Show Me the Science
If interested, I have a review of Expelled up at NRO. You can get some idea of my take on it from the opening sentence:
Expelled seems to me to be the right-wing analog of Fahrenheit 9/11.
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Good article, Jim. You write: “…in order to make practical progress, scientists accept paradigms (e.g., the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology) that have demonstrated the ability both to account for a wide range of empirical observations, and to produce useful scientific results. A paradigm helps to create a coherent discipline. The day-to-day work of scientists is to solve intellectual puzzles that fall within the relevant paradigm…If I started my day by demanding that I prove my own existence, I’d never get out of bed.“
This is correct, as far as it goes. I just don’t think it goes far enough.
What distinguishes science from everything else is not the use and progression of paradigms; many coherent disciplines have paradigms, and many of these evolve.
Nevertheless, science is distinct from all other enterprises, and it’s this distinction — this precise definition of what science is — which settles the debate as to why ID is not science.
There are two components to the definition (epistemological and methodological), easily illuminated by recourse to three of my favorite thinkers:
1. “The most valuable insights are arrived at last; but the most valuable insights are methods“ — F. Nietzsche, Will To Power (pg. 261)
2. “[T]otal science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.” — W.V.O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 20 The Philosophical Review 60 (1951).
3. “One is prepared to believe that reality exceeds the scope of the human apparatus in unspecifiable ways…[However], a sentence’s claim to scientific status rests on what it contributes to a theory whose checkpoints are in prediction.” Quine, Pursuit of Truth.
4. “The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus
I included this last to underscore the possibility that IDers could be right — ID’s minimal claims are not inconsistent with observations; as Quine says, a sophisticated epistemology results in a blurring of the boundaries between speculative metaphysics and science.
However, where the line remains clear and bright is on the issue of methodology. It’s here where science is uniquely defined, and it’s here where IDers fall flat.
Simply: Intelligent Design is not science because it cannot be tested using the scientific method. Not everything that could be true can be science.
— JA · May 2, 09:32 PM · #
JA, the points you raise are valuable ones, but I don’t think Jim’s review was intended to be a full-scale evaluation of ID. Rather, what he did was to ask whether Expelled has made a good case that the absence of ID proponents and ideas from the culture of science is a result of prejudice and discrimination. And he convincingly shows that Expelled has not made that case. Very well done, Jim — and thanks for wrapping up with that quote from Augustine, which could not be more apt.
— Alan Jacobs · May 2, 10:26 PM · #
Alan, you are certainly right about Jim’s article: his overall point, that Expelled fails as film and polemic, is convincing. By meeting the movie on its own terms, and engaging its argument “on the level”, he shows more generosity than I can muster, that’s for sure.
And, of course, he addresses the point I made (e.g., “You know, in science there is a term for such theories: non-falsifiable.”)
It’s just…ID is fundamentally invalid as a scientific theory. Even if they are right that IDers are being bullied and intimidated; even if it turns out to be true that Darwinian thinking breeds atheism and amorality; even if all this and more, they still would not have moved ID one inch closer to being a valid scientific theory.
So that’s what I was saying. There’s really no need to get lost in the trees when a single match — a definition — burns down their forest.
— JA · May 3, 01:39 AM · #
JA,
I disagree with your assertion that ID isn’t science.
Darwin’s theory is the denial of teleology (intelligent design) in biology. ID is the affirmation of teleology in biology.
The issue in the debate is this: is there evidence for teleology in biology? If there is evidence, ID is true. If there isn’t evidence, Darwinism is true.
If the question of teleology isn’t a valid scientific question, then neither evolution nor ID are science, because they are merely different answers to the same question.
Either ID and Darwinism are both science, or neither are science. If ID can’t be adjudicated by the scientific method, how can we infer that the Darwinian assertion— that there is no design underlying biology— is true?
Mark
— Mark · May 3, 03:11 AM · #
Mark: “Darwin’s theory is the denial of teleology (intelligent design) in biology.”
Actually, this is the unscientific, first-order philosophical fall-out of Darwin’s theory. An important issue, to be sure, but it and its opposite (ID) reside outside the scientific wheelhouse.
