Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

The Russians can always reclaim Lysenko's neo-Lamarkianism

They can suit themselves on that fm.

If they pressed the red button I would imagine the holding catches to be rusted up and the fuel to dissipate itself in the immediate vicinity.

Boy you can say that again

I've been reading Invisible Republic (again).

"The old free America".

I wonder if that idea is connected to ID.

We Europeans had to win what freedoms we have in a long and often bitter struggle.

It struck me you Americans, pioneers or exiles, had all the freedom in the world and are losing it in return for materialistic creature comforts. Did any other possibilty exist?

It's only a hypothesis. That ID is the last ditch of "The old free America" and anti-ID is inevitable barring a crack-up because the direction is set.

boy you can say that again

Okay.

I've been reading Invisible Republic (again).

"The old free America".

I wonder if that idea is connected to ID.

We Europeans had to win what freedoms we have in a long and often bitter struggle.

It struck me you Americans, pioneers or exiles, had all the freedom in the world and are losing it in return for materialistic creature comforts. Did any other possibilty exist?

It's only a hypothesis. That ID is the last ditch of "The old free America" and anti-ID is inevitable barring a crack-up because the direction is set.

Will that do?

BOOK REVIEW

James Robert Brown in his review of Shermer's book:


I read Stephen Jay Gould's "Rocks of Ages" years ago and always followed Gould's assertion that religion and science are merely separate rather than in conflict. The reviewer of Shermer's book brings up a valid point that this approach is placating rather than honest.

Gould always preached that morality grew only from religion as a societal "mikvah" . He was , of course full of it because he was only recalling his boyhood ties to his Grandfather..

I like all of Ruse's writing. Hes a transcendant God person. His writings are full of the conclusions that one draws from evidence and never does he once use the words that hes trying to define within the very definition. Hes quite an outspoken critic of ID and its poor attempts to divorce itself from Creationism, all in order to circumvent the Constitution.
Everyone knows it , even the IDers, but they plod on by creating their bogus science and then they fume at anyone who calls this "inconvenient truth" to their attention.

Just finished reading "monkey girl" the popularly written account of the events that led up to and included the Dover trial. I have a feeling that this could be as entertaining a play as was "Inherit the Wind", except , in this case the behind the scenes skullduggery was what makes the story like some tabloid account of Elvis fathering an alien child

A number of baseless assertions there fm. It is a little more advanced though than the innocence of the previous two posts.

It has been said that it is possible to pass from good to evil. That the progress of evolution (red in tooth and claw) must be directed towards degredation unless ambition is eradicated in that portion of mankind which uses pecuniary emulation as a vehicle of self expression.

But it is extemely difficult to pass from evil to good as we ought to know because we are not there yet. The Christian project is just such an attempt and it's failures are not a mark of its character but represent reversions to previous times under pressure of events.

There are bits of evidence though. Obesity in women, for example, conjures up visions of the Venus of Willendorf. Isn't a 50% divorce rate moving back towards promiscuity.

If it is permissible to assert that Mr Gould



then why not that there might be a recollection of boyhood ties to Mom in the AIDser's position and that Grandfathers might be a better bet, for men at least.

Grasshopper, If you read Gould's own words , he will explain to you. Till then, bye bye.

fm-

I was only making the point that assertions can't complain of counter-assertions unless they are in a one way street. It's bushwhacking.

I think Mr Gould might have had other reasons than his ties to his Grandfather. So also AIDsers.

Gould was very transparent about his catechism. He wrote an entire book on the subject "I have Landed" Its a tale that one can deduce the origins from which Gould cherry picked his own tales of the origins of moralityt. Of course , many scientists dont even buy many of his hypotheses in his chosen area, let aklone areas with which he had only a tangential association. He often lunched with messrs Ruse and Wilson.

