Analyzing Intelligent Design {a structural construction of ID theory}

Jerry, I read some of your posts on the other thread that was closed down. You obviously have some good mathematical skills and a knowledge of information theory, but I am still a skeptic like Mick.
I joined this forum around the same time as you, so I guess we are both relative newbies on similar footing when it comes to posting.Without getting into questions of designer identity and such, I would like to debate the 'utility' of ID theory for solving problems in applied biology. We can dispense with all the abstract reasoning and mathematics - just show me it's actually good for explaining some tangible, *biological* phenomenon.I would be convinced of its utility (and therefore afford it some greater degree of respect) if any of the following could be demonstrated:ID theory provides testable models for predicting the outcome of specific biological processes at the organismal or population levels.ID theory formulates explanations of tangible, biological phenomena that are *different* (in at least some cases) from those that would be inferred from ToE.ID theory provides unique inferences that can solve problems in applied biology (say agriculture or medicine) where ToE has either failed, or fallen short of providing an adequate explanation or solution.What do you say ?

Can I quote you on that?Because it seems that the kind of ID that they want to get into the public school curriculum is of a very different ilk.
It is promoted as an 'alternative' to neo-Darwinism, and to be truly alternative in my books, it has to provide *functional* explanations as good as, or better than ToE in order to be afforded that status.If you admit that, then ID theory can never replace Darwinian evolution as a functional model for biology.ToE does not address the ultimate origins of life, only the mechanisms by which it has changed and can be expected to change, so ID is not an alternative to neo-Darwinism in this sense either. The adaptationist approach of ToE would say that the apparency of purpose in morphological designs is evidence of adaptation without the requirement for teleology, but I am sure you already know that.Hey - thanks for answering.
I guess I will have to take my beef elsewhere

That is kind of hard for me to answer Brad, the way it is phrased.
I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or disagreeing, but I suspect the latter. I was only refering to the 'apparency 'of design in ACTUAL morphologies, not hypothetical ones,
but whether I concur or not would I guess depend on whether you are refering to proximate or ultimate 'purposes'. A trait can have a proximate purpose. Evolution does not have any purpose, proximate or ultimate. What is this 'morphospace' of which you speak ? Hmm...I don't think I said that. Adaptation almost implies utility by definition.
Morphological forms can have infered adaptative value based on the obvious functionality of their 'design' in the natural environment of the animal.
This is the 'adaptationist approach' to evolutionary explanation and it has its potential inferencial pitfalls, as pointed out by Gould in his essay on the spandrels of San Marcos, but it is still widely accepted as a useful approach provided it is not abused in circular arguments.The basic conflict between ID and evolutionary theory is one of teleology.
ID sees it everywhere and claims it is undeniable and without redress in ToE.
ToE says that teleological inferences are simply unecessary for functional explanations of change and that they make no useful contribution to such explanations.

OK Jerry.
I was going to graciously withdraw at this point, but you have raised some issues I must address.However, I have to take my dinner out of the oven, but in the famous words of a famous governor...I'LL BE BAAAAAAACK.EZ

Here we are definitely on the same track. Evolution is not *against* teleology, but rather oblivious of, and impervious to it. There is no intrinsic requirement for any 'purpose' or 'guiding hand' to make evolution work. It is just superfluous to the theory as we actually apply it. As you yourself seem to appreciate : ...although I would probably take issue with any "natural purpose" you might propose. Brad, I am much more concerned that I am misreading yours