Darwin’s scientific theory was that natural selection was the primary mechanism that drives evolution. Alloyed to genetics, this theory has been tested time and again and proven to have an extraordinarily robust explanatory power. One example (from Genes, Mind and Culture):
““Using standard biselection procedures, Kovach was able to separate two lines of [quail] chicks possessing much more marked preferences for red or blue respectively. Complete divergence, with no overlap in choice scores, was achieved within five generations…The result is important because it demonstrates…that the genetic basis of epigentic rules can be altered within ten generations or less by a sufficiently rigid selection regime, and that complex behavior can be affected by relatively simple ensembles of genes.” Pg. 48
I challenge you to name one experiment like this that will unambiguously support or, alternatively, unambiguously undermine the thesis of Intelligent Design.
— JA · May 3, 04:39 AM · #
One more thing (sorry guys upstairs).
Mark, you write: “If the question of teleology isn’t a valid scientific question, then neither evolution nor ID are science, because they are merely different answers to the same question.”
There are as many responses floating through my brain as my evolutionarily-derived “short-term-memory bottleneck” will allow (3-7); however, since this isn’t my neck of the woods, I’ll keep it to just one.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read John Barrow’s The Constants of Nature, but I strongly suggest you do. When you finally reach the last sentence and put the book down, ask yourself: “Why underestimate the Designer by tying him to biology? Why not imagine a really, really ambitious Designer and suppose he limited himself to the unexplainable-so-far physical constants — knowing that, in an infinite space, he will get what he wants many, many times over?”
A Designer who’s forced to revisit the production half-way through to make certain ad hoc adjustments is not exactly what Anselm was thinking of, right?
— JA · May 3, 05:02 AM · #
JA / Alan:
Thanks for the compliments on the article; it means a lot coming from you guys.
I agree that just about any intellectual discipline has paradigms (in the general sense of the term), but (crudely speaking) what distinguishes science from them is the adjudication of specific causal statements through decisive falsification tests. The observation that I was trying to grant to Expelled is that “evolution” (stated really imprecisely) is a paradigm, rather than a strictly falsifiable statement like “these two unequally weighted bodies in this vacuum will fall at the same rate”. That said, if an alternative paradigm, like ID, can do a better job of developing useful, non-obvious falsifiable predictions, the history of science indicates it will, over time, replace evolution. Yelling at the ref doesn’t get you very far.
I have a very practical view of science. We look at its methods descriptively to try to understand them, but it is not (in my view) analysis of the methods of science that lead us to grant it such authority, but simply the fact that it works. People can yadda yadda all they want, but in the end, airplanes stay up.
On the other hand, this take on science as the handmaiden of engineering, rather than some kind of a substitute religion, means that the view that science tells us how things work, but not what we should do (which I suspect many in the academy see as useful propaganda, but secretly believe will be a distinction that will be erased in short order), remains valid and is not just happy-talk. This was the point vis-a-vis evolution that I was trying to make in the NR article that I referenced in the movie review. I have another article coming out in an upcoming NR on this topic vis-a-vis the biological basis of mind. (The impact of discussions on this topic that the three of us and others have had here should be obvious to you when and if you read it.)
— Jim Manzi · May 3, 02:28 PM · #
JA,
Thank’s for your comments.
Regarding your first comment, natural selection isn’t a ‘mechanism’; it’s merely what happens. Survivors survive, non-survivors don’t. It’s a tautology, and it applies just as much to (hypothetically designed) traits as it does to traits arising without intelligent agency. Organisms that have a new designed trait survive or don’t survive just as organisms that have a new undesigned mutation survive or don’t survive.
The difference between Darwinism and ID is the mechanism by which new traits emerge— the difference is, to use an old phrase, about the arrival of the fittest, not the survival of the fittest. And it gets to the question: can the biological complexity that we observe be accounted for without without invoking intelligent agency? That’s a genuine scientific question, and a very important scientific question. Both Darwinists and IDers are answering the same question, and that’s why either both are science or neither is science. They are yes/no answers to the same question.
