Does Darwinism predict anything?
We’ve heard over and over again from the Darwinist side of this debate that ID offers no novel predictions. Intelligent design actually offers many intriguing and novel predictions (you can head over to ResearchID.org to see some of them), but what about Darwinism?
I would love it if some of our commentators or readers would offer what they think are predictions of Darwinism. The definiton of Darwinism that we’ll use is the following proposition:
"The origin and diversity of life has occured solely by undirected processes such as natural selection."
For a prediction to count, of course it will have to be one that only Darwinism makes.
Update: There seems to be some confusion about what kind of predictions count. No predictions count that could be made from a more modest postulate. ID has no bones about common descent, so any predictions from common descent don’t count.
The one sentence hypothesis above could of course be written as two:
1. "The origin of life has occured solely by undirected processes such as natural selection."
2. "The diversity of life has occured solely by undirected processes such as natural selection."
It’s fine to just give a prediction from just one of those hypothesis.
You must be joking. Are you being completely ignorant on purpose, or by accident?
Comment by Dan — February 17, 2007 @ 9:30 pm
Dan, I’m seriously asking for predictions. I can think of several predictions you could make with the above proposition. . . but none of them seem to have actually been fulfilled or look like they can be fulfilled. That’s how I knew I must be overlooking some prediction. :-)
You must remember that the predictions have to be ones that ID doesn’t also predict. They also has to be a prediction that another more limited proposition can not also predict. Thus for instance general predictions from common descent don’t count.
Comment by Wulfgar — February 17, 2007 @ 10:06 pm
Here’s a prediction for you: Thylacine DNA will be more similar to kangaroo DNA than to North American or European wolf DNA. ID makes no prediction on this, and some ID proponents cannot seem to tell the two species apart.
Let’s not forget predictions of evolution which have already been corraborated with evidence:
Human ancestor fossils in Africa, predicted on the basis of the similarity of humans to other great apes.
Camelid fossils in North America, based on the similarity of Llamas and camels, the current geographic location of each, and the geological record of continent movement.
Comment by ivy privy — February 17, 2007 @ 11:59 pm
Comparisons of the genomic data that is piling up in stacks will continue to show that:
Species considered to be related by traditional fossil/anatomical/physiological comparisons will have more similarity in their DNA than those which are considered to be distantly related.
Non-coding regions of DNA will continue to show more changes than silent mutations in the coding regions, which will be more frequent than mutations of the codign regions that affect the polypeptide gene product. That will be a clear sign of natural selection of the structure and/or function of the protein gene products.
Comment by ivy privy — February 18, 2007 @ 12:04 am
That’s a good try, ivy privy, but more precisely that’s a prediction from common descent. I’m just interested in predictions that come out from the above hypothesis and that are unique to that proposition. Do you see what I mean? I’m trying to keep it very simple.
Comment by Wulfgar — February 18, 2007 @ 12:04 am
You must remember that the predictions have to be ones that ID doesn’t also predict. They also has to be a prediction that another more limited proposition can not also predict. Thus for instance general predictions from common descent don’t count.
ID does not predict common descent. It only allows that such predictions, made by evolutionary theory, may be correct some of the time. Individual proponents of ID differ on common descent in general, and for the specific case of common descent of humans with other great apes, as well as on many other scientific points, such as the age of the Earth. In other words, the “big tent” if ID has room for Young Earth Creationists. If they have been kicked out of the tent recently, and I just haven’t heard about it, let me know.
Comment by ivy privy — February 18, 2007 @ 12:09 am
Protein sequence alignments for the same proteins across multiple species will continue to show more conservation of critical active site residues than in other areas of the proteins. Loops and surface residues will continue to show more point mutations, and loops more insertions and deletions, than core residues. This will continue to serve as confirmation of natural selection.
Comment by ivy privy — February 18, 2007 @ 12:17 am
ID has no bones about common descent, so any predictions from common descent don’t count.
I repeat that this is not the case. ID does not predict common descent, it simply takes no official position on it, and individual ID proponents may or may not accept varying degrees of common descent. When ID proponents (such as Behe) accept common descent, they do so based on evolutionary theory, not on ID.
Comment by ivy privy — February 18, 2007 @ 12:19 am
How about this: the theory of evolution predicts that genetic chimeras are impossible. E.g., we will never discover a species where some genes are clearly related to mammals, and others are clearly related to reptiles.
Take the pangolin. It looks superficially chimeric. It’s clearly a mammal, but it has scales rather like a reptile. If you analyze its DNA, evolution predicts you will not find a set of genes involved in scale development that are of reptilian origin.
ID certainly does not predict that. There’s nothing preventing a putative designer from mixing reptilian and mammalian genes to make a new species. In fact, the only actual intelligent designer we know of does exactly that. Here, of course, I’m talking about us. We are the only proven example of a designer making chimeras (e.g. bacteria that produce human insulin).
Comment by qetzal — February 18, 2007 @ 1:40 am
Qetzal, your prediction is in an intriguing one, but it still only follows from common descent, not from the stronger hypothesis I posited above.
Comment by Wulfgar — February 18, 2007 @ 2:00 am
How about the simple prediction that things will keep evolving?
We have seen evolution in action in a number of cases (mostly in small organisms like vira and bacteria, but also on larger organisms), and we will continue to see this.
