The Design Paradigm

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.

Midterm papers and problem sets take precedence, so I’m officially giving up on writing those two long posts– on our summer and on our upcoming semester. Suffice it to say we had a wonderful time in the Evolution & Design class. We managed to cover a great deal of ground and consider many issues; and I think demonstrated unequivocally that a course on intelligent design is fully in line with what the University– and Cornell in particular– is about, and need not equal indoctrination from one side or other.

Things are busy now as we go into round one of prelims, but we’re stealing little bits of time to think and read about intelligent design, and every so often to talk about it. We meet every week for discussions– 7 pm Wednesdays, at the Music Room in Willard Straight Hall– and so far have looked at irreducible complexity and specified complexity. This Wednesday we’re going to be discussing testability again, especially as it applies to this debate.

There’ll be a student debate soon as well, but details of that are still to be determined.

How would we build a really complex system — such as a general artificial intelligence (AI) that exceeded human intelligence?

That is the question Steve Jurvetson addresses in yesterday’s Technology Review. He considers it as a choice between two options: evolutionary search algorithms or design, and his summary of the problems with each are illuminating:

… designed systems also tend to break easily, and they have conquered only simple problems so far.

 In fact, biological evolution provides the only "existence proof" that an algorithm can produce complexity transcending that of its antecedents.

But evolved systems have their disadvantages. For one, they suffer from "subsystem inscrutability." That is, when we direct the evolution of a system, we may know how the evolutionary process works, but we will not necessarily understand how the resulting system works internally.

If biological evolution provides the only proof that evolutionary algorithms can produce complexity transcending that of its antecedents, but biological evolution happened by virtue of evolutionary algorithms producing that complexity, are we in some slight danger of circular reasoning?

Another question: how much inscrutability does positing unknown/unknowable evolutionary processes for a system add– in particular, processes we only know of because we assume that that system was produced by evolution? Is design or evolution more likely to be a science stopper in going into further research?

The article (available here) is worth reading and thinking about.

 HT: IDesign@UCI

Update: ID the Future has a post up on the problems with Jurvetson’s analysis.

It seems like Darwin’s tortoise has finally died. Could this be a good omen for IDers?

Update: It seems some of our readers didn’t realize this was supposed to be humorous. Next time I’ll try to put a smiley face to tip the more serious readers off. — Wulfgar

An article in the July issue of PLOS Biology details a study on environmental selection effects which came up with a rather interesting and almost counter-intuitive conclusion. The abstract:

There has recently been great interest in applying theoretical quantitative genetic models to empirical studies of evolution in wild populations. However, while classical models assume environmental constancy, most natural populations exist in variable environments. Here, we applied a novel analytical technique to a long-term study of birthweight in wild sheep and examined, for the first time, how variation in environmental quality simultaneously influences the strength of natural selection and the genetic basis of trait variability. In addition to demonstrating that selection and genetic variance vary dramatically across environments, our results show that environmental heterogeneity induces a negative correlation between these two parameters. Harsh environmental conditions were associated with strong selection for increased birthweight but low genetic variance, and vice versa. Consequently, the potential for microevolution in this population is constrained by either a lack of heritable variation (in poor environments) or by a reduced strength of selection (in good environments). More generally, environmental dependence of this nature may act to limit rates of evolution, maintain genetic variance, and favour phenotypic stasis in many natural systems. Assumptions of environmental constancy are likely to be violated in natural systems, and failure to acknowledge this may generate highly misleading expectations for phenotypic microevolution.

If intelligence is reducible to chance and necessity and the human mind is the product of non-directed naturalistic evolution, is free will an oxymoron? In the comments of our post on vacuity Allen MacNeill gave his position:

…The reason I bring up the summer course is that for over a decade Will Provine has focused that course on precisely that question, and has forcefully argued in the negative. I must admit that when I first started participating in his course, I disagreed with him, but over the years his arguments (and those of the authors he has used as references) have convinced me that the very idea of human free will is an oxymoron. The problem as I see it is not with the term “will,” if by this we mean that internal neurophysiological state which causes us to behave in the ways that we do (including, of course, having the thoughts that we do). No, the problem is with the word “free.” Free from what? Free from coersion, perhaps, but free from natural/physical causation? Absurd. As Will always points out in his evolution course (and in the summer seminar course when he teaches it), either our actions are caused by the biochemical processes that occur in our nervous systems (in which case they cannot possibly be “free”), or they are “caused” by magic (i.e. “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein called it), which any good physicist should affirm as being completely impossible.