If Darwinism is to be accepted as true, you have to explain the genetic code and molecular nanotechnology inside cells, among other things, without intelligent agency. And you must provide convincing evidence, not just hypotheses pulled out of the air (just-so stories). Darwinists haven’t done that. Not even close.
Regarding the Kovach example you cited, intelligent manipulation of populations of organisms in a lab is artificial selection- intelligent design, ironically. You need to show that major increases in organismal complexity can occur without intelligent agency in nature.
Regarding Barrows’ “The Constants of Nature”, I have’t read it, but it sounds very interesting, and I’ll try to get it. Thank you. Please note though that in my discussion of ID I’m not talking about theology; I’m talking about straightforward scientific inferences. I’m a Christian (and a scientist), and I have real qualms about how ID can be interpreted (ID, if true, could support pantheism, deism, Manichaeism, etc).
But I’m not talking about theology. I’m talking about science, and ID is science, and the evidence, in my view, supports it.
Mark
— Mark · May 3, 03:36 PM · #
Jim: “I have a very practical view of science. We look at its methods descriptively to try to understand them, but it is not (in my view) analysis of the methods of science that lead us to grant it such authority, but simply the fact that it works.”
Agree — there is no principled justification for our particular method of science as opposed to any other. While we can be confident that our current scientific method is good (“the fact that it works”), we simply cannot know whether our current Scientific Method is best. No procedure exists that can decide this problem; the only way we’ll ever be able to know is if we stumble on a better approach (and even then, all we’ll know is that SciMeth wasn’t best after all).
My point is that Science is superior to intuition precisely because it is a method of testing propositions, whatever the facts of the method happen to be. This is what Nietzsche meant when he wrote “the most valuable insights are methods“: Systematic approaches to problems are a priori superior to the kinds of noisy approaches typified by revelation, inspiration, untestable intuition and whatever.
Once you establish this idea, it becomes clear that there are certain problems that are solvable via the scientific “algorithm” we’ve chosen, and certain problems that are not. Some theories will propose problems whose tests will “halt” in a finite amount of time, and some theories will not. This is why I can say with confidence that ID is not in science’s wheelhouse; the concept “designer” cannot be reduced to terms that are properly scientific, and in its irreducible state its test will never halt.
I’m looking forward to reading your next article.
— JA · May 3, 04:45 PM · #
Mark: “If Darwinism is to be accepted as true, you have to explain the genetic code and molecular nanotechnology inside cells, among other things, without intelligent agency.”
I’ll do you one better. We know that Darwinism is not “true”. It is a picture of the truth, a compression of it, incomplete and inadequate. We buy into it not because it is “true”, but because it correlates to “truths” that are demonstrable facts of the universe.
To wit, P.C.W. Davies (from his essay Why is the Physical World so Comprehensible?):
“The issue of whether the laws of nature are discovered or invented is sidestepped if we view the world algorithmically. The existence of regularities may be expressed by saying that the world is algorithmically compressible. Give some data set, the job of the scientist is to find a suitable compression, which expresses the causal linkages involved.”
It’s these data sets which are “true”. In the words of Quine, these data are “impacts on our sensory surfaces” from the external world we assume is there. Moreover, these data are objective (meaning they are intersubjective, sharable, capable of demanding outright consent or dissent of human beings).
Therefore, “natural selection” is not so much an explanation as a way to capture the observed facts of evolvability in nature in the compressed language of theory. It uses words and ideas to symbolize the causal mechanisms and regularities that actually exist. As such it suggests further facts of this “mechanism” that are then testable, and that is what we do.
On the other hand, ID is all explanation. It doesn’t try to capture in theory how complexity may naturally arise, it simply assumes that it can’t naturally arise.
That may be true, but it’s not science. Science seeks to compress nature; ID wants to explain it.
— JA · May 3, 05:21 PM · #
JA,
Good points all, especially the view that theory is algorithm rather than explanation, but I disagree with the assertion that ID is all explanation and no algorithm. All of science- including biology- employs algorithms to detect intelligent agency. In many sciences, the design detection algorithms are used to detect artifact (‘what is the artifactual influence of my (designed) measuring device on the data I am collecting’). A famous example of the use of a design algorithm in natural science is the discovery of the Big Bang background radiation by Penzias and Wilson. The biggest problem they had was distinguishing natural from designed (artifact from their own equipment) signal.
