A Year In Intelligent Design

Yes, I think the usual method of detecting design is to consider a positive design hypothesis and use inference to the best explanation. Purely negative arguments are an unreliable method - it’s too easy to miss possibilities.However Dembski’s method is supposed to deal with identifying the pattern in retrospect. That’s the point of specification - the observed pattern is shown to be special. The problem Dembski missed at the time is that there are plenty of special patterns and the probability of getting any one of them is (usually) what you really need. I’ve seen writings where he tries to correct for this by calculating the number of possible specifications but it’s a really bad omission.The really weird thing though is that Dembski tried to sell his Complex Specified Information as an anti-evolution argument. But you can’t count any feature as CSI without ruling out evolutionary explanations. It makes me suspect that Dembski had a quite different argument in mind but couldn’t get it to work.

Would you mind elaborating? It's been a couple months since I've looked at any of this in depth.
Appended: Quoting wouldn't work earlier when I was trying to reply from my phone, so I'm fixing the post now for what I actually wanted to communicate.

I'm not too familiar with the usual methods; I have an interest in Forensics, but I know too little to make a comparison between how the science actually works compared with Dembski's method. However, I do understand that Dembski's method is a 'negative', or exclusionary 'sieve'; it doesn't positively indicate design, and it only rules out the (purportedly) only other explanations. As for probabilities...

I'm at a loss for how it is supposed to do this. Complex Specified Information makes sense to me, but he doesn't seem to propose a method to detect any specifications, they must be assumed. As for 'special patterns' and the probabilities of "getting" any of them, I don't know what you're referring to. In regards to possible specifications, I'd really like to see Dembski's chicken scratchings on that.

Evolutionary mechanisms are ruled out a priori with his method not because of the 'necessary' sieve in his Explanatory Filter, but because natural selection doesn't specify positively any patterns of surviving organisms genome, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm not a savant or even very well acquainted with evolution beyond the basics, but natural selection is the environmental pressure selecting negatively (akin to Dembski's sieve) the organisms which are unfit, and the rest of the population it is blind to, right? In other words, natural selection is simply death of the unfit, no?

Edited by A Certain Cyborg, : I'm not going to try to respond from my phone again.

Just time for one quick point.If you look at Mt Rushmore (a favourite ID example) you don’t go I can’t think of a natural explanation, it must be designed - but you might well go humans carved that to honour famous peopleThat is, Dembski’s method leaves design as an unexamined default. If you can’t think of a possible natural explanation for a pattern you are supposed to conclude design - even if you don’t have any idea at all of who might even want to do it.In contrast most people would think of an actual explanation involving design and compare that to the evidence.

quote:

---

I'm at a loss for how it is supposed to do this. Complex Specified Information makes sense to me, but he doesn't seem to propose a method to detect any specifications, they must be assumed.

---

The basic idea is pretty common. Given a fair coin the probability of any sequence of tosses depends only on the length. Obviously it would be daft to say that there must be something odd going on just because you’ve tossed a coins twenty times in a row. But if you get twenty heads in a row - which is a million-to-one shot you would be justified in thinking that maybe there is something making it come up heads.Dembski does have some ideas on what makes a specification valid and they aren’t too bad, but I don’t think that they are objective enough to call his design inference a mathematical proof. I may quote them later - I do have a copy of the book (remaindered - no way I’d have paid full price)

quote:

---

Evolutionary mechanisms are ruled out a priori with his method not because of the 'necessary' sieve in his Explanatory Filter, but because natural selection doesn't specify positively any patterns of surviving organisms genome, right?

---

Evolutionary explanations are supposed to be ruled out based on probability calculations. In reality I’ve never heard of Dembski coming close to doing that - in one case the reason was Behe said so which doesn’t even seem to be true.
(In Darwin’s Black Box Behe admitted that there were indirect routes of evolution that sidestepped his argument. He assumed that they were too unlikely to count but never made an argument to that effect, and certainly never showed that the probability fell below Dembski’s probability bound. He was almost certainly wrong, too)

quote:

---

but natural selection is the environmental pressure selecting negatively (akin to Dembski's sieve) the organisms which are unfit, and the rest of the population it is blind to, right? In other words, natural selection is simply death of the unfit, no?

---

That’s not really accurate. Positive selection for beneficial traits is an important part of evolution. The simplest explanation is that, in aggregate, genes that help individuals successfully reproduce become more common while genes that hinder that become less common.

This is an easy attack point for both Dembski's and Behe's positions. They each use different methods of ruling out evolution as a possibility and their critics have pretty much hammered away at those failings. The straight probability calculations are completely flawed. Here is one such critique:http://scienceblogs.com/.../dishonest-dembskithe-universal-1

quote:

---

Let’s look at Dembski’s own words first:

​

>Specifically, within the known physical universe there are estimated to be no
>more than 1080 elementary particles. Moreover, the properties of matter are
>such that transitions from one state to another cannot occur at a rate faster
>that 1045 times per second. Finally, the universe itself is about a billion
>times younger than 1025 seconds (assuming the universe is around 10 to 20
>billion years old). .these cosmological constraints imply that the total
>number of specified events throughout cosmic history cannot exceed
>1080 * 1045 x 1025 = 10150.

