Biological Evidence Against Intelligent Design

ID is dead, and indeed it never really lived to begin with. It is a religio-political movement designed to get around certain American laws (and the side effect is that it gets past some other nation's laws too) regarding secular teaching. It has been demonstrated to rely on lies, misrepresentation, mathemagics and so on. In this - it is no different from creationism.Teleology (the argument from or study of design in nature) was dealt a fatal blow with Darwinism where we learned that complicated looking things can arise naturally through certain processes.And that's the real evidence against Teleology: Awesome things can come about without the need for a plan or design.Of course, like many philosophical position it can be patched up. Like a philosophical zombie it raises its head. So what if it can all happen without seeming to need a plan....What if that was the way it was designed all along? Yes! It was designed to look undesigned! Of course! ^*And with that magic unfalsifiable wand armchair philosophers like to go wild.It's entirely pointless. "You can't prove it's wrong." is all very fine - but it isn't anyway to conduct an investigation into anything.The Biological Evidence (tm) against Teleology is in, Darwin figured it out over a century ago. No genius will ever prove the unfalsifiable as false. All that seems to be left is a bankrupt sense of desperation.

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^* You will also see this stellar reasoning in pubs when it comes to another topic: Conspiracy Theories. Of course there is no evidence that Dodi brought down the WTC - that's exactly how he planned it!

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.

No you can't assume it is false. We agree. It remains a logical possibility. Along with all of the other near infinite unevidenced but logically possible and irrefutable explanations for said phenomenon. But are all possibilities equally likely?If an objectively un-evidenced claim is competing with another mutually exclusive and highly objectively evidenced alternative can we not rationally conclude that one is more likely to be true than the other?Even if the unevidenced claim remains unrefuted (and indeed quite possibly inherently irrefutable).

Depends on how mutual their exclusivity is, I guess.Like, evolution doesn't rule out a designer so you can't use the evidence for evolution to determine the likelyhood of the designer.

Well let's take the example of man's evolution by natural selection and random mutation. Is that scientific theory compatible with evolution by godly non-random caused mutation to intentionally result in humankind? Or are those ideas mutually exclusive in your opinion? Can we ever actually refute that there was such godly interference? If not should we be rationaly agnostic about such interference? Or is defacto atheism regarding the role of god in human evolution rationally warranted because we have a plausible and evidenced naturalistic alternative? It rules out a designer that designed things (e.g biological organisms) as they are now. I would argue that the current scientific theory of evolution by natural selection and random mutation rules out a god that had a very non-random end plan for the forms of life as well. So some designers are indisputably ruled out. Whilst others are maybe not. What is the role in of the most interfering kind of designer that it does not rule out in your opinion?What do you make of Micheal Behe's form of ID? Irreducible complexity at the molecular level. Can we disprove or refute that god designed life at the molecular level? Or are our arguments against this form of ID based on invoking more evidenced (and thus likely?) genuinely scientific alternatives rather than direct refutations?If we cannot actually refute godly interference at the molecular (or indeed any other) level should we be rationally agnostic about it? Or is it rationally OK to be defacto atheists about the role of god in directly guiding evolution if we have a plausible and evidenced naturalistic alternative explanation? Yes. That is effectively my question to you. If there is an evidenced naturalistic explanation for something is that mutually exclusive enough to rationally warrant that we reject the unevidenced IDistic alternative as "unlikely"?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

What observations could we make that would distinguish between evolution with a theistic input and evolution without a theistic input?Assuming for the moment that this deity is all powerful and all knowing, we could dream up of millions of scenarios where the observations would be different. For example, there is no reason that a deity would be forced to put an ERV at the same location in both humans and orangutans, or even put ERV's into genomes to begin with. There are millions of scenarios where theistic input could result in a non-nested hierarchy. Heck, with theistic input there is no reason that we should even use the same codons as any other lifeform.So why is it that we observe patterns of DNA homology that match the predictoins made by the theory of evolution without any need for an outside force? We know that there is no reason that a deity would need to follow these rules of homology, and in fact human designers violate these rules at will, and often (I have even done it myself).You are asking if we can tell the difference between aerodynamic lift without magical pixies and aerodynamic lift with magical pixies who follow the rules of aerodynamics as a description of how airplanes fly. How would you tell the difference in this case?