OK Jerry, Here we go. Well I don't agree. It may not always be reducable to simple mathematical formulae like gravitation and e=mc^2, but there have been many elegant formalizations of evolutionary ideas by those such as Fisher, Haldane, Sewall Wright, Maynard Smith etc. etc.
The nature of biology has emergent properties that render it more complex than physics and not nearly as 'reducable'.
And seeing that ID proponents want to criticize evolutionary theory as inadequate, they bear the burden of proof to present something more adequate.
In your previous message you essentially conceded that ID cannot be used to solve applied problems in biology, so it
doesn't seem very adequate yet. I am far more concerned that they learn the critical thinking skills that enable them to recognize what is false. That way they can come up with their own concepts of truth and escape the deceptions of dogmas. I could name scads of very specific and testable theories that are all derived from the basic Darwinian model. Let's just start with one. Evolution of insecticide resistance in insects.ToE would predict that repeated use of an insecticide on the same population would result in that population eventually becoming resistant because the treatment constitutes strong directional selection for resistance evolution. Based on this reasoning derived from ToE, we can predict that this process will be substantially delayed by rotating among different insecticides, but ONLY if they act via different modes of action at the molecular level.
Guess what? It works.
If it didn't, we wouldn't be left with very many useful insecticides to protect our crops and we would all be paying a heck of a lot more for our food. Credible to some, obviously, but not to those of us who want a theory we can actually test and make predictions from. It does. We call it 'life on Earth'. If you want to argue origins, you need to take on the physicists and astronomers over in the "Big Bang and Cosmology" forum.
ToE does not deal with origins, only processes.
And this is the crux of your (ID theorists') dissatisfaction with it, I suspect.
You want a theory of origins with teleogical purpose in processes to substantiate your religious convictions and Darwinism denies you both of these things.
But it still 'works' - and it is more powerful than any ID theory simply because it is actually useful and predictive. Because it does not constitute a viable alternative explanation of how things work.
It has no predictive power in applied biology.
You yourself have already conceded this. Or did you not say the following?

You know Mick I agree with you philosophically 100%.
And I have read Maynard's work in depth ever since I started studying evolution in the 70's (see my grey hair in the avatar )
and I have studied under the direct supervision of one of his students, Dr. Graham Bell, at McGill University.
Smith was one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century and his ideas have influenced me considerably.I guess I am willing to retreat from arguments about ToE explaining life origins because these ideas are much harder to defend against ID and creationist attacks that demand teleology, even if I intuitively agree that the theories you list probably represent the 'most likely scenario' for most of those events.I was stimulated to come on this board to defend evolution in light of the ridiculous controversy in our state here.
I felt I could do a better job of it by avoiding questions of origin, particularly 'final' origins sensu Mayr.
However, of your list, only (a) really falls into that category - and the kind of question I am trying to avoid - simply because I do not think it necessary to address in order to defend evolution as a functional theory.
All the other events on your list are eminently well explained by ToE and I would defend those explanations as currently superior to all others.Sorry for sounding like a wuss with Jerry.
I was just trying to get him to show that his theory is actaully useful for something. Maybe he will show up later today....

Hi Paul This statement reveals your intrinsic bias toward seeking ultimate causation for life, rather than being able to understand how and why it is subject to change.
Why should what happened first be more important that what happened afterward?
It would seem me to to be the other way round.It is what has happended since then that has generated all the diversity, and it is what will happen to that all that diversity now that should concern us.Evolutionary theory gives us all the important tools necessary for managing the biosphere and (hopefully) perpetuating our own existence as a species.
All that Creationism and ID can provide (to their adherents specifically) is a warm fuzzy feeeling that everything is going to happen according to design, and (for creationists) that it OK because the designer is benevolent and will secure for us a better afterlife.

I am not a molecular biologist, (I suspect you are) so I am not really qualified enough in the detailed aspects of molecular genetics to really give you a good discussion on most of these.But I am interested in the above topic, especially as it applies to sexual reproduction and internal fertilization in higher organisms.But I need to do some actual WORK here (I am at work, supposedly), but perhaps we can share some ideas on this topic soon...Cheers,
EZ

OK. We all have a right to focus on what interests us.
And I do find the topic interesting.
Just so difficult to get evidence for things that happened that far back.
You can start with experiments like the one Mick describes in MSG 68, bu teven if you are succesfull, people will claim that you stacked the deck, tweaked the starting condtions, failed to adequately replicate nature etc. etc. There just never seems to be resolution when it comes to theories of origins.I guess I prefer a research project that gives me hope for closure at some point