​

He goes on to assert that this is the maximum number of trials that could have occurred since the beginning of the universe, and that for anything less likely than that which is observed to occur, it is not reasonable to say it is caused by chance.

​

Here’s the fundamental dishonesty: None of those numbers have *anything* to do with what he’s supposedly trying to prove. He’s trying to create a formal-sounding version of the big-number problem by throwing together a bunch of fancy-sounding numbers, multiplying them together, and claiming that they somehow suddenly have meaning.

​

But they don’t.

​

It’s actually remarkably easy to show what utter nonsense this is. I’ll do a fancy one first, and a trivial one second.

​

So any state of particles within that cube is an event with probability considerably smaller than 1 in 105232. So what Dembski is saying is that *every* possible configuration of matter in space in the entire universe is impossible without intelligent intervention.

​

And the trivial one? Grab two decks of distinguishable cards. Shuffle them together, and lay them out for a game of spider solitaire. What’s the probability of that particular lay of cards? 104! , or, very roughly, something larger than 110166. Is god personally arranging ,my cards every time I play spider

---

There is more in the article, but it is not hard to find any number of sound attacks on this probability BS.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Alright. Good to know I'm mistaken. It's been a while since I've read any Dawkins, and I haven't read any textbook explanations (which I should; I have several right next to me). I'll have to review the literature I have on hand before I consider these things further.

From my surface understanding of the Design Inference, it is nothing more than a Designer of the Gaps argument backed by bad math. His main thesis seems to be "it is too improbable, therefore magic". Of course, internally his whole thesis hinges on getting the probabilities right, and from what I have seen he uses the Sharpshooter fallacy where probabilities are calculated after an event has occurred (which is the wrong way to do it).In a nutshell, if we look at evolutionary pathways down to the fine grained level of individual mutations then every evolutionary pathway is extremely improbable. The problem for Dembski's thesis is that the mere fact of the arrow of time guarantees that a highly improbable evolutionary pathway will occur due to the simple fact that mutations occur in large populations of organisms. It is equivalent to a sharpshooter painting the bullseye over his bullet hole.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

If an archaeologists is digging in the ground and finds a potshard and an earthworm, which one does he take back to the museum as evidence of an intelligence? The potshard. If Dembski wants to claim that archaeologists are using the Design Inference, then he needs to explain why this is.

quote:

---

From my surface understanding of the Design Inference, it is nothing more than a Designer of the Gaps argument backed by bad math. His main thesis seems to be "it is too improbable, therefore magic"

---

Formally it is more everything else I can think of is proven too unlikely therefore some unspecified designer did it by unspecified means.That’s poor as science (since the conclusion is too damn vague), risks error (it’s too easy to miss something) and pretty much useless where he wants to apply it. (The calculations for evolution would be a ridiculous amount of work even if we had good figures)

quote:

---

Of course, internally his whole thesis hinges on getting the probabilities right, and from what I have seen he uses the Sharpshooter fallacy where probabilities are calculated after an event has occurred (which is the wrong way to do it).

---

In my experience it’s more a case of he finds excuses not to do the calculations or does the wrong calculation entirely. He does actually take some steps to avoid the sharpshooter fallacy, but having a more or less valid methodology - in principle - is no good if the application is always seriously lacking.

quote:

---

In a nutshell, if we look at evolutionary pathways down to the fine grained level of individual mutations then every evolutionary pathway is extremely improbable

---

Yes, that is a potential flaw of the method but I haven’t seen Dembski do a good enough job of applying his method for that to be a real issue in practice. If Dembski ever gets to calculating the probabilities of evolutionary paths (and he may have, I haven’t looked at his work in the last few years) that might be an issue. But I haven’t seen him even try it, even when he should.So, I think you are missing the mark somewhat.

One of the arguments I have used re neo-Paleyism is comparing watches (of course) to a kaleidoscope ...see Is ID properly pursued? (posted 2004)Enjoy

Then it ends up being a moot point. It would seem that the Explanator Filter is incapable of explaining biology, the very thing that ID is focused on.

quote:

---

Then it ends up being a moot point. It would seem that the Explanator Filter is incapable of explaining biology, the very thing that ID is focused on.

---

It is still worth getting the criticisms correct. Aside from the fact that honest debate demands it - and that is important, errors on our part give opponents an advantage they don’t deserve.

I was curious if there has been any activity, research,or reason generated through the ID Community in 2018? If they generate so few articles yet seemingly go on the lecture circuit as pork n cheese brought to my attention in his new topic, I am naturally curious whether these scientists are simply in it for the money---earning a living through lecturing favorable creationist leaning audiences at churches and Christian schools? Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

No. Like Francisco Franco, ID is still dead.** Old joke from Saturday Night Live mid 1970's

Well this year they have three articles. You may scoff, but that's a 50% increase. If this trend continues, in 35 years they'll be producing three million articles per year and in a century all the mass of the universe will have been converted into ID articles.