In many other cases, design detection algorithms are the primary science- cryptography, forensic science, archeology, SETI, and the detection of biological warfare agents are among the most obvious examples.
The specific application of design algorithms to science is actually the entire basis of one branch of science- reverse engineering.
ID is reverse engineering applied to biology. It is rich with algorithms. Discussion of it is excluded from acceptable discourse in biological sciences for ideological, not scientific, reasons. Much of our approach to modern biological research is reverse engineering, anyway. Watson and Crick’s elucidation of the structure and function of DNA was pure reverse engineering. They cracked a computer code. Darwin’s theory had nothing to do with it. The same is true of most current research in modelcular biology. We’re trying to figure out how these nano-machines work, and we use principles of reverse engineering all the time.
We just can’t admit it, for reasons that Expelled makes so clear.
Mark
— Mark · May 3, 05:41 PM · #
One more thing, then I’ll stop (promise).
If you take all I said above, you’ll see why evolution/ID is not an either or proposition. The fact that ID is not science means that these two “theories” are practically compatible.
To see this, think about the fact that “designer” is not reducible to properly scientific parts. There is nothing “real”, no physical data, that the concept “designer” can be encoded into that, upon observation and synthesis, the concept “designer” inevitably falls out as a logical necessity. Therefore, the only way we could ever test this idea is if we could find, in nature, a datum of “designer as such”, a self-referential signature that tells us “I am designer”.
Thus, in practice, “designer” theory and evolutionary theory are compatible — i.e., they are “empirically equivalent”.
For instance: what happens if the designer comes in at physical level and simply enables “evolution by natural selection” at the universe’s biological levels downstream. How would that look different to us than the standard evolutionary model we use? Wouldn’t it be empirically indistinguishable from “evolution sans designer”?
“We do better, in such a case, to take advantage of the presence of irreducibly alien terms. We can simply bar them from our language as meaningless. After all, they are not adding to what our own theory can predict, any more than ‘phlogiston’ or ‘entelechy’ does, or indeed ‘fate’, ‘grace’, ‘nirvana’, ‘mana’. We thus consign all contexts of the alien terms to the limbo of nonsentences.” Quine, Pursuit of Truth
We don’t do this because they are necessarily wrong, we do it because they don’t add anything to scientific pursuits.
— JA · May 3, 05:55 PM · #
JA,
The most important distinction in science is whether the entity to be studied is intelligently designed or not. If you find a rock, and want to study it, it matters enormously whether you infer that the rock is a statue carved by someone a few thousand years ago or whether it is merely a natural artifact. If it’s an archeological artifact, you will study it using the methods of archeology, which will preclude melting it down. A geologist will study it with methods (melting it down) that would never be used by an archeologist.
Darwinism is the denial of intelligent design- the denial of teleology- in biology. ID can accomodate some random changes in living things, but Darwinism presupposes no intelligent agency in natural biological complexity. If you assert that ID and Darwinism are compatible- that is, that lving things can be understood as products of both teleological and non-teleological processes- you are arguing entirely from an ID perspective.
Welcome to the fold.
Mark
— Mark · May 3, 06:24 PM · #
Mark:
Welcome to the Thunderdome!
I think you have put your finger on the exact problem that bothers many, many people about “Darwinism” (and positiviely excites others). You put it consicely and precisely: “Darwinism is the denial of teleology in biology”.
I wrote a long article in Naional Review last year that was an argument that this assertion is false, that is, that evolution through natural selection does imply lack of teleology. The ungated version is here:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+origin+of+species,+and+Everything+Else:+coping+with+evolution+and…-a0169089512
Note that in this digital version they have printed “2^100” as “2100” (a somewhat smaller number).
— Jim Manzi · May 3, 08:25 PM · #
Jim,
Thank you. I read your essay, and I agree with most of it. Neither I nor others who support ID have any problem with the notion that God’s creative activity may well involve an algorithm. ID advocates are not creationists nor are we biblical literalists.
