alien geological processes -- natural for the planet -- had not produced the rods." Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, pp 195-196

If you have no process in the environment that can produce the object, then we can conclude it was manufactured.

BTW, Behe is somewhat naive about those steel rods. Steel itself is something that does not occur in nature and is the end result of a long manufacturing process. So just finding "steel" rods, you know that you are looking at a manufactured artifact.

The problem for ID is that we do have a process in the environment -- natural selection -- that will produce the designs we see in plants and animals. Therefore we can't conclude manufacuture.

Behe's whole book Darwin's Black Box is an attempt to show that natural selection can't produce IC structures. Unfortunately, because of data and reasons I posted previously, Behe's claim is wrong.

It comes down to the fact that I don’t know if evolution is true.

That is quite different from the situation of whether objectively
1. Evolution is true.
2. ID is false.

Objectively, ID is false. Objectively, evolution is (provisionally) true. What you personally "know" has nothing to do with the issue.

“I can’t imagine how natural selection could have incrementally built this, so it appears it could be evidence against evolution”

That's the Argument from Personal Incredulity. It's not a valid argument.

“I can’t imagine how natural selection could have incrementally built this, but I know evolution is true, therefore evolution had to have built this”.

Uh, not quite. What is happening is that we are testing evolution to see if it is true. If we couldn't come up with a way to incrementally build the flagellum, then we would have a real problem with evolution by natural selection.

So what looks to me like evidence against the theory, cannot look like it you, because you already believe the theory,

That's not how it works. Your "evidence" is simply lack of imagination. That's not evidence. And "already believe the theory" has no weight, because our job as scientists is to disprove theories. It doesn't matter what we "believe", if the data refutes the theory, then the data refutes the theory. That's how ID and creationism got falsified in the first place. Remember, they used to be the accepted theories in science. All scientists "believed" them. But the data showed they were wrong.

and once you believe it (as we’ve seen in another thread) there is no such thing as evidence which could possibly be contrary evidence.

LOL! Sorry, but that is nonsense. At least 99.99% of all proposed scientific theories/hypotheses have been shown to be wrong. If what you say is true, then that couldn't have happened. Remember, people once thought the earth was flat. They don't accept that anymore. According to you, we must. Once upon a time, everyone thought that the earth was the center of the solar system. We don't think that anymore, either. Again, if what you said was true, then we would still think that. And before 1800, all scientists thought the earth was indeed less than 10,000 years old.

on’t see that as analogous to your thinking. Even if I granted that whales came from reptiles, it still wouldn’t require me to grant that bacteria had to have come from something else.

So, you think that there are created "kinds" instead of a common ancestor, right? Then there is evolution of new species within the "kind". Well, Darwin thought the same! You've just stated evolution! Congrats. You do "believe" in evolution after all.

However, data from analysis of DNA sequences shows this to be wrong. Bacteria, man, corn, worms, plankton, and all the rest of life alive today on the planet are related by historical connections seen in their sequences of bases in the DNA. IF there had been separate creations, that would have shown up as independent observations during phylogenetic analysis. Instead, we've got strong support for a common ancestor and another falsification of creationism/ID.

 

[shernren]

We have that and, ironically, it is one used by an IDer - William Dembski.

"Suppose that an organism in reproducing generates N offspring, and that of these N offspring M succeed in reproducing. The amount of information introduced through selection is then -log2(M/N). Let me stress that this formula is not an case of misplaced mathematical exactness. This formula holds universally and is non-mysterious. Take a simple non-biological example. If I am sitting at a radio transmitter, and can transmit only zeros and ones, then every time I transmit a zero or one, I choose between two possibilities, selecting precisely one of them. Here N equals 2 and M equals 1. The information -log2(M/N) thus equals -log2(1/2) = 1, i.e., 1 bit of information n is introduced every time I transmit a zero or one. This is of course as things should be. Now this example from communication theory is mathematically isomorphic to the case of cell-division where only one of the daughter cells goes on to reproduce. On the other hand, if both daughter cells go on to reproduce, then N equals M equals 2, and thus -log2(M/N) = -log2(2/2) = 0, indicating that selection, by failing to eliminate any possibility failed also to introduce new information. " http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/ntse/papers/Dembski.html

What a strange, strange definition. It looks like he couldn't understand Shannon information and simplified it.

"If I am sitting at a radio transmitter, and can only transmit zeroes and ones" is not a sufficient description for any information measure. If there is a 10% probability that I will transmit a one and a 90% probability that I will transmit a zero, then the information increase when I actually transmit a one is much more than just one bit.

His information measure can't say squat about the evolution of a particular genomic string, too, when that is the exact thing which the ID exponents need to explain away.

Personally I like Spetner's information metric; I think it is the most interesting and applicable measure of information that the creationists have come up with. Not that that's saying much.

 

[The Barbarian]

(Barbarian demonstrates how information actually applies to genetics)

Shannon's idea of "information" bears no resemblance to the common use of the word.

It has one saving grace over other usages; it actually works. That's a big deal in science, although maybe less so in ID.

According to Shannon, the more random the signal, the greater the information (I'm simplifying).

Too much simplification. It's a measure of uncertainty in the signal.

Shannon didn't care whether the signal carried actual meaning, the sense we use the word. Invoking Shannon in a discussion on biological information is irrelevant, a red herring, and equivocation.

No, and if you don't understand why, you need to go learn what information is. Shannon's understanding of information is what allows us to pack more of it into a smaller pipe. The fact that you labled the use of an effective measure of information to be a "red herring" is very telling.

We're talking about how much "information" is in, say, Shakespere's Hamlet.

That is also approachable by Shannon's equation. One of the interesting things about English (and other languages, I think) is that it uses the same strategy used by information people to make sure signals are properly decoded; a high level of redundancy. Turns out that it's quite high, on the order of 50%.

Obviously, this is much harder to quantify (IDists still haven't done so)

Probably because information theory is a bit hard for them. Note the above comments on Dembski's attempt to make it understandable.

In biology, we already know that a random string of A,C,T,G in DNA does not produce anything; it is meaningless, informationless.

If that were true, the evolution of a nylonase would not have happened. It was by a frameshift, which would make all the "letters" into nonsense if it were a language.

I think it's worth your time to learn about information and why it increases in a population when a mutation occurs. But you'll have to be a bit more dilligent at learning it than Dembski seems to have been.