What does "best explained" by design mean?

In situ said:

Yes I get that part, but why is it better? It is certainly not better in explaining why a mere tooth happens to tells something about an organisms reproductive organs.

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Sorry, that’s the best I can do.

As far as I’m concerned it’s not better, it’s useless, as a scientific explanation that is.

Hopefully an ID supporter can help you, I wouldn’t hold your breath though.

In situ said:

At any rate, I think I understand why Meyer says such things, but I am not fully clear on why he uses the word "best", it kind of bewilders my mind when I think about it.

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Same reason an advertisement for dish soap may describe it as the "best". It's advertising their product as superior. As I said, Meyer is just an ID-salesman.

In situ said:

In other words, you do not know why, or how things, works which you have "eginered". If you cannot explain it, then you have not understood it. Seriously, I would not want you to engineer a nuclear power plant, an air plain or anything else for that matter which might put peoples life or health at risk.

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Too late. I create prototype parts for GE Medical in Milwaukee.
They are usually the white or clear parts shown.
OEC Elite CFD

Being prototypes, we have to invent ways to create the parts.

In situ said:

What makes it the best explanation in his mind, i.e. in what sense is it better than the natural explanation Ken Miller proposed at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court trial in 2005 where he showed the claim of "irreducible complexity" to be incorrect, i.e. debunked the claim it can "only be explained" by design?

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2 things:

1) ken miller didnt showed that the claim about ic system is incorrect.
2) since a spinning motor cant be explain only by design this is why its the best (and actually the only) explanation. evolution is an explanation that base on belief. so we have a fact (motor need design) vs a belief (motor doesnt need design).

xianghua said:

2) since a spinning motor cant be explain only by design this is why its the best (and actually the only) explanation. evolution is an explanation that base on belief. so we have a fact (motor need design) vs a belief (motor doesnt need design).

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You're still making arguments based on the False Equivalence Fallacy. An argument based on a fallacy is a bad argument. But you don't seem to care.

It also doesn't address the fact that Intelligent Design has never actually explained anything.

Irreducible Complexity was never intended to explain design. Rather it was a dubious attempt at detecting design. If the flagellum was designed, there is currently no explanation for how that happened.

xianghua said:

2 things:

1) ken miller didnt showed that the claim about ic system is incorrect.
2) since a spinning motor cant be explain only by design this is why its the best (and actually the only) explanation. evolution is an explanation that base on belief. so we have a fact (motor need design) vs a belief (motor doesnt need design).

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It doesn't need design if there is a well-characterized and well evidenced process for producing it naturally.

In situ said:

Hi everyone and merry Christmas.

I just found a you Youtube video with Stephen Meyer titled "Intelligent Design 3.0" and curious about what Mayer and the Discovery Institute now is up to I had a brief look at it. However already at the start of the talk a question mark came up.


It seems the Intelligent Design community's argument about the bacterial flagella has evolved from "can only be explained" by design to "is best explained" by design. However it is unclear to me what Meyer mean with "best". What makes it the best explanation in his mind, i.e. in what sense is it better than the natural explanation Ken Miller proposed at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court trial in 2005 where he showed the claim of "irreducible complexity" to be incorrect, i.e. debunked the claim it can "only be explained" by design?

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The questions that need to be answered here are, "What is an explanation?" and "What makes a good explanation?"

An explanation is generally taken to be an account that leads to greater understanding of the phenomenon, and/or its causal origins, and/or its context in, or relationship to, the world around it.

What makes a good explanation is usually addressed in the philosophy of science in terms of abductive reasoning, or inference to the best explanation. There are many versions and models of this, and a number of problems, such as, is the best explanation the most probable one, or the one that provides greatest understanding, or is the one that provides greatest understanding the most probable by implication? also, Hume's argument on the unreliability of induction, and so-on.

In practice, a few relatively simple measures can effectively rank explanations in general terms:

1. How justifiable and fruitful they are, i.e. the testable implications they have, or predictions they make, and whether the results confirm them; the more varied and numerous the confirming tests and positive results, the better.
2. The scope or explanatory power that they have, i.e. the diversity of phenomena of which they enable understanding, and the degree to which they unify our knowledge and understanding. Note that specificity and/or detail is important, and it is how generalisable the explanation is that gives it scope. Explanations with low specificity or detail provide correspondingly little understanding, although they may superficially apply to a wide variety of phenomena. Explanations that raise more questions than they answer, particularly if the questions are unanswerable, have no explanatory power. This doesn't mean that it is necessary to explain an infinite regress of 'why?' questions; for example, 'bad luck' is not a good explanation for a tsunami, but 'an underwater rock slide' could be. If asked to explain the rock slide, 'bad luck' is not a good explanation, but would not invalidate a rock slide as a good explanation for the tsunami.
3. How simple or parsimonious they are, i.e. how few assumptions they require (application of Occam's razor).
4. How conservative they are, i.e. how well they cohere with existing knowledge. This is important, but not essential; if an explanation is not conservative or contradicts existing knowledge, it needs to outperform competing explanations on the other criteria.