There certainly is an elegance to the concept of genetic algorithms, and evolution (understood as changes in populations over time) certainly has occurred.
What I disagree with- vehemently- is the assertion that Darwin’s theory accomodates teleology. It does not. Darwin’s point was this: changes in populations of organisms that are analogous to breeding (ie teleology) can occur without breeding, and these changes account for all biological complexity. Darwin removed teleology from biology.
Scientific evidence for design- teleology- in biology is massive, particularly in molecular biology. Cells are astonishingly complicated machines, and they are obviously designed. There is no significant scientific evidence that functional complexity at the level of intracellular process can arise without teleology.
The non-teleological theory of biological complexity is Darwinism. The teleological theory of biological complexity is ID. ID incorporates genetic algorithms, natural selection, and teleology. Darwinism is the theory of non-teleological origins. And it is not supported by the scientific evidence.
This is a debate about teleology in biology. The teleological theory is ID, and it accomodates some non-teleological change as well. The non-teleological theory is Darwinism.
As you note in your essay, the evidence in favor of teleology in biology is very strong, and teleology may have been accomplished by differential survival within populations over billion of years. ID has no problem with that view.
ID has a big problem with the view that biological complexity can be completely accounted for without teleology.
That’s what this fight is about.
Mark
— Mark · May 3, 10:01 PM · #
Mark: “If you assert that ID and Darwinism are compatible- that is, that lving things can be understood as products of both teleological and non-teleological processes- you are arguing entirely from an ID perspective.”
I think we are arguing past each other. What I said was “Thus, in practice, “designer” theory and evolutionary theory are compatible — i.e., they are “empirically equivalent”.
That’s what I’ve been saying this entire thread. They are (empirically) compatible rather than rival theories because ID is not science. This is not a point in ID’s favor, it is a death blow to ID’s claim to be a scientific theory. As you said, the two are theoretically opposed (planned destinations vs. chaotic arrivals). I agreed — however, just because a scientific theory contradicts a philosophical argument doesn’t make the latter a science. To be a rival scientific theory, the latter would have to support (and be supported by) an entirely contradictory set of data. This is the importance of Quine’s argument about “empirically equivalent” — two theories that cannot be distinguished by data are, in practice, compatible: they look the same; it’s possible they both are true, or both false.
But, when the theoretical distinction between the two theories consists entirely of “alien, irreducible, untestable” terms, we have a circumstance where these both can be true but only one is scientific.
I don’t understand why this is a fight at all. You have to be a certain height to ride the tilt-a-whirl, and you have to make testable propositions to be a scientific theory.
What are the characteristics of the designer? How did he do it? Why did he do it? When did he do it? Where did he do it?
If you can propose how to even begin answering these questions (non-arbitrarily), and figure out how to test your answers with experience, then you will have created a scientific theory of Intelligent Design. Until then, it’s not science.
— JA · May 4, 12:39 PM · #
Mark, “Scientific evidence for design- teleology- in biology is massive, particularly in molecular biology. Cells are astonishingly complicated machines, and they are obviously designed.”
That’s not evidence of design. It’s evidence of complexity.
“There is no significant scientific evidence that functional complexity at the level of intracellular process can arise without teleology.”
Over the past twenty or so years, it’s been demonstrated over, and over, and over that very simple iterative rules can create vast amounts of complexity in very short amounts of time.
“This is a debate about teleology in biology.”
That’s not a debate science can adjudicate.
— JA · May 4, 12:54 PM · #
And, with respect, why stop at the intracellular level?
The global economy is far more complex than an individual cell. Was the global economy “designed”? Aren’t we pretty sure that it grew — organically — out of very simple facts: the realities, wants, needs, types and scopes of interactions of the primate homo sapiens?
— JA · May 4, 01:05 PM · #
Mark:
You say that:
What I disagree with- vehemently- is the assertion that Darwin’s theory accomodates teleology. It does not. Darwin’s point was this: changes in populations of organisms that are analogous to breeding (ie teleology) can occur without breeding, and these changes account for all biological complexity. Darwin removed teleology from biology.
