What exactly is ID?

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By that, I mean for ID:
-what is the age of the earth?

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Something that shouldn't be discussed, until ID has won.

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-what did the designer create? (species? genus? familiy?)

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There's no official position on that.

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-when did he create life?

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There's no official position on that either.

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-I would also like to know if possible, what are the observations that lead to your answers.

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The statements and positions of various ID supporters.

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I ask because most IDers say ID is a theory so it would be nice to know what we are talking about before arguing about the evidence.

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But occasionally some admit that there's no theory of ID.

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If you can prove to me that complex specified information arises from the simple and then can gradually increase through a step by step unguided or self-organizational process, then I will leave this forum.

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Complex Specified Information is a term frequently abused by ID supporters. Do you mean Dembski's version or the way that the term was used before the Dembski seized on it ?

No, that isn't Dembski's definition.Dembski's definition is that an event is CSI if it has a valid specification and the probability of occurrence is less than his Universal Probability Bound 2^-500.And there are no known examples in biology.Wouldn't it be good to find one before asking for explanations of how it could exist ?

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If you know of one then post it and I will study it.

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I told you that there aren't any known examples, so how can I show you one ?So I am going to ask again. Before you ask for evidence that CSI can evolve, wouldn't it be a good idea to find an example of CSI in biology ? There's no need to account for something that doesn't exist.

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I understand where you are coming from but obviously you didn't follow the thread back. PaulK and I have had this debate about CSI before. I have asked him, "If the information in DNA isn't CSI then, what is it then?" It certainly seems to be specified. Complex is a relative term but I would also say it is complex since the information forms proteins and these proteins also bind together. Proteins bind together in specific ways. (specific shapes, positive and negative bonds and lipid bonds)

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And quite obviously you haven't been paying attention. The "CSI" that is supposed to be a problem is Dembski's CSI - which has very little to do with what you are talking about.Interestingly in an earlier discussion I suggested that the name CSI was misleading. It seems that you have been so thoroughly mislead you are unable to even consider the possibility that Dembski wasn't talking about the "obvious" meaning.

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Another strawman argument that goes like this - Dembski defined CSI and therefore traderdrew cannot define it in another logical way.

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No, it's not a strawman. It is THE definition of CSI used by the ID movement. It is THE CSI that is allegedly problematic for evolution. Other definitions of CSI simply aren't.More to the point in out previous discussion I specifically stated that I was talking about Dembski's CSI. If you chose to ignore that (ironically accusing me of blindness !) then that is your problem, not mine.

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That might be true but we should follow the evidence were it leads us. There are people who use it in their own way. Darwinian conjecture is also fairly amorphous. It is flexible.

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If the evidence really did lead to ID then it shouldn't be THAT amorphous. There's no agreement, for instance, on the extent of common descent - or even the age of the Earth.

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If Darwin cannot be explained on a biochemical scale, (random mutations occur on that level) then why should it be used to explain the development of life?

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Of course, what Behe is demanding is that we reconstruct past events at a level of detail that the available evidence cannot support.As I said, if ID could do better, Behe would have a point. As ID cannot even do as well, then he is employing an obvious double standard. And so are you.

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Ironic because I have not read "Design Inference"? I

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No, ironic because your accusation of "blindness" is based on your own blindness.

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I have read your posts to me and I have not read Dembski's definition in any one of your posts.

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Not formally stated - but I've said enough about it that you should at least have an idea.

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We have been going around and around with it and it is time to stop since it is not going anywhere.

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If you're prepared to stop using an argument you clearly don't understand then that's fine by me.

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With Darwinian evolution, common descent has to be all or nothing.

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Wrong. Darwin himself allowed that there might have been more than one origin of life. It is the evidence that points to a single origin (at least for all currently existing lineages).

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The age of the Earth is something Creationists can debate over. I am willing to change it based on what science says and remain somewhat flexible on it as science should be.

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Your personal opinions are only relevant to the point if you have the authority to impose them on the ID movement. SInce you do not, the point remains that the ID movement is quite happy to accept Young Earth beliefs within it's ranks.

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In other words, the details can never be reconstucted in labs???

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Adding lab tests to a theoretical reconstruction only imposes an extra burden. How is that supposed to be an improvement ?

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My preference was always Dembski's CSI. Which is obviously quantifiable. If we have a, let's say a flagellum that is coded for with 800 bit sequence. Now I know there is a lot more bits needed to code for a flagellum, which is actually 4,639,221 base pair long, but I'm making it easier to understand.

