Letters to 'Unintelligible Design'

Ok, I got it. You dont need to respond to me anymore today if you dont want. I will argue if I put my brain to it, that adaptation might go beyond the 500 level but that is not for this thread.

Got ya. Sorry, I didn't notice the reply button. Cool forum software. It highlights my code mistakes in red! But back to the rumble.

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I must be misunderstanding this, because it reads like a tacit admission that the designer is supernatural.

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We must be talking past one another because I've tried to make it clear that I have no knowledge of the designer, much less one that is supernatural. My model of design is based on quantum mechanics. I would hardly think there are ghosts, fairies or leprechauns considering the behavior of particles. This is your introduction, certainly not mine.

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But this analogy doesn't apply to what ID actually proposes. ID requires the designer to both design *and* implement. How the designer implemented would provide clues to how the designer designed, which in turn would provide clues to the nature of the designer.

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What do you mean by "and implement?" How does the designer of a hair dryer implement that hair dryer? And again, I believe the how of design was quantum mechanics. But that tells me nothing about the nature of a designer.Without looking at the tag on your shirt, assuming you believe it was designed, tell me the identity of the design engineer. Can you even tell me the name of the draftsman that drew up his blueprints? Can you tell me the nature of the designer, was it closer to Mother Teresa, an axe murderer or Elvis? Can you see how silly this line of questioning is?You seem not wanting to broach the subject of design as you may be hung up on another subject, the biography of the designer which is irrelevant. Not only is it irrelevant, I simply have no answer for you as I wouldn't know how to assign an identity to quantum mechanics.And considering your shirt, perhaps you can see how irrelevant it is. You wear that shirt just fine, can study it's design all you want and enjoy it. I do the same with cells and toasters.

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Addressing your analogy, a cleaning lady might not be curious about the design and implementation of a vacuum cleaner, but a scientist studying vacuum cleaner design and manufacture or an archeologist of the future trying to better understand the 21st century certainly would be. A similar analogy, and more appropriate to this discussion, would be a natural sponge. Someone taking a shower using the sponge might not be interested in its evolutionary history, but a scientist certainly would.

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I have never stated I was not interested in the evolutionary history of anything. I am. Especially for the purpose of reverse engineering. I simply stated I do not know the identity of the designer. I just don't, I'm sorry. But if I ever do, you will be the first to know.

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Let's consider an example. ID proposes that the bacterial flagellum could not have evolved naturally, that it must have been the product of intelligent design. The natural question is how did the designer accomplish this. Did he work with an existing bacteria and modify its DNA, or did he create an entire new bacteria? Did he do it in a single step or multiple steps? Did he craft new DNA or work with existing DNA? Did he insert new DNA into existing bacteria using viruses or micromachines? There should be clues to the designer's means of implementation. In fact, finding such clues, were they sufficiently different from what could occur naturally, would be important evidence for ID.

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What are those clues and where do I find them? You are simply asking things of me that I have no evidence to answer. Want me to do the same with you? OK: please tell me what caused the big bang. Where did matter/energy come from when a universe that does not yet exist cannot possibly contain things that do? Then what set off the explosion? Was it an alien with a stick of dynamite, or a phasor beam from the starship Enterprise. What, you cannot answer this? Scientists are curious and would know this so Guth's inflationary hypothesis must not be science. Want to go to abiogenesis next and you tell me step by step how each protein formed? Did this happen via amino acids randomly assembling from racemic mixture being governed by Le Chatlier's Principle, or did tiny ribosomes form first and translate proteins fully formed via mRNA? How did the membrane come about, was this an RNA critter, a DNA critter or a simple liposome that something stuck a needle in, shot in some mitochondria and everything went from there?Ya know what, Percy? You weren't there and I wasn't either.

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It doesn't. Saying "I don't know" is much different than saying "One mustn't ask," which is what ID does. There are two possible answers to the question, "Who is the designer?":An alien race, which just pushes the question off to another planet. Ultimately, intelligent life had to evolve naturally at least once somewhere.
A supernatural being.
The first alternative is not an answer, and the second alternative is not science.
By the way, there's a small reply button at the bottom of each message for replying to that specific message. Using it causes links to and from the original message and the reply. This makes it easy to figure out who's replying to whom. The large general reply button is for when you're not replying to anyone specifically.

