Biological Evidence Against Intelligent Design

Hi, Modulous. I agree.----- This is kind of the point of my argument: ID is not a single hypothesis. You can't list evidences against a specific hypothesis and claim that it refutes the principle behind a whole suite of related hypotheses.That's the only point I have.----- A heuristic that governs how one makes inferences.

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

Hi, Straggler. Stop there: this is the part that I asked you to explain before, but you didn't explain it this time.We both know that there's no reason to think something that was created cannot evolve. Furthermore, we both also know that, e.g., transgenic bacteria (which are clearly designed in some sense of the word) can evolve after they've been altered, and can be altered by design after millions of years of evolution. So, clearly the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.Proving that things evolve does not prove that there have been no aspects of design along the way. It could very well be the case that future scientists, with much better genomic tools than us, will come to recognize non-random insertions or alterations to the genome, and will have accumulated enough knowledge to ascribe these anomalies to a guided process.While I doubt that this will be the case, we do not currently have the evidence or the technological capability to make such a determination, so it is best to consider positive evidence for evolution to simply be positive evidence for evolution, and not to be negative evidence against ID.In the interim, the only evidence we have against ID is an absence of evidence for ID, which, while certainly a valid, logical reason to not bother supporting ID, is also a valid, logical reason to consider this thread's approach impotent.This is why a "more generic form" of those same arguments will not refute the concept behind the ID movement.

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

Hi, Modulous. I see what you're getting at.It's always been my custom to treat science much more tentatively than most scientists do. I'm always hesitant to consider any "God of the gaps" argument defeated or refuted, particularly when the reason for dismissing it is because there is evidence for another process with which the gap-argument could very easily coexist.If an argument is that literally everything has a teleological origin, then Darwinism defeats that argument pretty soundly.But, if the argument is only that teleology plays a role in the origin of things, and does not have to be the only process involved, that is an entirely different concept to work with, and does require much more extensive refutation to defeat.Naturally, it depends on how much teleology is involved in the particular model being discussed. And, I see no reason why an argument that is 90% stochastic processes and 10% teleology (such as some variants of Old Earth Creationism) couldn't be called "Intelligent Design."----- I can accept that. But, I think, in this case, this is a given, though: since the alternative is "stochastic, unguided processes," then "something else" is invariably teleological.----- I was pretty proud of it myself. Okay, so I completely misread the intent behind that sentence... My bad.I was referring to Occam's razor.

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

Hi, Straggler. I have already answered this question twice. What else do you want me to say?There are plenty of potential roles for the designer nestled deep within the gaps in our knowledge about biology and natural history.Now, it is perfectly logical for us to infer that, if and when these gaps are filled, they will be filled with evidence for evolution, but this is still just inference.There is no evidence there, either for or against evolution or design.

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

Hi, Modulous. I’m uncomfortable with the way this statement portrays me as having an active role in all this. I haven’t constructed it in any way, am not specifying anything, and am not pleading for anything, either.I’m only looking at a concept and pointing out the inescapable, logical consequences of it. If the argument were that life was zapped to Earth via a wormhole, or that some organisms can evolve in a Lamarckian fashion, I would likewise be saying that there is no evidence against this argument, and that this thread would be a waste of time.Here’s what I mean: We could also say that the "jump" between corn and transgenic Bt corn has been shown to not be a jump insurmountable to evolution, based on the same set of evidence used to make the demonstrations you suggest; yet, we know that Bt corn was perpetrated by a team of intelligent designers.However, if the genome of Bt corn’s evolutionary descendants (were it not a sterile hybrid) and a handful of fossils were the only evidence left of it, future paleontologists could, using your reasoning, reasonably argue that there is no need to propose Monsanto to explain Bt corn. And they would never know the difference.The point is simply that Intelligent Design is innately an unsupportable and irrefutable concept, regardless of how it is constructed. There are simply too many variables and unknowns about the nature of design for us to list things that can be meaningfully considered evidence for or against design.

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

Hi, Straggler. Boy, you loaded those questions, didn't you?Why do you think I'm arguing any of those things (except the first one: I obviously am arguing that in some sense)?Have I given you reason to believe that I consider Occam's razor unjustifiable?Have I given you reason to believe that I disagree with presently-constituted school curricula?Is there anything I can say that will convince you that I'm only trying to distinguish between evidence and inference, and not trying to prove that one of those two things is flawed?----- Are you really having trouble understanding that designed things can evolve? Or that designers can work on evolved things?Are you really saying that evidence of some things arising through random mutations is evidence that all things arose through random mutations?Are you really saying that evidence of some things arising through random mutations is evidence that nothing was influenced by a designer?(See, I can do it too)Edited by Bluejay, : "questions" instead of "statements"