Excellent paper (an ACTUAL paper - peer-reviewed, refereed, accepted, and published in a major, respected, influential, legitimate scientific/academic journal) just out -

The Quarterly Review of Biology, March 2007, Vol. 82, No. 1
Copyright 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0033-5770/2007/8201-0001 $15.00

The Quarterly Review of Biology

WHAT IS WRONG WITH INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

Elliott Sober
Philosophy Department, University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin 53706 USA
e-mail: [email protected]

Keywords
adaptation, creationism, Pierre Duhem, falsifiability, Ronald Fisher, intelligent design, Karl Popper, testability

Abstract
This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.

ONEThe "No Designer Worth His Salt" ObjectionPopper's Falsifiability Criterion

If imperfect adaptations do not demonstrate that the mini-ID claim is false, perhaps the right criticism is that this statement cannot be tested. But, what does testability mean? Scientists often answer by using Karl Popper's concept of falsifiability (Popper 1959). According to Popper, a hypothesis is falsifiable precisely when it rules out a possible observational outcome. Popper understood "ruling out" in terms of deductive logic; a falsifiable statement is logically inconsistent with at least one observation statement. Popper further suggested that falsifiability provides a demarcation criterion, separating science from nonscience.

Popper's account entails that some versions of creationism are falsifiable, and hence scientific. Consider, for example, the hypothesis that an omnipotent supernatural being wanted everything to be purple, and had this as his top priority. Of course, no creationist has advocated purple-ID. However, it is inconsistent with what we observe, so purple-ID is falsifiable (the fact that it postulates a supernatural being notwithstanding). The same can be said of other, more modest, versions of ID that do not say whether the designer is supernatural. For example, if mini-ID says that an intelligent designer created the vertebrate eye, then it is falsifiable; after all, it entails that vertebrates have eyes. An even more minimalistic formulation of ID is also falsifiable; the statement that organisms were created by an intelligent designer entails that there are organisms, which is something we observe to be true.


Probability Statements Are Not Falsifiable

In addition to entailing that many formulations of ID are falsifiable, Popper's criterion also has the consequence that probability statements are unfalsifiable. Consider the statement that a coin has a 50% probability of landing heads each time it is tossed. This statement is logically consistent with all possible sequences of heads and tails in any finite run of tosses. Popper attempted to solve this problem by expanding the concept of falsification. Rather than saying that H is falsified only when an observation occurs that is logically inconsistent with H, Popper suggested that we regard H as false when an observation occurs that H says is very improbable. But how improbable is improbable enough for us to be warranted in rejecting H? Popper thought that there was no objectively correct answer to this question; the choice of cut-off is a matter of convention (Popper 1959:191).

Popper's idea has much in common with Ronald Fisher's test of significance (Fisher 1959). According to Fisher, if H says that an observation O is very improbable, and OH is false or something very improbable has occurred. The disjunction does follow, but it does not follow that H is false, nor does it follow that we should reject H. As many statisticians and philosophers of science have recognized (Hacking 1965; Edwards 1972; Royall 1997), perfectly plausible hypotheses often say that the observations have low probability. This is especially common when a probabilistic hypothesis addresses a large body of data. If we make a large number of observations, it may turn out that H confers on each observation a high probability, although H confers on the conjunction of observations a tiny probability. If Fisher's test of significance fails to provide a criterion for when hypotheses should be rejected, it also fails to describe when a hypothesis is falsifiable. Perhaps Popper's f-word should be dropped.

The fact that Popperian falsifiability fails to capture what testability is does not mean that we should abandon the latter concept. Rather, a better theory of testability is needed.

Testing Is ComparativeDuhem's Thesis

An additional point needs to be taken into account. As the philosopher Pierre Duhem (1954) emphasized, physical theories, on their own, do not make testable predictions. One needs to add "auxiliary propositions" to the theories one wishes to test. For example, the laws of optics do not predict when eclipses will occur. However, if propositions about the positions of the earth, moon, and sun are added to these laws, they do make predictions. Duhem's thesis holds for most theories in most sciences, and it has wide applicability when prediction is understood probabilistically, not just deductively.