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ID doesn't say don't ask. We ask everything and you can ask all the questions you want. Just think them through to insure there can be a logical answer to the questions you pose. Thus far, we seem to be struggling.

I'm sorry, the what?

Thank you, Brad. I see you found the paper you were looking for. I now understand the states you are referring to and we can get as deep into microstates, Shannon entropy or the combinatorials of macrostates as you would care to go. Hopefully you'll discover I am an infodynamic theorist that understands this stuff at a post graduate level. That's still a hopefully, at this point. EDITED: Oh Brad, I'm just catching up on a couple of posts I missed. If you want to get into the probability states of individual amino acids, I calculate them down in each protein of the flagellar system in E. Coli. in this paper: ESTIMATION OF THE SPECIFICITY OF FLAGELLA IN ESCHERICHIA COLI
THROUGH PROTEIN AMINO ACID LENGTH AND STOICHIOMETRYCRASH: I'm afraid you are lost, my friend. You cannot do anything 10^150 times per second. That's scientifically impossible. This message has been edited by Jerry Don Bauer, 04-26-2005 03:15 PM

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Design Dynamics

The Universal Probability Bound.This message has been edited by Jerry Don Bauer, 04-26-2005 02:45 PM

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Design Dynamics

Well, that's what we're talking about. Implementation.That's actually what ID is trying to detect - implementation, not design. To be most accurate they should call it "intelligent implementation." Obviously, a design that is never implemented is pointless.The fact that ID conflates "design" and "implementation" so thouroughly and obviously is more evidence that, behind the curtain ("don't look here!"), the designer and implementer are presumed to be the same figure, the same individual. In other words, he whose will become reality; he whose words become truth. God. There, in the cell. Just like tool marks that allow us to reconstruct the tool from the tooled, the tooled cell should allow us to reconstruct how it was tooled. If it was, in fact, implemented from a design.

That doesn't really wash with me. It's just a poorly-argued attempt to handwave away improbabilities. Suppose I had an event with a chance of occuring once in 10^150. What if I could repeat the trial 10^150 times every second?I don't see how the idea of a "universal bound" makes any sense at all, or should be expected to be granted any scientific viability. And, of course, all this is before we criticize the cherry-picked probabilities that constitute your argument.

The Universal Probability Bound ought to work IF there are sufficient bounds on the specification. Ideally there has to be only one possible specification that counts as a success. Even Dembski's rules aren't tight enough to reliably work with specifications made after the fact with knowledge of the results. Jerry's rules are even looser.

Shuffle two decks of cards together. Deal the cards face up on a table. The probability of the arrangement you are looking at is 1 in 10¹⁶⁶, sixteen orders of magnitude smaller than your (and Dembski's) "universal probabilitly bound". Therefore, your "universal probability bound" is no such thing. QED.The probability level at which we decide that an event is so improbable that it cannot happen depends on the event and the situation.

Back this one up first, please--using sites from university math departments because probabilities apply the same to everything that involves probabilities:

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The probability level at which we decide that an event is so improbable that it cannot happen depends on the event and the situation.

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Then:

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Shuffle two decks of cards together. Deal the cards face up on a table. The probability of the arrangement you are looking at is 1 in 10166, sixteen orders of magnitude smaller than your (and Dembski's) "universal probabilitly bound". Therefore, your "universal probability bound" is no such thing. QED.

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This is simply not factual as you are reversing time's arrow. You have to calculate the odds of a PRECISE pattern forming BEFORE you deal the cards and then if that pattern comes up the UPB might be falsified.Think this through. What are the odds you are going to get a pattern consisting of two decks of cards when you deal? 100%. You will get a pattern every time you deal them and there are no odds involved at all when the chance of something is 100%.If it makes you feel any better this is a very common misconception that I find in many students just learning probability.