Given these criteria, it should not be difficult to compare the quality of 'Intelligent Design' as an explanation with its competitor(s)

In situ said:

Hi everyone and merry Christmas.

I just found a you Youtube video with Stephen Meyer titled "Intelligent Design 3.0" and curious about what Mayer and the Discovery Institute now is up to I had a brief look at it. However already at the start of the talk a question mark came up.


It seems the Intelligent Design community's argument about the bacterial flagella has evolved from "can only be explained" by design to "is best explained" by design. However it is unclear to me what Meyer mean with "best". What makes it the best explanation in his mind, i.e. in what sense is it better than the natural explanation Ken Miller proposed at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court trial in 2005 where he showed the claim of "irreducible complexity" to be incorrect, i.e. debunked the claim it can "only be explained" by design?

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Perhaps Stephen Meyer had evolved his articulation of presenting ID with a much more empathetic notion to other worldviews, as he seemed to graciously appreciate the critiques and sound reasoning from brilliant minds that adhere to evolutionary ideas. He went on and explained why he thought that the ID theory is the best explanation for the origin of new genetic information based on the biological aspects focused at the conference at The Royal Society of London which took place in November 2016; arguably the world's most distinguished scientific body, and it goes back to Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, etc.

What's interesting is, according to Meyer, the conference was called by leading evolutionary biologists who were as it happens very unhappy with the current status of evolutionary theory, in particular, the textbook theory of evolution known as neo-Darwinism, or modern Darwinism, the contemporary Darwinian theory. There has been a whole slew of new evolutionary ideas proposed to help solve this as well as other related problems, and many of these were discussed at the Royal Society Conference, and according to Meyer, many were pronounced for less than momentous.

List of other Evolutionary ideas proposed at the Royal Society of London:

Puctuated Equilibirum
Self-Organisational Theory
Evolutionary Developmental Biology
Neo-Lamarckian Epigenetic Inheritence
Neutral Theory
Phenotypic Plasticity
Niche Construction
Natrual Genetic Engineering

Of the list of evolutionary ideas, Meyer saw Natural Genetic Engineering as the most intriguing, as the proposal was that the many mutations that have been observed in actual living organisms are not Darwinian in the sense of being random, they're occurring in response to various environmental stressors and pre-programmed adaptive capacities built into the organism itself. Meyer went on to say that this hypothesis was put forward by James Shapiro, a molecular biologist at the Univesity of Chicago, who was one of the conveners of the Royal Society event mentioned in the video.
According to Natural Genetic Engineering, these cells actually have the ability to react to environmental stress because they've got these pre-programmed adaptive responses that are under algorithmic control. Very non-Darwinian stuff - an advance in our biological understanding for sure.

However, Shapiro failed to address one key question: Where did the pre-programming come from?

And that is where the ID theory becomes an interesting proposal to help explain the origin of this pre-programming.

Speedwell said:

It doesn't need design if there is a well-characterized and well evidenced process for producing it naturally.

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but there is no such explanation. evolution is just a belief.

xianghua said:

but there is no such explanation. evolution is just a belief.

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Claiming that evolution is "just a belief" is a common lie that creationists tell themselves to avoid having to deal with the real science.

This is also largely why creationism is doomed to fail in the long run.

pitabread said:

Claiming that evolution is "just a belief" is a common lie that creationists tell themselves to avoid having to deal with the real science.

This is also largely why creationism is doomed to fail in the long run.

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so what is it? a fact? a good joke.

xianghua said:

so what is it? a fact? a good joke.

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In nature, evolution is an observable process by which populations of organisms change over time.

In science, The Theory of Evolution is the scientific explanation for that observable process.

Surely you must know this already, since I thought you'd already visited this site: Welcome to Evolution 101!

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

The questions that need to be answered here are, "What is an explanation?" and "What makes a good explanation?"

An explanation is generally taken to be an account that leads to greater understanding of the phenomenon, and/or its causal origins, and/or its context in, or relationship to, the world around it.

What makes a good explanation is usually addressed in the philosophy of science in terms of abductive reasoning, or inference to the best explanation. There are many versions and models of this, and a number of problems, such as, is the best explanation the most probable one, or the one that provides greatest understanding, or is the one that provides greatest understanding the most probable by implication? also, Hume's argument on the unreliability of induction, and so-on.

