stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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gonna go ahead and archive this here too, god knows what'll happen to it
| Quote | July 21, 2006
Iders: Start by asking different questions
Recently, National Review’s John Derbyshire took on George Gilder’s case against Darwinism and for ID.
To Gilder’s “Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance” (his subtitle, actually), Derbyshire ripostes against ID,
After being around for many years, it has not produced any science. George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science?
(Now, combining the figures in this way to get “thirty” is a bit dodgy.
I mean, in the same way, you could combine my age with my two daughters’ ages, and come up with a single human who is nearly 120 years old, but …)
It seems to me that ID is so different from Darwinism that if IDers want to make their case, they should probably not focus primarily on trying to get papers published in a hostile atmosphere, useful as that may be, but rather by asking different questions of nature.
As we journalists know well, people who ask different questions often discover different things.
Here’s one question that intrigues me: Why do some life forms not evolve, or so little that it hardly matters? The coelacanth and the cockroach come to mind, but there are others, including common ferns and cycads. Surely these life forms experience genetic mutations and changes in their environment.
If some life forms are especially well adapted over long periods of time, can general principles that are not mere tautologies (= they survived because they were fit and we know they were fit because they survived) be derived? If not, why not?
It strikes me that if IDers can make useful contributions by thinking about a problem differently from Darwinists, it is irrelevant whether a Darwinist allegedly “could have” made the same finding.
In the context, “could have” is a grammatical tense parallel to real time, not intersecting with it.
Filed under: Intelligent Design — O'Leary @ 8:35 am
20 Comments »
1.
The question of evolutionary stasis is an interesting one (though I think evolutionists would say the cockroches have continued to ‘evolve’).
The question I have wondered about recently has to do with the biological ‘explosions’ we see in the fossil record, like the Cambrian explosion. If indeed the 30+ phyla that appeared in the Cambrian were the product of mutation and NS acting on the simpler life forms that preceded them, and mutation and NS has continued to act on those same simple life forms for the last 500 million years, why has no such explosion occurred again? After all, if that is how evolution acted on those life forms, and those life forms continued to exist, why would they do so without producing another explosion of new phyla, body plans, and tissues?
Comment by jhudson — July 21, 2006 @ 8:59 am
2.
What a weak column…I would say that the whack a mole is exactly what the evolutionary establishment is guilty of. If you have not read Gilder’s column, I strongly recommend reading through it.
Dan
Comment by Dan — July 21, 2006 @ 9:02 am
3.
“Here’s one question that intrigues me: Why do some life forms not evolve, or so little that it hardly matters? The coelacanth and the cockroach come to mind, but there are others, including common ferns and cycads. Surely these life forms experience genetic mutations and changes in their environment.”
Come to think of it: What is ID’s explanation for this apparent lack of evolutionary change?
Comment by ofro — July 21, 2006 @ 9:48 am
4.
Question: “What is ID’s explanation for this apparent lack of evolutionary change?”
Answer: Redesign (technological evolution) itself requires design, and lots of things are designed so well in the first place that they don’t need to be redesigned.
Comment by William Dembski — July 21, 2006 @ 10:02 am
5.
Come to think of it: What is ID’s explanation for this apparent lack of evolutionary change?
One of the main contentions of ID was that there was no ‘evolutionary change’ in the larger sense because the organisms that exist are the product of intentional design; as such, the theory itself is the explanation.
Comment by jhudson — July 21, 2006 @ 10:07 am
6.
I’m intrigued by these ‘different questions’. What would you say is the best ID research which has been done so far this year?
Comment by stevie steve — July 21, 2006 @ 10:24 am
7.
“Come to think of it: What is ID’s explanation for this apparent lack of evolutionary change?”
ID’s explanation for the apparent lack of evolutionary change is the same as Einstein’s explanation for the apparent lack of ether. It’s apparently missing because it actually IS missing, like the apparent lack of unicorns. The only sort of change we have evidence for is minor changes within kind, like finch beaks getting larger or smaller.
Cheers,
Dave T.
Comment by taciturnus — July 21, 2006 @ 10:29 am
8.
“Answer: Redesign (technological evolution) itself requires design, and lots of things are designed so well in the first place that they don’t need to be redesigned.”
That’s fair. But your answer seems to imply that, at least occasionally, things get redesigned in Nature. And if so, why weren’t they designed well enough in the first place?
Comment by ofro — July 21, 2006 @ 10:43 am
9.
Ofro,
That is also a fair question, but it is irrelevant to the question of the existence of design. That would be the “bad design means no design” fallacy. It is also a question that moves beyond ID as a scientific enterprise and into the realm of philosophy. No problem with going there, as long as we recognize the question is no longer one of ID but of philosophy.
Cheers,
Dave T.
Comment by taciturnus — July 21, 2006 @ 11:05 am
10.
Ofro,
That is also a fair question, but it is irrelevant to the question of the existence of design. That would be the “bad design means no design” fallacy.