The paradox of course is that even most scientists “feel” like they have free will, and consequently affirm that it exists. However, the “feeling” of free will, as Daniel Wegner has pointed out (see http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8770&ttype=2), is just that: a “feeling.” As I have argued elsewhere, this feeling (or rather the neurophysiology that underlies it) is probably itself an evolutionary adaptation, in that it allows us to use our own behavior (or rather our perceptions of our own behavior) as guidelines for the formulation of a “theory of mind” which we can then use to interpret and guide our actions.

PvM seems to disagree:

Would you agree then that there is no such thing as free will?

–Nope. What makes you think that?

My answer: simply because it seems to follow directly from your other claims. There are probably few enough issues in which I agree with Prof. Provine; but here he has convinced me as well as Allen and I can’t say I see any reasonable alternative.  But I’d love to hear your reasons for accepting free will, while rejecting the possiblity of anything beyond the workings of chance and deterministic natural law in human intelligence, and why you believe your position is logically consistent.

Update: Clarification below 

The late philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, who was for many years probably America’s most distinguished philosopher ….   told me about a year before his death that as far as he was concerned, Darwin’s greatest achievement was that he showed that Aristotle’s idea of teleology, the so-called fourth cause, does not exist.

(Ernst Mayr, interview with Edge.org,  10.31.01)

And then again… did he?  There is an interesting discussion going on at Telic Thoughts and the Evolution List on telic, teleomatic and teleonomic processes.  Mayr’s position is that the appearance of design in nature is fully explained by Darwinian processes, and he chooses to describe the apparent purposefulness of living things as teleonomic, defined as "[a] processes or behavior which owe its goaldirectedness to the operation of a program".  This is as opposed to teleomatic or deterministic forces such as gravity.

The "purposefulness", then, of biological organisms is an emergent property produced by natural selection; the writing of programs based on bits of information supplied by the environment.

Mayr defines a program as "coded or prearranged information that controls a process (or behavoir) leading it toward process (or behavoir) leading it toward a goal." and states that it contains "not only the blueprint of the goal but also the instructions of how to use the information of the blueprint." It is material and exists prior to the initiation of the telenomic process.

But do those definitions even begin to solve the problem? Is it reasonable to conclude that the emergence of teleonomic processes is explicable simply by reference to evolutionary mechanisms?  As Allen states

Clearly, if the overall theory of macroevolution is valid, then there must have been a transition from teleomatic causation to teleonomic causation in biological organisms.

He suggest this transition takes place during the origin of the genetic code; a likely choice, given that necessay origination of a program there.  Certainly the simple molecules of a hypothetical prebiotic soup would have been only teleomatic, and yet the first functioning cell contained a complete program. Somehow in the interim we have managed to build not only the program itself, but also a machine with the capability of reading the program and turning it into action.

The only emperically known source of programs are already-teleonomic entities, and the only observed causes of machines capable of turning instructions into action are intelligent, purpose-driven creatures.  In Cell Biology International Abel suggests that  the origin of life is theoretically irreducible to chance and necessity, and Yockey has argued similarily in other papers.  Is this indeed demonstrable, or will we always be able  to insert our favorite cure-all– natural selection, fairies– into an ill-defined gap?

 [All definitions from "The Idea of Teleology", Ernst Mayr, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 53, No. 1. (Jan. - Mar., 1992), pp. 117-135; avalable here if you are in the Cornell network]

At the beginning of last month Cornelius Hunter gave a lecture with that topic at Cornell, and now the video is finally online.  To watch it (in wmv; apologies to linux users) go here.

Many thanks to Jim Hilker and 4U Training Solutions for providing this. 

This morning there was a pretty decent article by Nadia Chernyak in the Cornell Sun about the new intelligent design class offered here this summer.

. . .MacNeill first came up with the theme for the seminar when brainstorming with Prof. Will Provine, ecology and evironmental biology, for topics for this summer’s seminar class. MacNeill says that the idea was inspired by the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, in which the Dover Area School District in Dover, Pa. was sued for requiring the teaching of intelligent design in high school science classes.