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

Hi, Straggler. You did in Message 90. That’s what I was referring to.----- And, I have been ignoring this portion of your arguments, because you yourself said these were outside the purview of this thread.I instead chose to focus on these comments by you: And you still haven't explained to me why you think ID and evolution are mutually exclusive. You have instead tried to divert my attention to the mutual exclusivity of actual ID and psychogenic ID.It is precisely because ID and evolution are not mutually exclusive that I think this thread’s approach is impotent. That has been the whole point of my argument since I joined this thread, and you have so far not even acknowledged my arguments in support of this.Why do you think that things cannot be a mix of evolved and designed traits?
If you don’t think this, then why are you still debating against me?----- I'm not advocating anything. I don't think ID has any real logical merit, don't really find it appealing, and don't care to support it. But, I think the approach being advocated by the OP is flawed and impotent in tackling ID, and should never have been proposed.

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

Hi, Straggler. There isn’t a rule that says all things have to have the same cause.I am saying that some traits can be designed, even if others are evolved; and, that designed traits can be changed over time via random mutation and natural selection.This is an extremely simple point, Straggler: I'm having trouble believing that you're actually not understanding it. Not only is it extremely simple, it's also extremely crucial to my entire point: intelligent design is not mutually exclusive with evolution, because intelligently designed organisms can evolve, and evolved organisms can have some aspects of design.This is why I have been arguing that evidence for evolution does not count as evidence against intelligent design, unless that evidence is universal (i.e., unless it can account for the origin of literally every trait). If the evidence falls short of universal, we must then fall back on Occam's razor to fill in the gaps.I'm only complaining about the way this thread is set up: I have no complaints about the scientific method, no complaints about the Theory of Evolution as currently constituted, no complaints about educational curricula, no complaints about philosophical biases, no complaints about Occam's razor, and no complaints about the scientific community.It's just that, any evidence that fits the criteria set forth by this thread will either be something that could also happen to a designed organism, or require some presuppositions about the designer that are not held universally among all ID proponents.

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

Hi, Straggler. But, you have to say that there is in order to set up the dichotomy that you’ve been repeating in every reply to me on this thread. If things can have two different causes, then you can’t use positive evidence for one cause as negative evidence against the other cause being true in some other situation.----- You added a couple of important words since last time: facts and ALL. I certainly don’t teach that common ancestry of ALL species is a fact. I suspect that it’s accurate, and I teach it as a valid and well-supported theory, but I do not teach it as a fact.And, those aren’t facts, anyway. They weren’t taught to me as facts in school, as far as I remember (maybe they were in fourth grade, or something, but I don’t remember that). But, I don’t want to talk about education: I just want to talk about science.The fact is that we currently theorize that ALL species evolved from a common ancestor by means of natural selection and random mutations because of evidence that shows that SOME species evolved from a common ancestor by means of natural selection and random mutations, and, using Occam’s razor, we can infer that the conclusions from this evidence apply to other species as well.There isn’t really evidence that ALL species evolved from a common ancestor randomly/naturally, but we conclude that they did because of what we saw in SOME species. But, there’s always the possibility that we will find something that was designed among the millions of things that evolved naturally.So, ID and evolution can both be working simultaneously. Therefore, evidence that X evolved is not evidence that Y wasn’t designed; and, evidence that both X and Y evolved is not evidence that Z wasn’t designed. And so on.That means that the evidence approach advocated by this thread can only win through a war of attrition, because evolution and ID are not mutually exclusive. Any other approach requires an application of inferential reasoning.

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

Hi, Straggler. I can’t give you a straight answer, because this is a mishmash of things I agree with and things I disagree with. I have tried to explain this, but it apparently just comes off to you as accusations, and does nothing to convince you to refine your question. Let me lay out my problems for you again:

1. Education: I do not feel that I was taught evolution in the manner you propose (i.e. alone or as fact), so I don’t really know how I’m supposed to respond to this. I requested that we leave education out of this (it’s not the topic, anyway) and focus instead on science itself, but you didn’t even acknowledge that request, let alone give me an explanation for why you won’t respond to it.
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2. Facts: You’re not referring to facts: you’re referring to theories. Facts are not logical conclusions, they are observations that your conclusions are supposed to explain. I don’t want to agree with the facts thing and risk setting off some creationist lurker who wants to argue that evolution is just a theory!
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3. Alone/All: Most importantly, this question does not allow any sort of hybridization or gradation between the extremes. In effect, you are denying me the option of using my own argument to answer your question. I advocate the teaching of evolution alone, because it is the only explanation for which there is evidence, not because there is evidence that it is the only explanation. There is a very important difference there.

You can't expect me to give a straight answer to a question that employs a premise that I think is false, requires me to implicitly accept a controversial usage of a term that has caused much strife on this very site, and assumes that my primary argument is wrong from the get-go.Surely you should expect me to raise these objections in place of answering your question, right?But, if you prefer that I just jump through your hoops anyway, please let me know so we can get on with it.
Otherwise, at least acknowledge my objections (particularly the third one) before you repeat your question next time.