Ofro did not say bad design means no design. You might have encountered that argument before, but Ofro didn’t make it. And if you take a look, Mr. Dembski said that “Redesign (technological evolution) itself requires design, and lots of things are designed so well in the first place that they don’t need to be redesigned.” was ID’s explanation, he did not say it was an explanation beyond ID.
Comment by stevie steve — July 21, 2006 @ 11:15 am
11.
“No problem with going there, as long as we recognize the question is no longer one of ID but of philosophy.”
Then permit me a related question: The fossil record tells us that there are a lot of species/designs that disappeared after a certain period. Is an explanation for this disappearance also restricted to the realm of philosophy, or can ID account for that?
Comment by ofro — July 21, 2006 @ 11:20 am
12.
Ofro’s question is why something was not well-designed in the first place. It is not a question of redesign, but initial design. At least that is what I think he meant by “in the first place.” And Dembski’s comment makes no assertions one way or the other about the reasons for an initial design’s perfection or lack of it.
I stand by my point. Speculation into why an initial design was done one way rather than another is not part of ID proper as a science. That would require, at least, knowledge of the designer and his/her/its purposes, which ID explicitly does not require. ID, at least for now, is about detecting design, not ferreting out the reasons for design.
Cheers,
Dave T.
Comment by taciturnus — July 21, 2006 @ 11:31 am
13.
Dembski said that ID’s explanation involves “designed so well”. Taciturnus says those kinds of statements are beyond ID. Sorry, I have to go with Dembski over Taciturnus, as he’s the expert in ID.
Comment by stevie steve — July 21, 2006 @ 11:34 am
14.
Ofro,
Natural selection as a *destructive* force is well-established empirically. We observe it happening all the time. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that species in the past went out of existence for the same reasons they do now: They can no longer survive in their environment. On this, ID and Darwinism agrees.
Cheers,
Dave T.
Comment by taciturnus — July 21, 2006 @ 11:39 am
15.
Steve,
“designed so well” says nothing about purpose. The original question was about WHY things are well or not-so-well designed, not WHETHER they are well or not-so-well designed.
DT
Comment by taciturnus — July 21, 2006 @ 11:42 am
16.
Denyse, in response to your comment:
“Why do some life forms not evolve, or so little that it hardly matters? The coelacanth and the cockroach come to mind, but there are others, including common ferns and cycads. Surely these life forms experience genetic mutations and changes in their environment.”
Sometimes, what appears to be primitive and unchanged is not that way at all. Consider the Platypus for example. It has many reptilian features, including a cloaca (a single exit for anus, urethra and reproductive tract), it lays eggs, and it does not have nipples (although it does produce milk). In these respects and others it is a very primitive mammal that might not seemed to have changed very much over the past 200 million years. On the other hand it has that magnificent duck-bill which is a very sophisticated piece of navigation-equipment, that functions in a manner that is analogous to our detection of vision, a dog’s detection of smell, or a bat’s detection of sound. In the case of the platypus bill it is used to provide tactile (touch) sensory information…and it is very sophisticated indeed. So parts of its body have continued to serve it’s needs very well, primitive as they may seem, other parts have continued to change to allow it to capitalize maximally within a particular ecological niche.
Other organisms, have changed relatively little in all aspects of their body’s anatomy and physiology…as you indicate. This is no surprise at all to biologists. The sparseness of anatomical and physiological change relates to the stability of the particular ecological niche to which they are adapted. Not all niches change…if the organism continues to be well-adapted to its environment it can be in stasis and can exist that way as long as the niche for which it is adapted doesn’t change.
I don’t see that there is any tautology involved in this. We can point to examples in our own society in which certain aspects about our environment have changed dramatically over the years whereas others have stayed the same. A pastor for example is still a pastor…that niche of being a leader of a church still exists and has for a long time. On the other hand, a computer programmer is a new niche that never existed when I was growing up. It is not surprising that the same sort of thing is true of ecological niches in nature.
Comment by darrel falk — July 21, 2006 @ 11:52 am
17.
If ID can, as Dembski says, make statements about how good a design is, why can’t it hypothesize about the designer’s capabilities and motives, Taciturnus? Why are the putative space aliens off-limits to the kind of inferences we generate about human designers?
Comment by stevie steve — July 21, 2006 @ 12:21 pm
18.
For the record,
The modifications of my comments (dropping all vowels) was not my doing
Comment by ofro — July 21, 2006 @ 12:41 pm
19.
What in the world rule are taciturnus and ofro violating, that their posts are being disemvowelled?
Comment by stevie steve — July 21, 2006 @ 12:44 pm
20.
I have to admit that I thought taciturnus’ first “edited” comment was a clever way by him to underscore the point he wanted to make about the degradation of information. Doing the same to my comments is no longer funny.
Comment by ofro — July 21, 2006 @ 12:50 pm
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