Duhem's point applies to mini-ID. Taken alone, the statement that an intelligent designer made the vertebrate eye does not have observational consequences beyond the entailment that vertebrates have eyes. However, mini-ID can be supplemented with further assumptions that allow it to have additional observational entailments. For example, suppose we assume that if an intelligent designer made the vertebrate eye, that he would want it to have the set of features F. Mini-ID, when supplemented with this auxiliary assumption, has implications about the detailed features that the eye will have. Just like the laws of optics, mini-ID does not predict much until auxiliary assumptions are added. Does this mean that mini-ID is no worse than the laws of optics?

Auxiliary Propositions Must Be Independently Supported

It is crucial to the scientific enterprise that auxiliary propositions not simply be invented. By inventing assumptions, we can equip a theory with favorable auxiliary propositions that allow it to fit the data. Conversely, a theory also can be equipped with unfavorable auxiliaries that lead it to conflict with the data. An important strategy that scientists use to avoid this nihilistic outcome is to insist that there be independent evidence for the auxiliary propositions that are used. When testing the laws of optics by observing eclipses, we do not arbitrarily invent assumptions about the positions of the earth, moon, and sun. Rather, we use propositions about their positions for which we have independent evidence.

When we test the laws of optics by observing eclipses, the auxiliary propositions we use are "independently justified" in the sense that our reasons for accepting them do not depend on (i) assuming that the theory being tested is true or (ii) using the data on eclipses. The reason to avoid (i) is obvious, since a test of optical theory should not be question-begging. But why avoid (ii)? The reason is that violating this requirement would allow us to show that any theory, no matter how irrelevant it is to the occurrence of eclipses, makes accurate predictions about them. For if O describes an observation about the occurrence of an eclipse, and O is used to justify the auxiliary propositions we use to test theory N, then we can simply construct the auxiliary proposition "not-N or O;" this disjunction must be true if O is, and this auxiliary proposition, when conjoined to N, allows N to entail O.

The important scientific strategy of rendering theories testable by finding independently justified auxiliary propositions does not work for mini-ID. We have no independent evidence concerning which auxiliary propositions about the putative designer's goals and abilities are true (Kitcher 1984). Surprisingly, this is a point that several ID proponents concede. For example, the influential ID textbook, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, states that "the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent cause. What kind of intelligent designer was it? On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy" (Davis and Kenyon 1993:7). In the same vein, Philip Johnson (1991) says that the designer's motives are "mysterious" (p 67) and "inscrutable" (p 71).

What ID Proponents Say about Testability

Proponents of ID have had a variety of reactions to the charge that their position is not testable. Sometimes they embrace the criterion of falsifiability and claim that ID fills the bill:

"The concept of intelligent design entails a strong prediction that is readily falsifiable. In particular, the concept of intelligent design predicts
that complex information, such as that encoded in a functioning genome, never arises from purely chemical or physical antecedents.

. . . All that is necessary to falsify the hypothesis of intelligent design is to show confirmed instances of purely physical or chemical antecedents producing such informationt9 give rise to complex information at t10, this does not refute the ID claim any more than a mindless printing press does. ID proponents will simply maintain that an intelligent designer was present at an earlier stage. If scientists press their inquiry into the more remote past and discover that mindless physical conditions at t8 produced the conditions at t9, ID proponents will have the same reply: an intelligent designer was involved at a still earlier time. If scientists somehow manage to push their understanding of the complex information that exists at t10 all the way back to the start of the universe without ever having to invoke an intelligent designer, would that refute the ID position? Undoubtedly, ID proponents will then postulate a supernatural intelligence that exists outside of space and time. Defenders of ID always have a way out. This is not the mark of a falsifiable theory.