Hi Jerry,
I'm not retired yet, so I am going to have to make this my last reply for this afternoon (hopefully I can resist temptation ). I would argue you haven't falsified anything.
Evolution works perfectly well to explain how life changes and diverges.
If you want to say it shouldn't be taught, then you have to come up with something that serves its function as well or better.
ID, as we have established, cannot do that. 1. Darwin's observations on the Galapagos Islands.2. The Origin of Species and Descent of Man3. How about 165 volumes of American Naturalist for starters?
Almost every theoretical argument presented formally in this journal since 1867 has been based on evolutionary theory directly or indrectly. So these scientists were all wasting their time !?I think you are trying to discredit evolution by demanding something far too narrowly defined.
Useful scientific models of the world can be developed in more ways than just the sequential process you describe. They can be stated mathematically or verbally and still be testable and useful. Without interpreting that too literally, I would say there are probably several hundred published every day. I am working on a couple of my own right now.What in 'creation' has ID ever produced / explained / solved with respect to biological processes? Nothing - by your own admission. I don't need to twist it at all. If it can't solve problems in biology it is no good for anything to me or thousands of other biologists who have problems to solve and ROUTINELY use ToE insights to do so.It is just another unfalsifiable dogma developed for the sole purpose of infering teleology and challenging naturalism without providing any intellectual scaffold for making inferences at all, let alone superior ones.Evolutionary theory has provided insights critical to the level of agricultural productivity and quality of medical treatment we all enjoy today. ID theory provides only pipe dreams, not solutions. Now Jerry, you are twisting my words a bit.
I never said I didn't care about truth in science, I said I was *more* concerned with critical thinking about how to determine false-hoods.
For some reason they seem to outnumber truths by something like 100 or 1000 to 1. This controversy of which you speak is only in the minds of those who feel spiritually unsatisfied with the entirely naturalistic (and wholely satisfactory) explanations provided by ToE and feel spiritually driven to inject teleology into life sciences, however they can. Let's not split hairs. It is the whole ToE that is currently under attack in this state, not just Darwinism, although most of the creo's synonomize the two. Yes, It does. And there is no explanation more consistent with the huge body of evidence from completely independant lines of science than Darwinian evolution. These include geology, molecular genetics and paleontology just to name the most pertinent. I am beginng to think that's what it would take to convince you.
But we *do* watch species diverge into new species all the time. Just go over to my thread on "Macroevolution: Its all around us" for a bunch of very current examples. We begin by examining the fossil record and are able to produce a series of convincing intermediate forms from appropriate geological strata. So paleontology supports the inference.We examine living species of apes and humans morphologically in various stages of developmpent and find that various morphometric
measurements provide us with estimates of phylogenetic distance between humans and different primate lineages and find that conventional taxonomy supports the inference.We take blood samples from all primate lineages and humans and compare sequence homology of DNA and mitochondrial DNA and compare the phylogeneitc distances generated by these data to those generated by the other means and find that molecular genetics supports the inference (we still have > 95% of genetic sequences in common with chimps and we diverged from that lineage several hundred thousand years ago).Short of going back in time, we can only use *indirect* indicators to establish degrees of relationship and use these degrees of relationship to infer paths of descent. But the fact that very similar conclusions are converged upon by very different empirical approaches adds immensely to our confidence in the model.I might ask you how ID would go about establishing degrees of relationship, but of course you are going to say it doesn't concern itself with such 'biological' problems. Now Jerry, you are really starting to sound like a creationist.
I think I've just answered that.
Darwinian ToE (am I going to have to put "Darwinian" in front of 'ToE' all the time to keep you from getting slippery on me ?) is eminently powerful at predicting the results of all *observable* and *testable* experiments we can reasonable formulate with existing nature.
You will have to hang around some 100's of thousands of years to directly observe higher level taxa evolve.Your argument is a straw man because you are demanding direct observational evidence of processes that occur on geological time scales. You try to discount the power of ToE by saying that what we can observe and test is evolution, but not Darwinian evolution. No offense, but that is really a big cop out. Especially considering you admit that your theory has no explanations whatsoever to offer for any applied biological problems. Total creationist garbage. Another ploy that is getting really old, really fast.
To say evolutionary biologists disagree *about* ToE is like saying the automobile is a failed invention just because two car designers can't agree on the kind of tires to put on a particular model.
Because its an actual scientific theory, it is always being fine-tuned in highly specific areas. It evolves itself. It is not an immutable myth like creationism and ID theory.Sorry, but I am going to have to let some other evo gladiator step into the ring at this point. Like I said, I still have work to do, and as it happens, it is all based on [Darwinian] evolutionary precepts.Have fun Jerry.edited once for typos and minor grammar only - EZ.This message has been edited by Admin, 05-12-2005 04:24 PMThis message has been edited by EZscience, 05-12-2005 05:41 PM