"Given the Dover case, [Provine and I] thought it’d be interesting to teach [this year’s seminar] on Intelligent Design," MacNeill said.

(more…)

We’ve started a website to catalog some of the false statements and propaganda techniques Randy Olson uses in his documentary, Flock of Dodos.

The whole website can be found here. We’ve included information on the argument from suboptimal design that Olson uses a lot.

In one of our more interesting pages we investigate Olson’s claims that Jonathan Wells lied. As we write:

In Randy Olson’s pseudo-documentary Flock of Dodos, Olson remarks that he has problems with some of John Calvert’s sources. To demonstrate, he asks Calvart about the faked drawings that Jonathan Wells says appears in several evolutionary textbooks. After a prolonged ransacking of Calvart’s library they finally do find Haeckel’s faked drawings — in an old 1914 book whose covers are falling off.

Okie dokie, so Wells is a liar. . . or maybe not. A couple of us had taken evolution classes where we had seen those fake drawings– was Cornell using 1915 textbooks or something more recent? We decided to check out a few biology textbooks to check who was twisting the truth.

Evolutionary Biology (3rd edition © 1998) Haeckel’s faked drawings are actually reproduced without any note to show they are fake (see below). Although there is some discussion in the text of problems with Haeckel’s biogenetic law, the drawing is presented as factually correct.

Read the rest here.

In Flock of Dodos, filmmaker and marine ecologist Randy Olson asks the question, who are the real dodos in the evolution/intelligent design debate: 1) the intelligent design (ID) advocates who disbelieve a purely mechanistic Darwinian explanation for the origin and development of life, or 2) the legions of Darwinist academics who seem unable to connect with and convincingly explain their position to the majority of Americans who stubbornly cling to beliefs in origins that are not solely Darwinian. Flock of Dodos (FOD) is intentionally light-hearted, reflecting Olson’s desire to avoid yet another dreary documentary of droning talking heads, a format which quickly triggers the “Where’s the remote?” reflex in most viewers. Olson is a trained filmmaker, and his stated intent is to connect with his audience on an emotive level. In FOD he succeeds in this, using a combination of often self-deprecating humor, animation and a Charles Kurault-like “on the road” motif. 

However,  the film is not the impartial assessment of the ID debate as it is sometimes billed. Whether by simply reflecting the filmmaker’s own leanings (he was a tenured professor of evolutionary marine ecology at the University of New Hampshire before turning to filmmaking) or through an intentional desire to do so, the film conveys both explicit and subtle messages that seek to steer viewers at an emotive level against the ID position. I am no expert in ID, having only recently begun to read on the subject. But I have seen enough to conclude that, for whatever reason, FOD mischaracterizes or omits pertinent issues in the ID debate. Some were evident during the film and subsequent audience interaction with Olson; others become more apparent on reflection. In no particular order, I will list some of my concerns: 

Last February during Darwin weekend Randy Olson came to Cornell to show Flock of Dodos in one of the first screenings in the nation. In the documentary the narrator Olson interviews some of the participants in the evolution-intelligent design debate and tries to find out which side are the real dodos. Next week the movie is being screened in New York City as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. Our newest contributor, Sigemund, has also written a review on the film, which will be posted shortly.

by H. Kern Reeve

A response to Mark Psiaki’s follow-up, posted here 

Cornell’s Evolution department has a promising new course being offered this summer, entititled "Evolution and Design: Is there Purpose in Nature?". For more details go to the EvolutionList, or for our "official position" on it, see our press release below.

Cornelius Hunter gives his perspective of his visit to Cornell over at ID the Future:

Last night I visited Cornell University to give a presentation on evolutionary thought, and participate in a panel discussion on evolution and intelligent design with life science professors Richard Harrison and Kern Reeve. Like giving a theoretical lecture followed by an experimental demonstration, this two-event format allowed me both (i) to explain the non scientific philosophical background of evolution and (ii) to show a live demonstration of evolutionary thinking to prove my point.