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So, we have this 800 bit sequence, we also denote it as a: "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller". Becasue that is the patternt it maches, which makes it specified, and also since it is more than 400 bits long, it constitutes complex specified information - CSI.

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While Dembski;s CSI MAY be quantifiable in simple cases, that isn't the way to do it. You've made two big assumptions (that the actual sequence is the only way to get the function and that the sequence is assembled entirely randomly). Neither is likely to be true in a real case. You need to calculate the probability of the specification being met in the absence of design - and you haven't done that.Also, you've hit the big flaw in Dembski's CSI in that a specification based on the observed pattern is NOT the same as a specification produced without that knowledge. Dembski has recognised the problem by won't to the best of my knowledge has not yet found a way of dealing with it (and probably won't bother because the practical problems of using CSI in biology were already insurmountable rendering the whole thing utterly useless to ID).

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1.) We are trying to get the probability of this sequence, not some other. There may very well be other ones that work well, but we are working with this one right now. What you actually have to show is that there is a possibility of a considerably large amount of sequences than can code for a flagellum.

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If you are just trying to get the probability of a specific sequence then you are NOT using Dembski's CSI. If you are trying to use Dembski's CSI then YOU have the burden of dealing with all the sequences that meet the specification. I don't have to show anything other than that you have failed to correctly follow Dembski's method.

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If you read Dembski's NFL, in his calcualtion he defined the E. Coli as consisting of flagellum as consisting of 4289 proteins, which is 4,639,221 base pairs. Out of which 50 proteins are used for the flagellum. And gave the possibility of 10 interchangeable parts. For which there is no evidnece than the flagellum can be modified by that much.

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I've done better than that - I've read The Design Inference. And to measure the variations possible even within the limits of the E Coli flagellum (which itself is taking too narrow a view) you need to consider what variations witin the protein sequences are possible without disrupting function.

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2.) The sequence is calcualted that way because the NFL tehorem itself says that averaged over all sequence sapces, no algorith outperforms any other. And is thus no better than random chance if it does not take into account any prior problem-specific information. Since evolution is an algorithm, that means that if there is no prior input from an intelligence, it's as good as random chance.

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That would be averaged over all fitness spaces. Unfortunately that doesn't tell you how well evolution will do at finding a working (NOT necessarily optimum) solution given the actual situation. The NFL theorems aren't much use to you.

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You have to have some knowledge in order to descibe the observed pattern. It's called a descriptive language, aand can be any language. Mostly English because it's the easiest to use.

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Using an observed pattern IS the problem. The probability of getting 500 heads in 500 tosses of a coin is 2^-500. The probability thatt 500 tosses of a coin can be completely specified is far higher. (500 tails is specified, alternating heads and tails is specified - in fact you can probably specify any sequence if you work hard enough).Thus specification derived from observation is not good enough.

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And that's why I said that out of 50 protein parts, 10 parts are assumed to be interchangeable.

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Probably ALL of them could be changed for similar proteins. At least one could bne left out altogether without loss of function.

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How is that better, since basicly NFL came out after the Design Inference?

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Because The Design Inference is (supposedly) an academic level book aimed at describing Dembski's method. NFL is a popular level book where Dembski botches his own method.

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Anyway, as I said above, Dembski assumed 10 interchangeable parts. If we are going to be more specific we can look at Doug Axe's work.

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Which demonstrates that quite serious mutation is needed to remove function from a protein. Therefore indicating that if you were allowing for sequence variations all of the proteins could be replaced.

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It tells me that if evolution does not use any prior knowledge it's probably as good as random chance.

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Then you've been fooled by Dembski. The NFL theorems don't tell you any such thing.

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Do you have any evidence that the laws of nature are set up in such a way that evolution does perform better than random chance in inputing novel information into the genome?

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Yes. The change of fitness related to changes ing traits is not purely random. You will rarely find a small variation in a trait having a huge effect in fitness nor another small step in the same direction having a huge effect in the opposite direction. Thus the fitness landscape will not be the random mess which the NFL theorems focus on. Any reasonably well-behaved landscape will be more conducive to search algorithms than a random one. And that is just one problem with applying the NFL theorems.

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Or do you accept the evidence from genetic entropy that clearly shows it's not working so well?

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No, I don't accept that speculation (which is not evidence).

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But it's not an independently given pattern, therefore, it's not a specification. It has to describe something else.

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If you don't accept a specification derived from observation as valid at all you are completely rejecting Dembski's method.

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For an example. Any hill side is complex and has a pattern. But only one hill side has 4 US presidents on it. And therefore it has a specifiaction. You see, that hill side, Mount Rushmore, has an independently given pattern to it. And that's why it's differnet from other naturally occuring hill sides. And that's why we know it's designed.