In addition, the proponents of ID who make this argument have lost sight of the role of observation in Popper's concept of falsifiability. For a proposition to be falsifiable, it is not enough that it be inconsistent with a possible state of affairs; it must also be inconsistent with a possible observation. Granted, the ID position is inconsistent with the existence of complex information that never had an intelligent designer in its causal history. It is equally true that "all lightning bolts issue from the hand of Zeus" is inconsistent with there existing even one Zeus-less lightning bolt (Pennock 1999). These points fail to address how observations could refute either claim.

Defenders of ID often claim to test their position by another route, by criticizing the theory of evolution. Behe (1996) contends that evolutionary processes cannot produce "irreducibly complex" adaptations; since we observe such traits, evolutionary theory is refuted, leaving ID as the only position standing. Behe (1996) says that a system is irreducibly complex when it is "composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning" (p 39). Before considering whether evolutionary theory really does rule out irreducible complexity, I want to note that this argument does nothing to test ID. For ID to be testable, it must make predictions. The fact that a different theory makes a prediction says nothing about whether ID is testable. Behe has merely changed the subject.

One flaw in Behe's argument is his assumption that evolutionary processes must always involve a lockstep increase in fitness. This ignores the fact that contemporary evolutionary theory describes evolution as a probabilistic process. Drift can lead to evolutionary changes that involve no increase in fitness and even to changes that lead fitness to decline. Evolution does not require that each later stage be fitter than its predecessors. At least since the 1930s, biologists have understood that evolution can cross valleys in a fitness landscape.

The most that can be claimed about irreducibly complex adaptations (though this would have to be scrutinized carefully) is that evolutionary theory says that they have low probability. However, that does not justify rejecting evolutionary theory or accepting ID. As noted earlier, many probabilistic theories have the property of saying that a body of observations has low probability. If we reject theories because they say that observations have low probability, all probabilistic theories will be banished from science once they are repeatedly tested.

There is a second problem with Behe's position on irreducible complexity. The fact that a system can be segmented into n parts in such a way that it counts s irreducibly complex does not guarantee that the evolution of the system involved a stepwise accumulation of parts, moving from 0 to 1 to . . . to n-1 to nConclusion

It is one thing for a version of ID to have observational consequences, something else for it to have observational consequences that differ from those of a theory with which it competes. The mini-ID claim that an intelligent designer made the vertebrate eye entails that vertebrates have eyes, but that does not permit it to be tested against alternative explanations of why vertebrates have eyes. When scientific theories compete with each other, the usual pattern is that independently attested auxiliary propositions allow the theories to make predictions that disagree with each other. No such auxiliary propositions allow mini-ID to do this.

It is easy enough to construct a version of ID that accommodates a set of observations already known, but it also is easy to construct a version of ID that conflicts with what we have already observed. Neither undertaking results in substantive science, nor is there any point in constructing a version of ID that is so minimalistic that it fails to say much of anything about what we observe. In all its forms, ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Richard Amasino, Alan Attie, Jeremy Butterfield, Michael Cox, Mehmet Elgin, Malcolm Forster, Daniel Hausman, Bret Larget, Gregory Mougin, Ronald Numbers, Robert Pennock, David SWilson, and the referees of this journal for useful suggestions.

REFERENCES

Behe M J. 1996. Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.
New York: Free Press.

Behe M J. 2005. Design for living. New York Times 7 February: A27.

Burkhardt F H, Browne J, Porter D M, Richmond M, editors. 1993. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: Volume 8, 1860.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davis P, Kenyon D H. 1993. Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins. Second Edition.
Dallas (TX): Haughton Publishing.

Dembski W A. 1999. Signs of intelligence: a primer on the discernment of intelligent design.
Touchstone 12:76-84.

Dembski W A. 2002. No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence.
Lanham (MD): Rowman and Littlefield.

Duhem P M M. 1954. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory.
Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.