That is due to the endless numbers of designers that one could imagine. However, we can look for evidence that runs counter to a rational, single designer that thinks and designs like us who is not concerned with making designs which mimic natural processes to the last detail. Simply put, we can rule out God minus Omphalos type assumptions. This is the type of designer that is falsified by atavisms, vestiges, and the nested hierarchy.

I am going to try to redirect a bit if I might.First of all, I did not intend to try to DISPROVE anything. What I asked for in the OP was biological evidence against ID. You CAN have biological evidence against special creation and ID (really one and the same) without having the burden of disproof. Just as we can have lots of biological evidence that supports evolution, yet evolutionary biologists, like all scientists avoid using the term proof. On the other hand we can certainly make a strong case against something like irreducible complexity by looking at the biological evidence. And in so doing we make a strong case against ID because evolution provides a more plausible explanation of the complexity we observe. Plus we can point to lots of biological evidence that only makes sense when viewed through the prism of evolution and thus we accept evolution. The only other alternative is to conjure up a trickster God - one who "plants evidence". The only Intelligent Designer that makes any sense is the one who is either incredibly inept or a cynic who likes to play tricks on people just for amusement. We are not creating and destroying straw men here. The ID proponents have created the argument. All we are doing is showing why, if one considers the biological evidence, it has so little going for it that for all practical purposes we can be confident that it is false.

Yes, it can rule out some designers. How do you know they're actually random? Oh fuck, I don't know. I just wanted to make a simple point in passing.How would you rule out Jesus magically causing (non-random) a mutation in E. coli so that it could digest nylon? Heh, everytime the expirement is performed... maybe not the best example.But I don't know where to draw the line.

Because mutations are observed to be random (with respect to fitness). The processes by which mutations occur are random, be they from external sources such as radiation and carcinogens or internal sources such as mistakes made by polymerases that duplicate the genome.Other experiments have found that mutations which lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria occur in the absence of antibiotics, and the same for phage resistance. There is no meaningful connection between the processes that create mutations and what is beneficial for the organism. What would allow you to rule it in?

Its not ruled in, or out. The evidence doesn't say one way or the other (although for this example specifically it might).The point was that the evidence for evolution isn't necessarily evidence against a designer. Okay. If we can prove the randomness then more (specific) designers will be ruled out.

If the Pixies are suitably magical and choose to be undetectable you can't tell the difference. That is the point.As I understand it according to RAZD and CS we should therefore be logically agnostic about this possibility because it cannot actually be refuted. The evidenced mutually exclusive alternative is not sufficiant grounds upon which to dismiss the Pixie proposal as "very unlikely".As for me? - Well I am all for dismissing the Pixies as one possibility of an infinite number of equally unevidenced and evidentially nonsensical but nevertheless logically possible answers and going with the physically evidenced conclusions of science regarding aerodynamic lift.But let's hear what RAZ and CS actually say rather than take my word for it.

What are you suggesting as a viable alternative to random?Random is what we teach in science classrooms. So are you saying that we are teaching kids unevidenced philosophically biased evidentially groundless information when we tell them that evolution occurs by natural selection and random genetic mutation? Should we tell them about all of the logically possible alternatives to "random"?I know you are not an ID as science advocate. I know that. I am jusy trying to get you to think about this and what it means in practise. How do we rule out any deity of any sort imaginable doing anything imaginable? If suitably magical/powerful and undetectable then logically we can't rule it out. There are an infinite number of things that we cannot refute the irrefutable doing. So where does that leave us?I would argue it leaves any such claim in the defacto atheist "very unlikely" category. But what do you think? Well isn't that something of a problem if you want to invoke the supernatural to explain some things and not others? Sorry.............(ish )Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Oh come now. The designer(s) move in mysterious ways. Mere humans are incapable of comprehending or sometimes even recognising the great plan.