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Unfortunately we know it is deisgned because of our background knowledge of human beings and human activities. That's why we don't need to do Dembski's probability calculations. The same, alas for ID, cannot be said for anything in biology.

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Two of the flagellum's proteins are not interchangable. I'm just correcting you because you stated you don't accept speculation (which is not evidence).

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Either a)you are asserting that there are two proteins in the E Coli flagellum which will tolerate no substitutions AT ALL or b)you didn't understand the point. The first is far more speculative than anything I wrote.

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The question I have, does this loss of function mean loss of specific function?

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It means losing the function that it had. Axe didn't look for other functions.

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Also I have read that the active site for a specific function in relation to the size of the protein as a whole can be quite small. This suggests to me there can be quite a large amount of changes to a protein before that specific function is compromized.

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That's correct.It also suggesst that counting the entire length of the protein as "specified information" will give you a serious overestimate.

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This also suggests to me certain proteins are predesigned to adapt to new functions.

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That is something of a leap. Perhaps you would like to explain your reasoning ?

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Could be, but we don't know that for sure.

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It's more certain than anything you've offered. Unless you want to argue that Axe's work is inapplicable in this case.

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No, he actually improves on it and deals with the NFL theorem to boot. The paper he wrote in 2005 went even further. Basicly the CSI defined in The Design Inference is the oldest possible model you could use.

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That's odd because he hasn't owned up to any real improvements. The NFL theorems aren't even relevant to the method.

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By how much different proteins?

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You mean you want me to provide data that Dembski should have used in his calculations ? Isn't it in his book ?

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The chance of the flagellum forming by chance according to Dembski in NFL is 1:10^2954.

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Which is based on his idea of an individual of an individual flagellum forming by chance. The idea that bacteria GROW flagella seems to have escaped him. It would have been muuch better had he calculated the probability that a bacterium would evolve a means to grow some sort of motility aid...

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If we add the possibility of modification and the flagellum still working fine, according do Axe's work I showed you, we would be justified to cut off 10^20 from this number. And would still be way over 10^120. Which is the limit of computation of the whole universe.

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Why only 10^20 ? That isn't allow for manhy other options at all. If there were a mere 10 possible sequences for each of the 50 proteins that would be a factor of 10^50. And that is going to be a huge underestimate - before even looking at other factors.

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Oh, well than please tell me, why is any algorithm better than random chance averaged over all fitness functions?

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Obviously you've been fooled so badly that you don't even see the distinction between Dembski's claims and the NFL theorems. Sorry, but your question is an irrelevant strawman.

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That is not what I asked for. I asked you to show me why do you think evolution is going to input CSI into living organisms. The way you are going to do that is to show me novel biological functions that evolved in nature or in a lab.

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Then your question is nonsense. Any information that dis not the produce of design is not CSI by Dembski's definition. I answered the real point, which is that there is reason to believe that evolution will do better than chance.

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No, it's not a speculation, it's a FACT. And I already presented this link few posts ago. Did you miss it? It talks about the evidence of the accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations in 110 mammalian species. It would seem that evolution is not cut out to do the job you thought it was.

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Your misinterpretations are not evidence either. Genetic entropy is only a problem under certain circumstances.

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That is not a specification, that's a fabrication. You obviously didn't read Teh Design Inference very well, or you read it a long time ago. Please note the difference between a specification and a fabrication.

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No, obviously YOU failed to understand it. Dembski's own explanation starts with observation of a pattern - whih is used to produce the specification.

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But if we didn't know it was designed, we would still infer design. With or without Dembski's method. Simply because our intuition would tell us it's designed.

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Background knowledge (e.g. knowledge of statues) helps rather a lot.

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A clear evidence for what I have just said is the Rosetta Stone. Nobody ever saw it get designed. But it is a clear case of design. And when it was found, design was infered.

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And again it's an example of background knowledge leading us to prefer a positive design hypothesis over non-design. How unlike Dembski's method which avoids positive design hypotheses like the plague.

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What's certain is that you can't on average change the protein beyond 20%. Anything else is a complete loss of function.

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Actually that isn't certain in this case. Especially when one of the proteins can be entirely absent.

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Of course they are relevant. They show that you can't get new CSI by the use of algorithms. Algorithms are only used to transmit CSI.

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Which just shows how little you understand CSI. The definition of CSI ensures that algorithms can't produce it.

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Nope, I told you, it's about 20%

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Then I guess that you should have looked it up instead of coming up with bullshit figures.