Think of my simplified Genetic Algorithm for the chemical plant from the article. Would you agree that teleology exists in this case? Assuming that you do, how do you distinguish evolution through natural selection from this case?
— Jim Manzi · May 4, 01:06 PM · #
Jim, I read your Free Library article (it’s superb), and I have two quick questions.
You write, ““The algorithm is therefore the opposite of goalless: It is, rather, a device designed to tend toward a specific needle in a haystack—the single best potential result.”_
The algorithm is goalless, isn’t it, in the sense that you can change the “specific needle in the haystack” in 2^100 different ways, and the same unchanged algorithm will still find it? Aren’t you instead talking about the algorithm’s purpose rather than its goal?
Also, you write: “Further, you write, “Notice, third and finally, that though the number of possible solutions is very large, it is finite. With sufficient computational power the goal is, in principle, knowable without ever running the algorithm. The algorithm itself is just a computational convenience.”
Don’t you have to run some algorithm for the goal to be “knowable”? Without performing at least one operation on the answer set (or on the person who “created” it), how do you get any information?
I say all this because I think your overall point is solid. More on that later.
— JA · May 4, 07:57 PM · #
Jim,
You asked:
“Think of my simplified Genetic Algorithm for the chemical plant from the article. Would you agree that teleology exists in this case? Assuming that you do, how do you distinguish evolution through natural selection from this case?”
Teleology exists if you have an endpoint established by an intelligent agent. Darwin’s theory explicitly excludes an endpoint. It’s random mutation and natural selection. ID is teleological mutation (variation) and natural selection. Since natural selection is a tautology, it’s as much a part of ID as it is of Darwinism.
What’s the difference between teleological natural selection and non-teleological natural selection? Consider this: generate one coherent English paragraph (a paragraph with meaningful semantics) using a random iterative process that obeys syntax but without semantics as a target. Teleology in biology is analogous to semantics in language. Both teleology and semantics must be introduced into the system by intelligent agency. Neither arises from non-intelligent iterative processes. If you claim that it does, show me the evidence, and show me that there was no intelligently designed endpoint to the iterative process.
Regarding the predictions of ID, they are plentiful. ID predicts irreducible complexity. There are hundreds of thousands of different kinds of biomolecules. There is no hard data on an established evolutionary pathway (one that is not irreducibly complex)for any of them, and only a few even have remotely plausible pathways that have been suggested. So far, that’s several hundred thousand predictions of ID supported by our current state of research.
ID predicts that some aspects of cellular biology will use mechanisms only known in other areas of science to be created by intelligent agency. The genetic code is entirely consistent with ID. Darwinism has no credible explanation for the origin of a code.
ID predicts front-loading of genes, which is a situation in which organisms have genes coding for structures that organisms don’t have, but their descendents will. Front-loading is increasingly being found to be common. Darwinists have tried to explain it away (exaptation, etc), but these explanations are ad hoc.
ID has explicitly predicted that junk DNA isn’t junk. Darwinists have predicted the opposite. Recent evidence is trending strongly to the ID prediction.
What aspects of 20th century molecular biology did Darwinism predict that aren’t also natural predictions of ID?
Mark
— Mark · May 5, 12:26 AM · #
Jim, great article. Not as much fun as Derb’s, but more insightful.
JA, you’re on fire. Bravo.
— J Mann · May 5, 01:07 PM · #
Mark:
In reference to my question about the genetic algortihm usded to control the chemical plant in my article, you say that:
Teleology exists if you have an endpoint established by an intelligent agent. Darwin’s theory explicitly excludes an endpoint.
But in my chemical plant example there is exactly one combination of switch settings that will, in fact, lead to maxmimum factory production. This genetic algortihm does have an endpoint. Is it not teleological?
If you agree that it does have an endpoint, how can you distinguish this examle from evolution through natural selection “in the wild” that removes the teleology?
Your next sentence is:
It’s random mutation and natural selection.