Edwards A W F. 1972. Likelihood: An Account of the Statistical Concept of Likelihood and Its Application to Scientific Inference.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fisher R A. 1959. Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference. Second Edition.
Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

Forrest B, Gross P R. 2004. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Gould S J. 1980. The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History.
New York: Norton.

Hacking I. 1965. Logic of Statistical Inference.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hartwig M D, Meyer S C. 1993. A note to teachers. Pages 153-163 in Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, Second Edition, by P Davis and D H Kenyon.
Dallas (TX): Haughton Publishing.

Johnson P E. 1991. Darwin on Trial.
Washington (DC): Regnery Gateway.

Kitcher P. 1982. Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism.
Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Nelson P A. 1996. The role of theology in current evolutionary reasoning.
Biology and Philosophy 11:493 - 517.

Pennock R T. 1999. Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Popper K R. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
New York: Basic Books.

Raddick G. 2005. Deviance, Darwinian-style.
Metascience 14:453-457.

Royall R M. 1997. Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm.
London and New York: Chapman & Hall.

Sober E. 2005. The design argument. Pages 117-147 in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion, edited by W E Mann.
Malden (MA): Blackwell Publishing.

Boy, that's gonna raise a welt.

Eliot Sober is great! I have read other essays by him. I believe philosophy of science is his specialty. Have you ever gone to one of his lectures up there in Wisconsin, timber?

timber quoted-



That looks anthropomorphic to me. And the conclusion does not follow unless it derives from the writer's idea of "imperfect".

What is an "imperfect adaptation" unless it is judged on human standards.

Isn't everything imperfect? Why pick out a panda's thumb? Does a panda even have a thumb?

These are a bunch of people talking their salaries up. A work avoidance scheme.





Which then don't appear. What follows is not psychology. It is simple stuff indeed.

Let's look at the psychology then.

Would the AIDsers on here be AIDsers had they been born and raised somewhere else such as in a Sarawak head-hunting tribe or a Hitler stud farm?

Freud said that the psychology is set in childhood. Why wasn't Billy Graham an AIDser. What type of punishment/ reward conditions create AIDsers within an established religious tradition? Is it non-acceptance? One can understand how a religious mindset is created within an established religious tradition.

There's a boat-rocking attitude in the former which is absent from the latter. Is it attention seeking?

Recall, if you can, my piece on my mate's communist sparkpoint.

Why read the rest of timber's quote. It is self evident drivel.

ah yes, drivel that manages to dispute every point you have ever tried to make past, present and future.

When you can't support ID simply change the subject by attacking the scientists. Oh wait. Timber's piece points that out as being a false argument. Hmm..

Don't read the drivel..

I'm not attacking scientists. They are great. Wonderful achievements.

There was no science in timber's quote. It was psuedo-science.

What is an "imperfect adaptation"? Eyes are not perfect. I could think of a number of improvements to eyes. Is our vulnerability to radiations above the natural level an imperfect adaptation. Why can't we digest cellulose?

Answer that parados. You haven't said anything. Just trotted out some easy assertions.

What is an "imperfect adaptation"?

Greil Marcus quotes Marx in his ace book Invisible Republic-



He is driving west out of Norton, in Wise County, "the farthest reach of Virginia before it meets eastern Kentucky, about seventy-five miles south of Frank Hutchinson's territory, as far from Thomas Jefferson's Virginia as the other side of the world."

There, he says,"you could look a lifetime and not see your reflection."

An urban psychology which only sees reflections of itself is bound to try to raise itself up as the supreme being and dethrone God. A rural psychology would not do. There is no complexity at all in Manhattan. It is merely complicated. Irreducible complexity is the everyday experience of the countryman.

As I said long ago- this is an urban/rural argument. Buying into urban psychology brings a lot more with it than simply dethroning God. A full-baked AIDser would welcome all of it.

"Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial,
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while."

Visions of Johanna. Bob Dylan.

Also in that masterpiece-
"Ghosts of 'lectricity howl in the bones of her face."