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Design Dynamics

Actually it has with regard to at least one IC system posited by Behe, which underscores the problem with IC in general... it has never been proven.Essentially what you have set up is a logical possibility and then argued that we must assume it first, until we can refute it. That is to say for any complex biological system for which we do not know through what process it could have formed naturally, we must assume that it was created.That seems a bit bizarre does it not? First of all that is asking us to come to a conclusion that prohibits further exploration if it is actually accepted, and second of all misses the much more obvious problem of the existence of the complex thing that created this complex thing under discussion. Actually isn't it easier to say "I don't know", until we find a way that it might have formed naturally, or some positive evidence that it was created? I have a chemistry background and more than that a background that includes having modeled chemical reactions.I must say I am uncertain where you have gotten your numbers from. It is not like the universe is a giant stew with everything engaging in easily calculatable random reactions. Chemicals form environments which actually make harder or easier future chemical reactions.It is not impossible that any two chemicals WILL come together and start interacting, once that happens, especially under the crush of gravity which will happen due to gathering of mass, that makes certain future interactions more likely, and some less likely.I have not seen where you have taken into account the possibility of catalytic environments which would promote biomolecules from forming. Citing Miller is especially interesting as he also did not examine all possible environments.You could perhaps dispell my doubts by giving an example of your calculations regarding such a formation if it occured in a chiral clay at the bottom of the ocean, near a vent with little oxygen but high temperatures and high pressures, as opposed to inside a meteorite with hydrocarbons trapped within small inner chambers warmed and cooled by passage near a star, as opposed to free floating hydrocarbons in an atmosphere.I hope you would agree the difference in probability would be significant.Also once the initial biomolecules are formed, I am uncertain how you can calculate that further steps are impossible by themselves. Bio environments generally produce reactions and, given change over time, produce new features. I assume you take this as true, even if you suspect that abiogenesis poses statistical issues?

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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This is simply not factual as you are reversing time's arrow. You have to calculate the odds of a PRECISE pattern forming BEFORE you deal the cards and then if that pattern comes up the UPB might be falsified.

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Think this through. What are the odds you are going to get a pattern consisting of two decks of cards when you deal? 100%. You will get a pattern every time you deal them and there are no odds involved at all when the chance of something is 100%.

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If it makes you feel any better this is a very common misconception that I find in many students just learning probability.

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And exactly the error you yourself make. It's good to know that you understand at least some of the fatal errors in your own arguments.

Yes, you should do it that way. Unfortunately, Dembski doesn't. I'm not minimizing the difficulties of calculating a posteriori probabilities ... however, what I proposed is exactly what Dembski and the other ID'ers are doing. They take an existing system and attempt to calculate the probability of that one system arising by chance in one trial (or some small number of trials), not taking into account the possibility of other equivalent systems arising by chance and not considering the number of trials available (not to mention the possibility of arising through a combination of chance and regularity, which is what the TOE proposes). If my example was invalid (and it may be, depending how you look at it) all attempts to date to apply probability to ID "theory" are invalid in exactly the same way.I agree that the probability of some pre-specified exact arrangement of card arising is minuscule. However, in biology we don't know how many equivalent arrangments there are and we don't know how many trials there are. Perhaps the analogous situation in the decks of cards is "what is the probability of an arrangement in which 75 to 100 percent of the cards on the left of the middle are red, given 1,000,000,000 independent trials?". Biological systems arising by chance probably aren't that likely, but we don't know how likely they are.But it's all moonshine anyway, because the ID "calculations" ignore combined chance and regularity. Just like the YECs who claim that evolution is impossible because a tornado in a junkyard never produces a 747, just as wrong, and for just the same reason, except the IDers have dressed it up in fancier language.Oh, and BTW, you've misunderstood Borel's Law too. From Borel's Law and the Origin of Many Creationist Probability Assertions

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The point being, that Borel's Law is a "rule of thumb" that exists on a sliding scale, depending on the phenomenon in question. It is not a mathematical theorem, nor is there any hard number that draws a line in the statistical sand saying that all events of a given probability and smaller are impossible for all types of events. ... Ultimately, the point is that the user must design his or her "negligible probability" estimate based on a given set of assumed conditions.

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Hello Holmes:

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Actually it has with regard to at least one IC system posited by Behe, which underscores the problem with IC in general... it has never been proven.

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Essentially what you have set up is a logical possibility and then argued that we must assume it first, until we can refute it. That is to say for any complex biological system for which we do not know through what process it could have formed naturally, we must assume that it was created.

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That seems a bit bizarre does it not? First of all that is asking us to come to a conclusion that prohibits further exploration if it is actually accepted, and second of all misses the much more obvious problem of the existence of the complex thing that created this complex thing under discussion.