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You missed the point of the entire book. First of all, it doesn't matter that bacteria grow flagellums. The information they have to grow one still has to be acounted for. Teh reason Dembski got that number is that because without prior knowledge any algorithm is as good as any other averaged over all fitness functions, including random chance. Therefore, the number is correct. Evolution is not going to help you because it's an algorithm without prior knowledge. Unless you want to calim it actually does have prior knowledge. But in that case you have to explain where it got it.

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In other words the whole point of the book is to avoid dealing with the real question (you have just admitted that I was correct and it is the origin of the mechanisms that grow flagella that is important, not the flagellum itself) and to misrepresent the NFL theorems as saying that evolution can't work.

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The best possible estimate is 20% change. That would amount to chnace of 1:10^14770. Therefore, that's still way over 10^120.

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So you can't do maths either. If we use your 20% figure there are a huge number of substitutions possible for each of the 50 proteins. And you get to multiply them all together because you can use any combination. Of course it doesn't matter because dembski's doing completely the wrong calculation anyway.

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That's not the point. We are talking about transmition of CSI here, for which algorithms are very well suited. The question is, is evolution well suited to transmit the CSI from nature into living organisms.

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No, we're talking about WHETHER the flagellum is CSI in the first place.

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Yes, you answered it, by simply asserting it. Where is the evidnece evolution can actually do it?

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Wrong. I explained why evolution can do better than chance.

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What misinterpretations are you talking about? And what "certain circumstances" are you talking about?

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The question of whether genetic entropy is a problem for a species depends on the mutation rate and the effective population size. Any idea that it is a general problem outside of the mathematical limits that result from those factors is a misinterpretation.

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But the point is that not every observed pattern is a specification.

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No. The point was that "specifications" derived from observed patterns are NOT the same as specifications derived without observation, and Dembski's separability criterion fails to deal with the problem.

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Of course it hels, that is why it's here for.

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Thanks for admitting that there is more to dsign detection than Dembski's limited (and often impractical) method.

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What are you talking about? What positive design hypothesis is Dembski avoiding?

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So you don't understand Dembski's design inference AT ALL ? Why try to defend a method when you don't understand the most basic part of it ? Let's put it simply. When dealing with Mount Rushmore and the Rosetta Stone we immediately form positivie hypotheses about how they were produced. Involving people and chisels, for instance - and we can compare those with the alternatives and see which comes up best. Dembski doesn't do that. Design is left as the default choice with no suggestion about who or how or why. Which is why real design detection has rather less to do with Dembski's methodology than he would like you to believe.

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Yes, and on average, the change is 20%, all changes included.

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For enzymatic activity.

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I know it can't be produced, but it can be transmited by an algorithm. So when we see something we think is designed, the question is is it just expanded by an algorithm, or is it real CSI.

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No, the real question is can CSI be created by an algorithm. The answer is no.

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Aside from the amusing juxtaposition, it hardly seems worth writing a book to deal with a matter which trivially follows from the definition of CSI given in a previous book.

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No, I never said that. And you are not correct.

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What is important is where did they get their information from to grow a flagellum in the first palce.

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And the contradictions just keep on coming !If you are interested in the information involved in growing a flagellum then you need to look at how it grows. Working on a basis of random assembly ignoring the regularities underlying process is just going to give you the wrong answer.

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Yes the flagellum itself too, because it is simply the expanded informatoin stored in the bacteria before it grows the flagellum.

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In other words once we account for the information involved in producing the flagellum we've accounted for the information in the flagellum too. That's not a good reason for looking at the flagellum.

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It's not a misrepresentation. That's how things are.

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Unfortunately for you, it is a misrepresentation and it isn't how things are.

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I just noticed I posted the wrong number. It was supposed to be 1:10^2363. This whole number includes all 50 proteins and all their possible changes.

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You mean that it includes your estimates for those. Of course there are all those other flagella out in the world to consider, too and the possible variations of those and other ways of producing motion. And even if you included all those you still wouldn't have a number that meant anything because you're ignoring the fact that flagella don't just assemble randomly. [quote] It conforms to an independently given pattern and it's complexity is 10^2363 after we calculated the possible change in the structure. Therefore, yes, it's CSI. [quote] Except that isn't the complexity. You haven't got close to a valid calculation of the complexity. If you wanted to argue that flagella can't grow, so they must be individually assembled by the Intelligent Designer you could claim to have calculated the complexity. You;d be wrong but at least you'd have made a bad attempt at the right calculation. Which is more than you or Dembski have managed for the E coli flagellum. [quote] No, you just asserted it. [quote] Simply repeating your error doesn't help you.