In practice, a few relatively simple measures can effectively rank explanations in general terms:

1. How justifiable and fruitful they are, i.e. the testable implications they have, or predictions they make, and whether the results confirm them; the more varied and numerous the confirming tests and positive results, the better.
2. The scope or explanatory power that they have, i.e. the diversity of phenomena of which they enable understanding, and the degree to which they unify our knowledge and understanding. Note that specificity and/or detail is important, and it is how generalisable the explanation is that gives it scope. Explanations with low specificity or detail provide correspondingly little understanding, although they may superficially apply to a wide variety of phenomena. Explanations that raise more questions than they answer, particularly if the questions are unanswerable, have no explanatory power. This doesn't mean that it is necessary to explain an infinite regress of 'why?' questions; for example, 'bad luck' is not a good explanation for a tsunami, but 'an underwater rock slide' could be. If asked to explain the rock slide, 'bad luck' is not a good explanation, but would not invalidate a rock slide as a good explanation for the tsunami.
3. How simple or parsimonious they are, i.e. how few assumptions they require (application of Occam's razor).
4. How conservative they are, i.e. how well they cohere with existing knowledge. This is important, but not essential; if an explanation is not conservative or contradicts existing knowledge, it needs to outperform competing explanations on the other criteria.

Given these criteria, it should not be difficult to compare the quality of 'Intelligent Design' as an explanation with its competitor(s)

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Though your criteria are accurate to a T, and I too did not initially see any quantifiable aspects to the ID theory or where it could lead in advancing our scientific endeavours, but, it seemed ID theory has had some gradual progression last I looked into it.

Predictive Power of ID

For example, the ID theory can actually be predictive which was the case back in recent years that concerned "junk DNA" as false. It was for many years that big sections of the genome didn't appear to code for proteins, and therefore neo-Darwinism was correct in the view that 97% of the genome was non-functional; and this would be expected evidence of the non-functional parts of the genome being the byproduct of that trail and error process consistent with the neo-Darwinian theory, the accumulation of mutations gradually over time.
It is apparent that mutations and natural selection are real processes, but are they really the mechanism for neo-Darwinism to be functional and evident in molecular biology? Yet if the genome was designed then we wouldn't expect to find 97% of the genome as being junk and only 3% being functional, and it was the ID theory that predicted that non-coding regions of the DNA would turn out to be importantly functional.
At the forefront of the work of "junk DNA," an evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg predicted on the basis of ID that the non-coding regions are going to have a function. This was a major study that came out of the National Institutes of Health called the Encode Project, and in 2011 it confirmed what Sternberg and evolutionary biologist James Shapiro had been working on, that at least 85% of the genome is transcribed into various RNA's and have many important regulatory functions that are not just dealt with the DNA, but it's a whole complex hierarchically organised informational processing system. James Shapiro acknowledged Sternburg as the first one to have the insight that the non-coding regions would be functional.

Unfortuately, there was controversy surrounding his decision being he is an evolutionary biologist coming to conclusions that invoked intelligent design, and it led to his dismissal from a well established career in molecular evolution.

How could ID be used to advance?

One of the scientific applications of ID is what's called Design Patterns, and programmers will know what that means as it pertains to the function of the digital information within a computer and how it is processed, and design patterns is an established method of storing or processing information.
One such design pattern that could further our scientific advancement is that within a molecular cell there is a mechanised application of correcting errors. Basically, it is like our version of spellcheck on our computing devices, only much more efficient while hierarchically filing millions if not billions of information in a much more compact and dense storage area. By looking for design patterns within other areas of molecular frameworks other than cells, there is room for advancement in human progression and an understanding of the universe.

Certainly an advancement in design principles in computer science and potentially benefit other fields such as increasing the efficiency in medical or weaponised applications.

Abraxos said:

and it was the ID theory that predicted that non-coding regions of the DNA would turn out to be importantly functional.

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No it didn't.

In order to actually make proper scientific predictions, we'd first need to have a cohesive theory of Intelligent Design which actually explains the existence of whatever it purports to explain. Since such a theory doesn't yet exist, there is nothing to derive any real predictions from.

The work that Shapiro and Sternberg did wasn't based on any ID theory.

(It's also worth noting that "junk DNA" hasn't always been explicitly thought of as non-functional. This is something that's been investigated for decades; the idea it's a result of ID giving rise to purpose for non-coding regions of the genome is purely revisionist history.)