To admin and everyone:First, let me apologize for being part of the problem for the digression.But you can see the problem here is a recurrent one.I am sure the ID'ists would love to debate their own theory on their own terms, but it has no real substantive structure for making biological inferences.The only way to demonstrate this is by comparing it functionally to ToE.
That is the 'gold standard' that ID seeks to replace, or at least displace.
ID is incapable of offering us the useful inferences that ToE can, but that can only be demonstrated by repeatedly resorting to examples of what ToE *can* do.I would love to debate the validity of ID theroy as it relates to some specific, tangible, biological example,
but it is a 'ghost theory' that seeks to exist as such, without accepting any burden of proof or responsibility for formulating any testable predictions regarding real world biological phenomena.JDB's comments on this thread are clear proof of that.In response to my requests in message 43: So I ask you, how can you debate the validity of a theory that refuses to make any testable predications about the living things it purports to explain without repeatedly refering back to a theory that does?EZThis message has been edited by EZscience, 05-14-2005 10:28 AM

Thank you Brad,So your opinion is that ID theoretically could be made compatable with ToE ?I see how you have mapped a geometric model taken from dielectrics onto a botanical example, but I am not convinced this demonstrates intentional design.Because this margo / torus structure is a natural phenomenon in dielectrics (and maybe other physical systems0, we might reasonably expect the same sort of structure to emerge through evolution in some sort of plant morphologies where it happens to represent a good solution to a physiological problem.Interesting, to be sure, but do you consider it evidence of design ? This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 05-14-2005 01:36 PMSorry - getting lazy again - title changed - EZ.This message has been edited by EZscience, 05-14-2005 03:01 PM

which >95 % of actual biologists will claim is founded on Darwinian ToE. Why does this concept seem to disturb you so much ?It has been explained in numerous threads that it is unreasonable to expect empirical testing of historical events in 'real' time . Get 'real' Jerry Maybe you would feel more comfortable with a world-class cladogram of insects 'morphing' into winged and wingless forms back and forth again ?
If you read this thread starting here you might learn something about how powerful inferences from evolutionary theory can actually be.We are are still waiting with baited breath for Inference No. 1 from ID theory.This message has been edited by EZscience, 05-14-2005 09:55 PM

I don't need to 'get away' from it.
Belief in a God or teleological forces doesn't prevent you from doing science. But the belief is not essential, or even relevant, to the science itself. This is a testable inference in biology how?
I suggest it makes a very nice description of ID theory development, but not a very good description of anything biological. So if the probability of some ID theory actually 'occurring' was '1' (because here it is), then it must contain '0' specificity ? Why? Because anything else would represent an unacceptable challenge to your predetermined religious convictions ? Do you remember anything from genetics and evolution? No, its because they didn't want to permit the slightest inference that ID had any credibility at all as an alternative to ToE. Don't you mean "mathematically *baked* up" ? Collins English Dictionary. Propaganda: 1. The organized dissemination of information, allegations etc. to assist or damage the cause of a government or movement.
Also: a congregation responsible for the directing of foreign missions and the training of priests for these.I think these definitions fit ID theory a lot better than ToE. But what are you actually standing *on*, Jerry, science or mysticism ?Sorry Jerry, I can only re-iterate my previous assertion about ID theory: