A thought on Intelligence behind Design

NosyNed: "The flagellum argument was that it COULD NOT have evolved. Thus showing that it could is enough to demolish that."ID is not based on proving the impossible. You think the flagellum evolved because it's merely possible? Where is the evidence that the flagellum DID evolve? Where is the evidence that it was random mutations and natural selection that evolved the flagellum?

That's a subjective judgement - even if we didn't have photographic evidence of the carving of Mount Rushmore, we could reasonably assume that it was carved by sculptors because we see sculptors today, carving things out of stone. That's a process we can observe to this day.We don't, on the other hand, observe any intelligent designers creating highly advanced life at this time. We don't observe gods waving things into being with irrational powers. What we do observe to this day are processes of random mutation and natural selection giving rise to complexity, so it in fact is highly reasonable to assume that they did so in the past, and that the diversity of life we see today is the result of only those processes.Show me god creating life right now, and I'll give that theory some credence.

Show me evidence for any alternative. Random mutation and natural selection is the simplest explanation.

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There's a sheer possibility that wind and water erosion could sculpt Mount Rushmore but not a realistic one.

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Hey, pure erosion sculpted a human face on Mars. You get enough planets out there randomly eroding their rocks, one of them's gonna wind up with something recognizable. It's the old poker analogy. What are the odds of getting a royal straight flush? Exactly the same as getting any other hand. There are just a lot more bum hand possibilities than there are winners.Yes, I'm just being a punk. But trying to make a point while doing so. "It's so unlikely" is not the same as "it's impossible". Quite the opposite, in fact, since "it's so unlikely" acknowledges a possibility, however remote.------------------
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Dan Carroll

While Dembski states that he does not argue for the LOGICAL impossibility of evolution accounting for the flagellum it is a fact that he does argue (poorly) that it is a PRACTICAL impossibility.Both the major arguments of ID - Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's filter argue against the possiblity of evlution.And both arguments have essentially failed.Behe has failed to adequately handle "indirect" evolution. He has never got beyond the assertion that it is too unlikely - an assertion which is certainyl questionable and requires support. After seven years it seems unlikely that even an attempt at support will be forthcoming.Dembski has failed to offer any practical method of applying his filter that does not amount to assuming that if we do not know how a particular feature evolved then it did not evolve.

Uh, no it didn't.http://barsoom.msss.com/education/facepage/face.html

Warren writes:

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William Dembski<< No genetic algorithm or evolutionary computation has designed a complex, multipart, functionally integrated, irreducibly complex system without stacking the deck by incorporating the very solution that was supposed to be attained from scratch.>>

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Dembski's wrong.Take a look at the latest Boeing 777. It was completely designed by computer. No human knows how it works. And given the extensive use of robotics in manufacturing these days, a goodly portion of the planes weren't even made by humans. Seems we've got a completely artificial development process going here.I love the claim of "stacking the deck." It implies that there is a conspiracy going on in the computer science field to keep programmers employed. Why on earth would somebody write a program to tell them what they already knew? That is, if your boss comes up to you and asks you what 2 + 2 is and you know it's 4, do you really think your boss is going to accept you taking a month to develop a computer program with all the bells and whistles that will tell you that 2 + 2 = 4? Especially when it's telling you that it's 4 not by actually performing the arithmetic but because you "stacked the deck" so that it simply spits out "4" whenever it sees the question, "What is 2 + 2?"The reason genetic algorithms and evolutionary programming work is precisely because the deck is not stacked. Dembski seems to think that providing constraints such as the way fluid dynamics works or gravity or structural coefficients is somehow forcing the specific answer to come out.Indeed...if we were to run these programs without those constraints, we wouldn't get the results that we get (indeed...the plans of the Boeing 777 were airplane-shape.) But then again, if we didn't tell the system about gravity, we wouldn't get a result that worked in an environment that has gravity. The reason a plane has wings is because there is gravity and wings provide lift to counteract the force of gravity. Remove gravity and you have little reason to have wings. In fact, they would become a liability as they would provide lift when you don't need it and you'd veer off course.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

Crashfrog<< That's a subjective judgement - even if we didn't have photographic evidence of the carving of Mount Rushmore, we could reasonably assume that it was carved by sculptors because we see sculptors today, carving things out of stone. That's a process we can observe to this day.>>What if Mount Rushmore was on the moon? What would you conclude produced it?

<< Take a look at the latest Boeing 777. It was completely designed by computer. >>Yeah, ID had nothing to do with it. Give me a break!

We're not talking about Mount Rushmore on the moon; we're talking about life on Earth. So answer me this - when faced with trying to figure out what process gave rise to something, which is better: to explain it through the action of process we observe and can test in the present time; or to explain through the action of entities no longer present and inaccessable to scientific inquiry?If you chose the latter you'd better have a good reason, because it's simply not good science.

This is not an example of a genetic algorithms. The design is a human one aided by tools but not replaced by tools as is the case with genetic algorithms.