Abraxos said:

Predictive Power of ID

For example, the ID theory can actually be predictive which was the case back in recent years that concerned "junk DNA" as false. It was for many years that big sections of the genome didn't appear to code for proteins, and therefore neo-Darwinism was correct in the view that 97% of the genome was non-functional; and this would be expected evidence of the non-functional parts of the genome being the byproduct of that trail and error process consistent with the neo-Darwinian theory, the accumulation of mutations gradually over time.
It is apparent that mutations and natural selection are real processes, but are they really the mechanism for neo-Darwinism to be functional and evident in molecular biology? Yet if the genome was designed then we wouldn't expect to find 97% of the genome as being junk and only 3% being functional, and it was the ID theory that predicted that non-coding regions of the DNA would turn out to be importantly functional.
At the forefront of the work of "junk DNA," an evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg predicted on the basis of ID that the non-coding regions are going to have a function. This was a major study that came out of the National Institutes of Health called the Encode Project, and in 2011 it confirmed what Sternberg and evolutionary biologist James Shapiro had been working on, that at least 85% of the genome is transcribed into various RNA's and have many important regulatory functions that are not just dealt with the DNA, but it's a whole complex hierarchically organised informational processing system. James Shapiro acknowledged Sternburg as the first one to have the insight that the non-coding regions would be functional.

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Not really - the ENCODE project paper was a lesson on the dangers of not clearly defining or explaining the terms used and their meaning in the context of the study, and of post-hoc re-scoping.

Their figure for 'functional' DNA referred to DNA that they thought might potentially be transcribed (they were not particularly judicious in their choice of transcription proxies) and might possibly result in biochemical activity (it was already known that there was transcription activity in 'junk' DNA).

Unfortunately, it was taken (read) to mean DNA that was actively transcribed and had biological activity, i.e. contributed to a selective advantage. This misunderstanding of 'functional' caused a strong reaction and criticism from other researchers in the field, particularly as it was clear that active areas involved were not strongly conserved as would be expected of biologically functional sequences.

It was later explained that, as ENCODE was investigating activity potentially relevant to biomedical studies, they were interested in biochemical products whether biologically significant or not (perhaps for possible drug interactions). Subsequent papers from the group no longer mention a 'functional' DNA figure. It is now widely thought that the original lead paper was written knowing that the figure was likely to be misinterpreted, so as to attract publicity.

See The Truth about Encode and The ENCODE Controversy.

One of the scientific applications of ID is what's called Design Patterns, and programmers will know what that means as it pertains to the function of the digital information within a computer and how it is processed, and design patterns is an established method of storing or processing information.

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Your characterization of design patterns is a little off the mark. Design patterns are simply proven strategies or template solutions for common tasks or problems; they're useful and effective ideas.

One such design pattern that could further our scientific advancement is that within a molecular cell there is a mechanised application of correcting errors. Basically, it is like our version of spellcheck on our computing devices, only much more efficient while hierarchically filing millions if not billions of information in a much more compact and dense storage area. By looking for design patterns within other areas of molecular frameworks other than cells, there is room for advancement in human progression and an understanding of the universe.

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Error correction is not itself a design pattern, but a particular technique of error correction might be. You can abstract design patterns from any efficient and generalisable utilitarian sequence of operations; i.e. you can pick up good ways of doing things by seeing how things that work well are done.

I'm curious to know what design patterns you see in DNA repair, because IIRC, there are about six repair mechanisms, each of which is pretty specific; can you describe the design pattern or patterns they demonstrate?

Certainly an advancement in design principles in computer science and potentially benefit other fields such as increasing the efficiency in medical or weaponised applications.

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But how is the possibility of picking up neat tricks from biological processes relevant to Intelligent Design?

With respect, this thesis doesn't seem to hold together or make much sense...

FrumiousBandersnatch said:

But how is the possibility of picking up neat tricks from biological processes relevant to Intelligent Design?

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I've noticed some creationists/IDists have adopted this idea that holding a belief in a thing's origin constitutes an application of that belief when you learn about how that thing works.

It certainly makes no sense, but that seems to be the best creationists/IDists have when it comes to answering why their ideas have no applications.

pitabread said:

I've noticed some creationists/IDists have adopted this idea that holding a belief in a thing's origin constitutes an application of that belief when you learn about how that thing works.

It certainly makes no sense, but that seems to be the best creationists/IDists have when it comes to answering why their ideas have no applications.

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Yes; it's illogical, but I suppose that's no great surprise.

As far as ENCODE goes, even if they'd found 80% of the genome to have selective effects (biological functionality), 20% would still contradict that ID 'prediction' - which has no explanatory mechanism or structure, but is based on guessing what someone thinks would an 'intelligent designer' would do in each context, without knowing that designer's motivation, purpose, or intent.

pitabread said:

In nature, evolution is an observable process by which populations of organisms change over time.

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no according to your own source:

"The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor"

so its not just mere changes.