(more at ID The Future…) 

 by Mark L. Psiaki

I have the following critiques of points made last night (April 5, 2006) at the Panel Discussion on Intelligent Design and Evolution in which Prof. Cornelius Hunter of Biola University represented intelligent design and Profs. Richard Harrison, chair of the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department at Cornell, and Kern Reeve, professor in the Cornell department of Neurobiology & Behavior, represented evolution.  I don’t think that Prof Hunter made adequate replies to some of the problems with points made by Profs. Harrison Reeve. The important additional responses, as I see them, are as follows

The IDEA Club press release on next week’s events:

Evidence is the most ubiquitous thing on our planet.  Sometimes, though, it has a doubtful releationship with our theories, and it is always tricky to bring it in quantity to support anything. 

Over at ID the Future Cornelius Hunter takes a look at one small piece of the mountains of evidence for evolution, a PNAS article on the highly fascinating electric fish (subscription required, so go through the Cornell library if you’re home for spring break).  The article itself, entitled Sodium channel genes and the evolution of diversity in communication signals of electric fishes:  Convergent molecular evolution is a look at "whether the evolution of electric organs and electric signal diversity of electric fishes was accompanied by convergent changes on the molecular level".  It appears to investigate this point very thoroughly, and the conclusion is that it does;  "changes in the expression and sequence of the same gene are associated with the independent evolution of signal complexity". 

Or almost; if you assume the (independent) evolution of signal complexity, the authors show it is accompanied by convergent, molecular level changes.  Hunter’s conclusion:

It turns out that there really isn’t any evidence, in particular, for the evolution of these electric organs or their sodium channels. …

The bulk of the paper reports empirical findings that do not hinge on, nor support, evolution. The force-fitting of the results into the evolution paradigm is gratuitous. Of course this assumption of evolution is no surprise. But this means that such papers do not help evolution as is claimed. Piles and piles of papers that presuppose evolution and force-fit results do little to rescue evolution from its many evidential problems.

It is important to note that there is nothing wrong with making assumptions; sometimes they are essential for any productivity.  But it’s also important to remember when we’re making them, and to be careful not to assume evolution in order to prove it.

If we want to avoid circular reasoning we need a high standard for papers called in to support any theory.  After all, if there is any contradiction in your premises, from them you can prove anything…

Suppose for a moment that Darwinian evolution was not consistent with reality.  What would it mean, then, to assume it?

Over at Concerned Scientist Dan takes issue with my post from yesturday, "Minimal bacteria".  He has a graphic showing the proposed steps from simple chemicals to bacteria, juxtapositioned with what he considers to be the creationist paradigm.

The purpose of his post is to ‘correct pseudoscientific arguments’, but since we didn’t make any arguments of that nature he seems to have decided to make some rather bold assumptions about what we meant to say, and work from there:

The obvious implication is that, if the simplest known bacterium requires well over 200 genes to survive in modern laboratory conditions, with ample nutrients, etc., it’s inconceivable that it could have evolved from nothingness (a.k.a. that abiogenesis could have occurred without a Creator)?

The argument against this, of course, is that life–even such as the simplest bacteria– isn’t expected to arise in one magical step from a stewpot of simple chemicals, but slowly, via the steps outlined on his graphic above. 

But then– was it possible I was not implying anything about "arising from nothingness"?  The post in question was hardly more than a summary of the article, which was definitely not written by creationists.  Looking at minimum life forms is certainly relevant to abiogenesis, but from that does it necessarily follow that we posit the ‘minimal bacteria’ as the first step in life from simple chemicals?

We appreciate your clarifying this, Dan, and especially the collection of papers in your footnote– good spring break reading– but it isn’t quite fair to make up arguments for us just because Talk Origins has arguments against them.

Once upon a time, we thought there was such a thing as simple life. Now . . . well, we still talk about simple life, but our perception of it has changed drastically.

In the January issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences there is an interesting article on “Essential genes of a minimal bacterium”. Mycoplasma genitalium was chosen for study because, according to the abstract, it has the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in pure culture, minimal metabolism and little genomic redundancy, and so can be expected to be a good approximation to the minimal set of genes necessary for sustaining bacterial life. Researchers at the Venter Institute identified 382 of its 482 protein-coding genes as essential.

Why it matters? From their introduction:

One consequence of progress in the new field of synthetic biology is an emerging view of cells as assemblages of parts that can be put together to produce an organism with a desired phenotype. That perspective begs the question: “How few parts would it take to construct a cell?” In an environment that is free from stress and provides all necessary nutrients, what would constitute the simplest free-living organism?

The entire article is here; it’s somewhat technical reading, but includes nice graphics.