And ‘common descent’ is evolution (though not everything that evolution is), and evolution makes precise predictions related to this. ID takes no official position on the subject, and thus doesn’t make predicitions on the subject. Thus you can’t claim that predictions related to ‘common descent’ are somehow not valid - they are fundamentally grounded in evolution.
A different prediction, which goes somewhat against the whole concept of intelligent design. We’ll find organs that have changed their functionality over time.
Oh, sorry, that’s not a prediction…. Well, we’ll continue to find this to be the case.
Comment by Kristjan Wager — February 18, 2007 @ 12:33 pm
Kristjan,
Those are good predictions but they don’t follow directly from the very limited proposition in my post. Even YEC’s have no trouble with change over time. Even YEC’s know that organs sometimes loose their functionality.
IDers certainly have no trouble with those concepts. The ID theory also doesn’t have anything to say about common descent, so any predictions from common descent are totally irrelevant.
According to Occam’s razor we should always hold the most modest hypothesis we can. If there are no predictions from the above proposition by itself, there is no reason to hold it and we should just hold a more modest proposition (say common descent).
Comment by Wulfgar — February 18, 2007 @ 2:49 pm
Yeah, and water runs downhill, entirely *undirected* by the hill, gravity or any other damn thing that might interfere with it… This is why ID proponents are fools. They start with a *assuption* that there *needs* to be a designer, then state that evolution is undirected, then finally insist that you have to replace the director with some unspecified force or entitiy who pushes every molecule of the water down hill, presumably making sure it *fits* the shape of the fracking hill and doesn’t do something weird like falling up. The universe is orders of magnitude more complex than the earth and a single beach is orders of magnitude more complex than the genetic material an *any* cell. Why the @%@$@#$ can’t an already complex system produce something “less” complex than itself, but still more complex than some limited minds are willing and able to comprehend? And more to the point, “HOW EXACTLY”, is a process that helps those things better fit that complex environment, by adapting to “fit” its shape, “unguided”? More to the point, why do you need anything extra to make sure it happens at all, beyond the shape and structure of the “existing” environment?
Oh, and I really love the suggestion made about trying to find similar genetic features between “unrelated” species. Given that evolution says “all” life on the earth is related, where they hell are you planning to find such a thing? Alpha Centauri maybe?
Try, I don’t know, actually reading literature on the subject that comes from the people that “do” understand it, instead of the list of dipsticks at DI who will happilly look at a stack of 200 articles on some specific minor subject in evolution and go, “Bah! That doesn’t really exists and says nothing useful!”
Comment by Kagehi — February 18, 2007 @ 8:46 pm
No, because natural selection and the other undirected processes have no way to create chimeras. A designer could create chimeras (as we humans already do, to a limited extent).
You can certainly argue that a designer is not obligated to create chimeras, and might choose not to. But neither ID nor common descent predict the absence of chimeras.
If you want a prediction that gets closer to the heart of the undirected vs. directed question, consider this. Evolution predicts that specific mutant and new genes do not arise in anticipation that they will be useful at a later date. Which is what we see, as best we can currently test this.
ID doesn’t predict that.
Evolution also predicts that regions of DNA that do not directly influence fitness will mutate faster than regions of DNA to do affect fitness. Again, that’s what we see.
ID certainly doesn’t predict that.
Here again, you can argue that a putative designer could choose to work in these ways. But there’s no way that ID actually predicts this.
Comment by qetzal — February 18, 2007 @ 10:39 pm
The evolution of nylon-eating bacteria is an interesting example. A random mutation (frame-shift) coupled with environmental selection, a vat of artificially created waste.
Comment by Zachriel — February 19, 2007 @ 1:16 pm
The ID theory also doesn’t have anything to say about common descent, so any predictions from common descent are totally irrelevant.
You stepped in it earlier, and now you’re wiping your shoe on your trouser leg. Sow what if ID “doesn’t say anything about common descent”? This is supposed to be about predictions of “Darwinism”, not about ID.
Even YEC’s have no trouble with change over time.
I should say not! YECs must believe, for instance, that llamas and camels diverged (evolved?) into their present forms from a common ancestor in less than ~10000 years, since the two species can be cross-bred and therefore must be the same “kind.”
Comment by ivy privy — February 19, 2007 @ 3:01 pm
From reading the comments posted thus far, I can see that I would be completely out of my league to try to debate the issue with any other “commenter”. However, with apologies for my naivete, I propose these.
It seems to me that the single most important prediction of Darwinism is that the fossil record would show clear and convincing evidence of the gradual change of one species into another. That is to say that a large number of transitional forms, each varying from the previous form only slightly, yet clearly linking two species would be found. Further, occurrences of this type would be found a number of times.
Darwin himself alluded to the other prediction of Darwinism that I see. It is a prediction of what will not be found, rather that what will. Darwinism requires, as I understand it, that no structure in the makeup of a living thing can be irreducibly complex. That is, not structure can be of such a nature that it could not have arisen by minute, incremental changes from one or more simpler structures. Or, to put it in the positive, all structures within the makeup of a living thing must be capable of having incrementally developed from one or more simpler structures.
Now, Though my knowledge of it is limited, I don’t think ID predicts either of these.
Comment by Just a novice — February 20, 2007 @ 5:17 pm