Biological Evidence Against Intelligent Design

Hi, Hooah. If we're going to include this, let's also ask why the designer didn't include the following: I think you understand what I'm getting at. We could rail all day on the imperfections and vulnerabilities of the human body, and claim it to be evidence against Intelligent Design. Eventually, the discussion would get completely absurd (e.g. unbreakable bones).We'd have to propose either that an Intelligent Designer must have made our anatomy with no flaws (which would probably require a different system of physical laws), or that a Designer must have made our anatomy with an essentially arbitrary number of imperfections.Then, we'd have to start asserting back-and-forth that a Designer should prefer perfection or imperfection, and we'd only end up talking about why a Designer would want to create something in the first place.-----Taq already beat me to the point I was going to make next, but I put a lot of effort into it, and I'm not about to remove it just because I was ninja'd.To me, the hallmarks of Intelligent Design have nothing to do with the prevalence of imperfections.Rather, the hallmarks would have to do with the process of Design.How does an intelligent being design things? Would it take a template and shape the gestalt in different directions? Or, would it mix and match different parts and generally make stuff up from the ground-up each time?Well, how do humans (our model intelligence for all other ID discussions), design things?Ancient humans made up centaurs, griffins, dragons and fairies: composites of pre-existing things.Our technological designs are also very modular. A spear became a bow-and-arrow by adding a bow and feathers to the spear’s tail end. The bow and arrow became a crossbow by adding a stock and a crank. The stock of a crossbow, combined with a tube and explosive, makes a gun. The same tube, combined with the spear, makes a harpoon gun. While our weapons do evolve over time, they evolve in a modular fashion as much as in a gradualistic fashion, with a lot of mixing and matching happening along the way.For a more modern example, here is a list of aircraft that used the Rolls Royce Merlin engine during World War II. The list includes aircraft with one engine, two engines and four engines; bomber aircraft and various types of fighter aircraft; basically, you can find the Rolls Royce Merlin engine in aircraft that essentially share nothing else in common. And, while there were many variants of the Merlin engine, you could find any one variant distributed across any number of different aircraft: for instance, the Merlin XX was used in the single-engined Hawker Hurricane fighter and the four-engined Avro Lancaster bomber.If life was designed intelligently, we may still see the gradualism, but I would expect to see at least some modularity, some mixing of parts, combining of old ideas to make new, hybrid ideas, and complete restructuring of old ideas to make new ones. For instance, I would expect to see something like the occasional mammal with snake fangs; or a reptile with bat wings; or maybe a whale with squid tentacles. But, traits always stay within their group, and they seem to be strongly associated with other traits. The very fact that we can even group things according to clusters of characteristics suggests to me that what is happening does not, in any way, mirror the process of design that is utilized by the only model of intelligence that we know.Edited by Bluejay, : "Their." Ugh.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Cat. This is somewhat a misnomer that's popular with evolutionists.Cephalopod eyes aren'treally any better than human eyes. There are a couple of things that cephalopod eyes do better than mammal eyes, but there are also a couple of things that mammal eyes do better than cephalopod eyes (e.g. cephalopod vision is monochromatic).