'If you chose the latter you'd better have a good reason, because it's simply not good science. 'the universe and earth is so impressive , so brilliant ,so awesome i just think it is logical to assume there is intelligence behind it,is that really so bad ? and why must everything have to be tested by science.science is not the meaning of life,just the tool used to give us life.

PaulK << Both the major arguments of ID - Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's filter argue against the possiblity of evolution.And both arguments have essentially failed.>>Wrong and wrong. First of all, there is a difference between evolution and Darwinian evolution. In saying that irreducibly complex biochemical structures are inaccessible to Darwinian pathways, design proponents are saying that the Darwinian mechanism has no intrinsic capacity for generating such structures.All the ID critic is doing is invoking pure chance for the origin of a molecular machine and then challenging the ID proponent to prove it impossible. I don't blame them. It must be comfy when your hypotheses about the world only need to be possible. Then to have a brand of metaphysics that converts the possible into the actual, unless the possible is proven impossible, my, now that's luxury.

Warren responds to me:

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Take a look at the latest Boeing 777. It was completely designed by computer.

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Yeah, ID had nothing to do with it. Give me a break!

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I am.Are you saying the computer was intelligent?Or perhaps you're saying that the design for the Boeing 777 was "stacked" inside the program that created it and the computer programmers that put together the design program were just dicking around for all that time and sucking money out of Boeing in a conspiracy to keep themselves employed? "Pssst! Joe! I've got this great design for a new airplane. Yeah...down to the last wire. The bosses want a new plane but if we give them the design right now, we'll be out of a job in two weeks! Can you come up with a fancy program that'll spit this design out after taking a long time looking like it's doing calculations? Great."I recall an assignment in my computer science class from my undergrad days. It was to develop a program that found a knight's tour of a chessboard and then indicated whether or not it was cyclic. That is, given an input of a starting square and using only moves made by a knight, attempt to find a path that lands on every square exactly once and then see if you could land on the starting square from the ending square.So the first thing I do is model the chessboard. And I notice that not all squares on a chessboard are created equal. For example, the corner squares only have two possible moves for a knight. The further you get into the middle of the board, the more freedom of movement you have. Thus, to save time, I'll restrict movements based upon physical possibility so that the program doesn't try to move the knight off the board.But in doing so, it occurs to me that certain moves might be more likely to result in a knight's tour than others. Through some practice on my own, I happen to find a cyclic knight's tour of the chessboard and thus, I could constrain the results of all the squares to just two possible moves...one of which is not allowed since it's moving to the square you just came from.And thus, the program I turned in truly was a "stacked" program. No matter where you started on the chessboard, my program found a cyclic knight's tour.The same cyclic knight's tour.Every time.I got an A because the assignment didn't say that you had to develop an algorithm that would find the tour on its own, though many people wrote just such a program. You'd place the knight on a space and the program would systematically start moving the piece around, keeping track of the resultant path and if it found that it got stuck with no more moves but still not a complete path, it would backtrack to a spot where it had another choice and continue on the new path until it found a tour.Now, is this program "stacked"? I'd say no, though I'd point out that there are two possibilities for such a program.One is that it has a rule for how to go about finding paths. That is, when it lands on a square, it might always do an "up two, right one" move first and if that move is not allowed, do a "right two, up one" move, and so on around the square, trying to find a legitimate move.Such a program will always find you the same tour given a specific starting square. Why? Because it has a methodical approach that is always used in exactly the same way. There is no randomness involved. However, this program is not "stacked" because the tour you find is dependent upon where you start. My program always gave you the same tour no matter where you started. The choice of square, since the tour returned was cyclic, simply noted where on the cycle you started, not which cycle you found.But there is a way to have the program find unique tours even for identical start positions: Have it randomly choose squares. That is, instead of having it always start by trying the "up two, right one" move, have it randomly choose one of the eight possible moves until it finds one that it can use.Since the knight is moving randomly (though constrained by the rules that no square be landed on more than once and not moving the knight off the board), you can find multiple tours of the board given a single starting position.In neither case does the program know what the tour is like it did in my program, though. The program is figuring it out for itself. The only thing the program knows how to do is move the knight and how to keep track of which squares have already been landed on.So tell me, Warren: How do those programs count as having "stacked the deck"? I thoroughly admit that my program was stacked. If the boss had come to me and asked me to find a cyclic knight's tour of a chessboard, I should have simply written down the path that I found and turned it in. For me to spend another three days writing a program to spit out what I had already found would be a huge waste of time.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

It's only bad if that belief is so strong you won't listen to evidence to the contrary.Haven't you ever seen clouds that you thought were beautiful, or funny? Just because you thought they were neat, does that have to mean that an intelligence was there to make them just for you to look at? Isn't it much more likely that your thoughts about impressiveness, awesomeness, and beauty are just in your head? because science is a filter that separates out what we think it should be, what we'd like it to be, what we need it to be, and leaves us only with information about what is. In that sense, science is the best way to find out anything that can be known.