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Guys, it must be me as I've been at the laptop...lesss see...in 20 minutes it will be 23 hours. Yes, I'm addicted. But the deal is, I'm not understanding much in the posts. Considering this one, I have not calculated any probabilities regarding IC systems, so here's one that throws me again.I'm afraid you'll have to get much more specific on these calculations for me to understand what you refer to.Regarding IC systems in general, I proposed one for you: "Consider the irreducibly complex mammalian cardio-pulmonary apparatus. The minimum system consists of a heart to pump the blood, a lung to oxygenate the hemoglobin, hemoglobin, plasma to carry the hemoglobin, a kidney to keep the blood clean and a system of veins and arteries to carry the blood around the organism."Now, when I take a monkey into the lab and remove any of these component parts the system stops functioning and the monkey dies showing by the definition of an IC system that this system is irreducibly complex. But you seem to think that IC systems have been refuted. If so, then you should be able to take a monkey into the lab and cut out its heart or lungs or one of the other parts in the defined system, the system will still function OK and the monkey will skip off into the monkey playground, none for the worse.Now I showed by my monkey experiment the concept of an IC system. Unless you show your version of it, and that it works, then YOU stand refuted.

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Actually isn't it easier to say "I don't know", until we find a way that it might have formed naturally, or some positive evidence that it was created?

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It would be if I didn't know. Sorry, I do. It is simply illogical that an IC system could evolve. What does this leave other than design or magic?

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I have a chemistry background and more than that a background that includes having modeled chemical reactions.

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Cool. Me too. We'll get along fine.

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I must say I am uncertain where you have gotten your numbers from. It is not like the universe is a giant stew with everything engaging in easily calculatable random reactions. Chemicals form environments which actually make harder or easier future chemical reactions.

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I got my numbers straight from biochemistry knowing the way that amino acids assemble themselves via electrical charge from a racemic mixture of AAs being held as racemic via chemical equilibrium as described by Le Chatlier's Principle. That's the math. You might want to reread the piece. If you think the math is wrong, tackle it and show it to be wrong. I'll be glad to back up and go another avenue if you do.

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It is not impossible that any two chemicals WILL come together and start interacting, once that happens, especially under the crush of gravity which will happen due to gathering of mass, that makes certain future interactions more likely, and some less likely.
I have not seen where you have taken into account the possibility of catalytic environments which would promote biomolecules from forming. Citing Miller is especially interesting as he also did not examine all possible environments.
You could perhaps dispell my doubts by giving an example of your calculations regarding such a formation if it occured in a chiral clay at the bottom of the ocean, near a vent with little oxygen but high temperatures and high pressures, as opposed to inside a meteorite with hydrocarbons trapped within small inner chambers warmed and cooled by passage near a star, as opposed to free floating hydrocarbons in an atmosphere.
I hope you would agree the difference in probability would be significant.
Also once the initial biomolecules are formed, I am uncertain how you can calculate that further steps are impossible by themselves. Bio environments generally produce reactions and, given change over time, produce new features. I assume you take this as true, even if you suspect that abiogenesis poses statistical issues?

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I was not calculating molecules forming on clay. There is no evidence this occurs in a manner that would form complex proteins of the type that sustain life to begin with. But this wouldn't affect anything, as those particular AAs would still have the same probabilities of formation no matter whether it was on clay or in a primeval ooze.And don't forget Gibb's free energy and how that forbids the complex organic molecules we are discussing from forming spontaneously. We need stay in science and out of pseudo-science.You have the second law of thermodynamics working against you and you will lose every time when that happens.

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Design Dynamics

Er, yeah, but you don't really need all that. I mean, insects get by with an open circulatory system just fine, and presumably, you could even eliminate the heart and simply rely on the organism's limb movements to circulate blood. Granted, but what does that have to do with evolution? If you consider the stone arch, the removal of a single stone sends the arch toppling. It's irreducably complex. Yet, somehow, we construct arches one stone at a time.When you come to learn how this is possible, you will understand why a system that is "irreducably complex" is no barrier to evolution. Not so. Random mutation and natural selection are more than sufficient to result in IC systems, a fact confirmed by experimental trials. 2LOT works for us, not against us. 2LOT is what makes life possible, not what prevents it.