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, RAZD. Just to clarify, are you saying that the evidence for this type of design would be indistinguishable from the evidence for Darwinian evolution? Or that this design process would actually be Darwinian evolution?I don't understand how Darwinian evolution could be a means to accomplish any specifiable goal: perhaps you could walk me through this?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, RAZD.This sounds like a simulation of evolution, the output of which serves as the blueprint for the manufacturer/builder.If this were the case, would we actually see intermediates in the fossil record? Wouldn't all of those only exist in the simulation?Does that mean that we are the simulation? Wouldn't we then expect to see some fiddling with the simulation's parameters?Also, the only goal that I could see Darwinian evolution achieving is the goal of designing things that survive and reproduce successfully.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Greyseal. I think the whole point of RAZD's argument is that Occam's Razor, by itself, is not evidence of anything: it's just our means of drawing conclusions when we have no evidence.The thread is about finding evidence that refutes ID, and RAZD is saying that this can't be done. If ID is untestable, then it is untestable, and the conclusion of this thread should rightly be that there is no biological evidence against Intelligent Design.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Greyseal. I understand perfectly. And, I agree with you. And that's why I agree with him that this thread's central concept is invalid on its face.----- You can't force IDists to have a falsifiable theory, and, if they don't have one, then we just can't use an empirical, scientific approach to disprove it. Yeah, it's frustrating; but those are the breaks.Our only recourse is to either focus only on the positive evidence for evolution, for abiogenesis, etc.; or restrict our arguments to specific ID models that are falsifiable (e.g., irreducible complexity, biblical "kinds," genetic entropy, the Flood, etc). I would be a proponent of this approach.Otherwise, all we'll get from this thread is unjustifiable confidence in what amounts to an argument from incredulity, and the hollow satisfaction of beating up on strawmen.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Greyseal. Well, it's essentially Deism, and it's thematically similar to Old Earth Creationism. There are IDists who accept the general principles of evolution, but not Abiogenesis. And, some well-known IDists follow similar models: Behe, for example, accepts evolution, but includes the occasional input from a Designer as a requirement.----- Which one? There is no central model of ID that can simply be assumed when you mention the name! Creationists have come up with many variants of ID, and, when you just say, "ID," every one of them is going to think you're talking about something different.Unless you specify which particular branch of the movement you're talking about, there will always be a subgroup that can withstand your criticism. Most branches can be falsified by specific arguments, but none of the specific arguments work against the gestalt.----- None of these things is evidence against a Designer, though.Even created things can be killed; and things that can be killed can go extinct.Men may have nipples because it was easier, more efficient and more sensible to design one process of embryogenesis for both sexes than to make two different ones.I've never heard of alligator blood being better than human blood, and don't see how that would go against ID anyway: birds fly a lot better than we do, fish swim a lot better than we do, bees sting a lot better than we do, mushrooms digests cellulose than we do, polar bears survive cold temperatures better than we do, and alfalfa grows back after severe injuries better than we do. What does any of that prove?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Taq. RAZD's scenario has the Designer setting the equations beforehand, then letting it go. So, in RAZD's scenario, gravity is gravity. Intelligent falling is hilarious, but it's not the same as what RAZD is suggesting.----- But, IDists don't believe that everything goes against the regular process of the mindless laws of the universe, so no amount of evidence of things following the regular process of the mindless laws of nature is going to disprove ID.----- Good point there. But, Occam's Razor is still not evidence.Since that's the only thing we have, I guess it makes sense for you to want to go back to making jokes and beating up on strawmen instead.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, RAZD. I don't know if I would go this far. Occam's razor is still an important heuristic in logical and scientific thought: I just think it's important to remember the difference between what is evidence and what isn't; and between what evidence can actually do, and what it can't.It isn't because of evidence that we can conclude that ID is wrong: it's because of evidence + parsimony. And, because of that, the conclusion is tentative.So, to be technically correct, you're right: we shouldn't rule it out as a possibility. But, it's most logical to work under the tentative assumption that it's not there until we find some bit of evidence that it is.But, the notion that any particular biological feature or phenomenon is evidence against the fundamental concept of design is just wrong.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Modulous. Isn't this the same logical principle that's used in the Pasteur argument against Abiogenesis? Incidentally, we also know that complicated-looking things can be designed by intelligent beings, so this still isn’t evidence against intelligent design. It’s a logical reason to not conclude intelligent design, but it isn’t evidence; and it won’t ever be evidence.The argument will always revert to positive evidence for evolution (e.g. nested hierarchies, conserved features, vestigial traits), with the (perfectly reasonable and justifiable) inclusion of the parsimony heuristic to complete the argument. If we’re not allowed to include parsimony, then RAZD is right. Thus, there is no evidence against the principle of intelligent design.----- But, that’s not the same thing. They build their models to incorporate some level of non-design (e.g. microevolution). So, things that look undesigned are undesigned in many, if not all, ID models.Unfortunately, that means that we have to provide evidence that absolutely everything was undesigned before the principle of ID is disproven. So, we can certainly find evidence that specific things are undesigned, and that specific types of design do not happen, but we cannot legitimately say that these things are evidence against all existing ID models.We all at least have to acknowledge that our arguments rely on heuristic as much as they do evidence. That’s what logic and science are! And, I don’t really see this as a flaw: it’s just that we need to recognize it for what it is.Edited by Bluejay, : Bold and italics

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Taq. Most IDists accept that some amount of Darwinian evolution happens, so atavisms, vestiges and nested hierarchies can still happen naturally under most ID models.Extensive nested hierarchies that include all life could go a long way to disproving most ID models, but, if the Designer only shows up here and there to tweak the system toward a certain goal, and simply lets it go otherwise, we wouldn't see much deviating from naturalistic expectations. But, this also isn't an omphalos hypothesis, because it's not design made to look like non-design: it's non-design with a few alterations along the way.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Mod. My point was that you can't prove a universal negative.No amount of observations of life coming from other life will prove that life never came from nonlife.No amount of observations of complicated things coming from natural processes will ever prove that complicated things never came from non-natural processes.----- Agreed. But, the concept of this thread wasn't "evidence against this certain biological entity being designed because of its complexity," it was, "flaws in the modern human body that prove that it wasn't designed."My point is that flaws in the human body do not prove that it wasn't designed according to ID, so the thread amounts to beating on a strawman.----- If you find beating on a strawman to be more interesting, then, by all means, let's continue this thread, but not under the pretenses of it having any sort of logical merit to it.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Modulous. I don't see how this is the case, though. If the design argument was that things were designed exactly as they are and cannot change over time, you would have a point. But, that is not the model that most IDists support. Perhaps IDists used to think that that was the case, but virtually none do anymore. You can hardly blame them for adapting their model in the face of new evidence.You can call it an uninteresting zombie, if you want, and I don't disagree that it's lost its explanatory power... but, ultimately, the only evidence here is evidence that supports evolution, not evidence that refutes ID. We can only really refute ID by heuristic. I don't really have a problem with this: what I have a problem with is trying to make a heuristic out to be evidence.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Straggler. How are evolution and ID mutually exclusive?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Modulous. My complaint here is that, even if design were correct, I can’t think of anything that could objectively be considered evidence fordesign without making some sort of presupposition about the methodology, goals, nature and/or psyche of the designer, and thus, ruling out some possible designers by default. IDists think complexity has something to do with it, but quantifying complexity is tricky, and drawing lines between design and non-design is impossible, even for things that we know are designed.So, even if design were correct in some way, what evidence would there be? Inevitably, people, such as you, will point out all the positive evidence for evolution, but this only rules out some designer templates, and leaves others untouched. The lack of specificity about the designer prevents us from arguing against the concept, and only allows us to argue against certain templates.And, also, you’re restricting your arguments to feature x, which can work on a local scale for things like mollusc eyes, whose plausible evolutionary sequence we can see in living organisms. However, this argument can only be applied to other features---such as insect wings (which are still unexplained)---by inferential heuristic.I don’t have a problem with using this methodology. But, I do have a problem with calling it evidence.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.