I think that you’re letting those who would use Darwinsim to make all kinds of philosophical points steal a huge base when you say this, for two reasons. First, ask yourself what “random” means. As I go into in some detail in the article, all kinds of philospohical baggage gets swept under the rug here, and what we noramlly call “random” events in evolution (mutation, crossoverpoint selection, etc.) are really pseudo-random. Second, the genetic algorithm that I describe in the article deploys “random mutation and natural selection” in service of the search for a known goal, that is, teleologically.
— Jim Manzi · May 5, 03:56 PM · #
Jim,
Thanks for you comment. I agree that an algorithmic process can be teleological, and that a teleological algorithmic process is probably the best model for understanding evolution.
A teleological algorithm is ID theory, or at least one kind of ID theory. ID merely posits that teleology is scientifically discernable in biology.
Teleology is not compatible with Darwinism, either by Darwin’s original theory (which explicitly rejected teleology) or by the modern synthesis, which does not invoke teleology.
You note: “I think that you’re letting those who would use Darwinsim to make all kinds of philosophical points steal a huge base when you say this, for two reasons. First, ask yourself what “random” means.”Darwinists use the ambiguity of teleology in iterative processes to advance an atheist materialist agenda. ID recognizes the teleology in the iterative process of mutation and selection. It encompases much that is important and true about the modern synthesis (population biology, etc) without the metaphysical deceit. Teleology is discernable in biology.
Regarding the definition of “random”, that’s easy, at least in reference to the Darwinism/ID debate. Randomness in evolution is the randomness of a flipped coin. The coin’s trajectory obeys all kinds of laws (gravity, Newton’s second law, matehematical descriptions of air turbulence, etc), yet we call the outcome of the flip random because it is not determined by purpose. The result of a flipped coin (heads or tails) is random becuase it is non-teleological (non-purposeful). Darwinists assert that random mutation is non-teleological. ID folks assert that mutation (understood in its broadest sense) is not always non-teleological. The astonishing functional complexity in living things is clear scientific evidence for some non-random (that is, teleological) variation.
Darwinists argue that all evolution is a flipped coin- it obeys laws of physics and chemistry, but shows no evidence of purpose. We ID folks argue that evolution is a flipped coin with a hand still on it, guiding it to biological solutions that randomness could not have achieved alone.
As for the scientific relevance of ID, consider this. Imagine that you were going to study in detail a ‘factory’ that was generated by an iterative process. Would it matter to your study whether or not the iterative process that generated the factory had teleology or not? Of course it would. In fact, understanding the teleology inherent in the iterative process would be perhaps the most important foundation for studying the factory.
Mark
— Mark · May 6, 12:59 PM · #
Mark:
I’ve been going through our comments several times, because it seems like we’re talking past one another. I think I see the crux of the issue. You say that:
Teleology is not compatible with Darwinism, either by Darwin’s original theory (which explicitly rejected teleology) or by the modern synthesis…
Why?
I agree that many philosophers and popularizers have asserted this. I also agree that the Modern sysnthesis does not “invoke” design, as you say later in that sentence. But “not invoking” isn’t the same thing as “excluding”.
Explain why you think Darwinism exlcudes teleology. If you agree that my chemcial plant algortihm IS teleological, then explain how Darwinain evolution is different than my genetic algortihm in a manner that renders one teleological and the other non-teleological.
— Jim Manzi · May 6, 06:07 PM · #
Jim,
I don’t understand why the concept that ID invokes teleology and Darwinsm doesn’t is so opaque. It’s the essence of the debate. Darwinian evolution is evolution caused by random mutation and natural selection. Random means without evidence for purpose/intelligent agency.
ID accomodates natural selection and all of the iterative processes inherent to Darwinism, but asserts that there is scientic evidence for intelligent agency (teleology) in biology. The inference to teleology is what separates ID and Darwinism.
If you accept teleology in biology, then you and I (and virtually all of my ID-supporting colleagues) agree on evolution, and you disagree with most evolutionary biologists (>90% are atheists, and reject teleology on metaphysical grounds).
And why do you assert that ID isn’t science? If you accept that biology reveals evidence of teleology, then you accept that the scientific inference to teleology is valid, which means that ID is science.
I don’t understand your objection to ID.
Mark
— Mark · May 6, 08:10 PM · #