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

Hi, Straggler.I can’t allow you to take ALL the blame. SOME of it is your fault, for sure, but not ALL of it. I don’t really disagree with any of it, because you didn’t really address the stuff I’m trying to get at. This is where you missed it here: But, we can be agnostic about the possibility that SOME of the differences between humans and apes were directed or mediated by intelligent design.----- I would only feel the need to mention things that are evidenced.The struggle I would have is in explaining random mutations. Randomness is not something that can really be evidenced, per se: we use it to describe a pattern of occurrence of things, not the causation. For instance, if some mutations were caused by God, some by Satan, some by aliens from Alpha Centauri, some by aliens from Betelgeuse, and some by various unguided processes, the pattern we would see would still be considered random overall. So, these could still technically be called random mutations.I don’t think I would try to address that in a classroom setting, though, unless it was a class dedicated to such theoretical or philosophical analysis.

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

Hi, Straggler. I was just trying to parallel the syntax of your statement: I hadn’t actually thought about it in that much detail. I never considered the possibility that agnostic might be a technical term in formal logic. I suppose I thought of agnostic as meaning acknowledgement of the uncertainty and hesitance to commit in the presence of uncertainty. I don’t think probabilities entered my mind at all while I was writing that.Also, am I saying that it is equally probable that what occurred, exactly? Natural history? The erect posture of hominids? The substitution of G for C at position 478 in gene X? Scale is critical here. Your probabilities are drawn on a broad scale (the history of life, diversity or life, etc.), and my arguments are based on a narrow scale (individual features): I think this is a major source of our communicative failures so far. There will always be questions about how well broad-scale probabilities apply to narrow-scale problems, because broad-scale dynamics tend to swamp out narrow-scale dynamics.If intelligent design was responsible for a relatively small number of events in natural history, wouldn’t these events just appear* as outliers or blips, which we can ignore for all practical intents and purposes? *If they appear at all, that is.For instance, Kaichos Man pointed out that a certain human gene is more similar to the kangaroo variant of that gene than it is to the horse variant (he got some of the particulars wrong). On the broad scale, this means nothing, because it is completely swamped out by hordes of genetic evidence showing that humans have a closer kinship with horses than with kangaroos. But, on the narrow scale, we still haven’t explained why that particular gene is more kangaroo-like than horse-like. Sure, we can disregard it: it’s just a blip, and it doesn’t really challenge the overarching theory, anyway. But, the intelligently-designed Bt-endotoxin gene in transgenic corn would also appear as such a blip, and also wouldn’t challenge the overarching theory if future paleontologists noticed it.Should future paleontologists just ignore that blip and assume that evolution is wholly responsible? For all practical intents and purposes, sure, why not?Saying that we can ignore something for all practical purposes isn’t the same as saying that we have evidence against it. I don’t think I have tried to make the case that we shouldn’t ignore intelligent design for practical purposes (if I have made that case, it was unintentional): I thought I was only making the case that we can’t seriously claim that evidence for evolution is evidence against ID.----- Sure, from a practical standpoint, we can generally ignore ID and pretend it isn’t going to happen.But, we’re talking about making lists of evidence against ID, not about ignoring it because there is no evidence for it.----- If I currently had a teaching position, I probably would face the question often. But, since I’m a doctoral student funded by a research assistantship, I’m not doing any teaching right now, and I don’t recall having encountered many questions like this from my peers or superiors.So... thanks for warning me ahead of time and giving me the chance to prepare mentally for it. When I face a question about gaps in my personal knowledge, I prefer not to answer the question. However, peers and professors will often ask for speculation or hypotheses on some things (usually from the standpoint of preparing or correcting an experimental design or for a line to put into a presentation), and I might be inclined to provide them. But, I’m very sensitive to subjective opinions and excessive reliance on inferences, so I’m generally very explicit about my confidence in and evidentiary support for anything I say.

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

Hi, Straggler. I forgot to address this in my last post.I don’t accept the implicit premise that intelligent design must be non-naturalistic. It’s possible to design things while staying fully within the limitations of the laws of physics.Perhaps this is where we’re losing each other?

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

Hi, Modulous. What is the difference between the two parts I bolded?Edited by Bluejay, : Better wording.

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

Hi, Taq. So, if I showed you this mutation (parent on top, daughter beneath)... ...you could tell me what caused it?{AbE: maybe I shouldn't have said you, specifically, but the point is still there.}----- Agreed. But, randomness only describes the pattern of occurrence. Intelligently-designed things can still occur in a random pattern (I realize that "random pattern" is sort of a contradiction in terms).Edited by Bluejay, : Disclaimer.

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