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You didn't even bother to click on the link, let alone read the article. The article is an empirical study of the accumulation of mutations. Not just a mathematical model. Here is another one. Not only does it show mutations accumulating, but it shows populations going extinct. I'm sorry you can't get around this. Evolution does not work. Populations die becasue of genetic entropy.

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And it agrees with what I said. SMALL populations are vulnerable to genetic entropy.

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That is not a problem that is meaningless drivel. How do you intend to acquire knowledge about a pattern unless you observe it?

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You could have a theory that predicts it. This is the way science often works, You take observations to build a theory and then test it against observations that had not previously been made.But that isn't the point. The point is that that since there are many patterns which look designed the probabiblity that you see A pattern that looks designed will always be significantly higher than the probability of seeing the specific pattern that was observed. Dembski originally failed to take this into account, and has yet to adequately deal with the problem.

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No, I never said that. You keep misinterpreting everything I say.

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So you DON'T think that background knowledge is helpful in identifying design. Please make your mind up.

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This is something that is totally irelevant to design detection, because we do not need to know the tools that were used to design something.

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So your reason for saying that background knowledge isn't helpful is that it isn't absolutely essential. Not a very good - or rational - reason.

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Which is what is going on when proteins interact with other chemicals.

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Which isn't relevant to structural uses of proteins.

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No it's not. Because something that we see could be a product of an algorithm, yet we mistook it for CSI.

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That point, too is dealt with in TDI.Of course if you tried to calculate the complexity without taking the lagorithm into account you might make just that mistake. Like for instance calculating the complexity of a biological structure on the basis of random assembly, ignoring the fact that - in reality - it grew.

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I'm not interested in how it grows. I'm interested in how the bacteria that grows it got the information to grow it in the first palce.

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To find that out it's no good just looking at a flagellum without thinking about how it grows.

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Yes it is because you have to measure the information first.

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No. You need to gather the data you need to measure the information before you measure the information.

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You have to know what you want to account for. It's like saying that we do not need to account for the information in people's limbs because people grow limbs.

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Unfortuantely the information measure is based on the (possible) ways that a flagellum could form - not on ignoring the way that it DID form and assuming that random formation is the only alternative to design.

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Explain why.

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I already have.

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No, it's not my estimate. It's Dembski's calcualtion coupled with Axe's research. And no, we are not looking for other flagellums now. We are looking at this one. Other's are irrelavant righ now.

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Really ? Please produce the specification and explain why it only covers the E Coli flagellum and not all the others out there.

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Explain why.

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This is why TDI is better than NFL. NFL gives you a hopelessly inaccurate view of CSI. To calculate the complexity you need to know the probability of meeting the specification considering ALL POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS,. Ignoring possible explanations is going against the method and just asking for false positives.

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Their gorwth doesn't help you one bit. It doesn't matter how they are assembled. What matters is the amount of information that is required to construct one.

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Which means looking into the probability of the mechanisms involved in the growth forming - including through evolution. A bit hard to do that without finding out what those mechanisms actually are.

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Cite me the part where you showed that evolution works bettern than random search.

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The fact that the real fitness landscape doesn't look like the typical random landscape of NFL and is therefore more amenable to incremental searches.

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No. It doesn't agree with you. You said that genetic entropy is non-existant and that it's a misinterpretation. The article claims that it exists.

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No, I didn't. I said that it isn't a problem in general. And the paper doesn't show that it is.

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If you think that larege populations, whatever you define large to be, don't suffer from genetic entropy than you are wrong. It's like saying that 1+1=3. Smaller popultations suffer from entropy moer than larger populations. That's obvious. But that doesn't mean that you will make the the entropy go away by simply increasing the population. The entropy stays.

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Well you can't prove that by looking at a paper specifically about SMALL populations.

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And the reason is becasue all individuals are mutants. And we pass 100% of our genetic material with good and bad mutations. Therefore whoever gets selected, both beneficial nad deletarious mutations stay in the population and accumulate

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But that is where natural selection (and recombination) come in. There are factors working against the accumulation of bad mutations

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Hello!? I said without an observatio! You just said that you first have to make an observation.

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Then you are misunderstanding the point you are trying to argue against.

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This is a meningless statement. The statement: "Probability of observing patterns that only look designed is higher than observing patterns that are observed" is meaningless.

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If that is your understanding of the point I am trying to make then I strongly suggest that you read more carefully.

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Of course it is.

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So a method that leaves background knowledge out IS missing something that is useful in design detection ?

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When did I say that?

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In your last post. I even quoted it.