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Intelligent design's predictions

No Von...
I'm not going to play the "intelligent design" game with you and the assorted undercover and blatant "intelligent design" proponents on this thread. That isn't my "proof". Occam just makes unnecessary and vastly improbable since all consciousness we know of requires a living brain hooked up to sensory inputs to program it. All things attributed to magical forces and entities in the past have been slowly and steadily being explained by science. So far, nothing supernatural is required to explain anything-- no invisible intelligence... once you get a real strong understanding of natural selection it becomes obvious... that's why intelligent design proponents go out of their way to NOT understand it... and to make sure others don't either. It's fairly easy... but not if you are infected with the "scientists think this all happened randomly" meme.
 
VonNeumann said:
You believe a mechanistic process, an exceedingly simple non-teleological process, is sufficient to design biological systems. And yet it is a stupid process that you claim to know could have been done better somehow. That's your proof it wasn't designed intelligently?
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It's a prefectly reasonable argument. Evolution is a stupid process, which eventually gave rise to the level of intelligence we have. A level at which we design and build things, some of them pretty damn' cute. Of course we're in a position to criticise the results of the stupid process. Nobody intelligent would have designed things that way.

We're just starting into re-designing life on a more rational basis. It'll take time, though; given the choice, we wouldn't have started from here. It's a mess, frankly.
 
VonNeumann said:
There's been a lot of hype about nanotechnology and it is a science that has a long way to go -- but we can play with the ideas as if we were further along: I can imagine a nanotechnologist looking to biology for some examples on how to do some extraordinary things -- maybe some design ideas to emulate. Or what if some brilliant nanotechnologists somewhere had successfully invented some great technology. ..and some others try to understand it so they can copy it. And they can't! It's too complex for them. And yet, would they deprecate it with comments about how flawed is the design by the brilliant nanotechnologists? Designs that they can't even copy? Designs that are too sophisticated for them to understand?

I think it is proud of you Art' to think you could have designed biological systems better than **** designed it (plug in "designer" or "darwinistic mechanistic process" or "god" for ****). You would have to believe you can, since you apparently believe you know enough to criticize the design of biological systems.

You believe a mechanistic process, an exceedingly simple non-teleological process, is sufficient to design biological systems. And yet it is a stupid process that you claim to know could have been done better somehow. That's your proof it wasn't designed intelligently?
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Quiz:

Read "Consilience" by E.O. Wilson and come back and tell us why nanotech is, in fact linked to evolution. It is, but not in the way you imagine.
 
cyborg said:
Give me an example of a non-quintessential randomness.
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The instructions for my dishwasher tell me to place the cutlery into the little holes in the cutlery thingy "randomly".

If I were a statistician, that would take me ages.

As it is, "non-quintessential randomness" allows me to just stick the cutlery where ever I fancy, thus saving many hours of effort with random-number-tables.
 
Would you expect to see strong correlations after an infinite amount of dishwasher loads?
 
cyborg said:
Would you expect to see strong correlations after an infinite amount of dishwasher loads?
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Indeed.

After AND Before.

A strong correlation just waltzed down my driveway. It was the postman with his bike. They are a 100% correlation. (In my experience.)
 
jimbob said:
Chaotic systems are a plausible mechanism to amplify quantum effects, so although deterministic over the short term, they could be random over the longer-term; if random quantum events alter conditions sufficiently to perturb the system.

The maths is deterministic, but some of the conditions would be random.

If one states that deterministic systems always have identical responses for identical starting conditions, then this would not be deterministic.

ETA:

That would mean that it would be impossible in principle to predict the weather on an precise day far enough in the future, but not impossible to predict the climate at that time.
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It's been 20 years since I read Lorenz's '63 paper on weather forecasting.:) but I took another look today. I realize now that the subject of intitial conditions, etc. in Lorenz is not just a throwaway, but the idea of constrained, "deterministic", infinite variability is indelible.

I'm opening another thread on the Chaos topic to get it out of this ID context.
 
There are features that evolutionary theory can predict wouldn't happen, just as there are features which one wouldn't expect of a benign and competent designer. Let alone an omnscient and benign designer.

Evolutionary theory would predict that if there is sufficient selective advantage, certain traits would evolve independently on several occasions.

If a trait evolves in one organism its descendents may or may not have this trait, but you would not expect to see this trait being suddenly "reused" in its entirety in another, unrelated organism, as opposed to evolving independently inboth cases.

Something that evolutionary theory would predict to not occur:

Luckily we now have some examples of intelligent design:

144944724ee8d6b96f.jpg


The important point here is that this mouse has the same 700-letter sequence as the jellyfish Green Fluorescent Protein, including those parts of the sequence which are unimportant.

That wouldn't have happened by chance, so it is safe to conclude that this was an intelligent designer reusing the jellyfish GFP gene-sequence.

Lateral transimssion of genes has been observed, but the sudden appearence of a fluorescent mouse, and genes from a jellyfish without many other interveaning organisms would militate against this being natural.


An omniscient and benign designer would get things right first time, if such a designer was also competent.

So lets remove omniscience, as even Behe agrees that there has been incremental improvement...

If a competant designer manages to design something, then this designer does not waste effort redesigning the same feature from scratch every time, but reuses as much of the design as possible.

There are many examples of organisms that have independentently evolved extra sets of eyes, but didn't "reuse" their original "design" of eye. The mammal retina is poorly designed compared to the squid's. A competent designer would not waste all that effort to redisgn something and then get parts of it wrong.

So lets remove competent and benign.

That leaves us with an incompetent and/or malign designer, or none at all...
 
cyborg said:
You do not appear to be communicating in English.
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Damned cheek!

You will find that my English is perfect. If there is a problem with your English comprehension, that would be a different category of problem entirely.
 
CapelDodger said:
Oh for Pete's sake ... Damnable, not damned :rolleyes:! Abbreviated to damn' before a consonant.

A once splendid language has gone to the dogs ...
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With all due respect, how do you know his cheek hasn't already been damned? "Damnable" means "Item X is damn-able" , i.e. is something that it is possible could become damned at some point (as if things exist which a god could not damn if it so chose.)

"That damned cheek" is some cheek that's so evil, it's already existing in a state of damnation. I'll leave to the pedants to say whether that means it's Hellbound, or already in Hell.
 
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Beerina said:
With all due respect, how do you know his cheek hasn't already been damned? "Damnable" means "Item X is damn-able" , i.e. is something that it is possible could become damned at some point (as if things exist which a god could not damn if it so chose.)
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"Damnable" (in this context) means worthy of being damned, which is stronger, I think, than simply damning it.

It's not only gods that can damn. One can, for instance, "damn with faint praise", or damn someone's eyes.

(Damn, I love this language ...)
 
dahduh said:
I've just finished listening to Point of Inquiry's intelligent design interview with Michael Behe, one of the founding father's of that ironically named movement. As usual, the phrase "Intelligent design makes no predictions" cropped up, together with the idea that god must be the designer.

Does everyone go along with these positions??

This is what bugs me. Firstly, the hypothesis that some or all aspect of our biology were designed by some intelligent agent is not, on the face of it, unreasonable. And subject to reasonable assumptions, this hypothesis certainly does make some predictions. Well designed artifacts are designed for a specific purpose: so we should expect to be able to divine purpose from design. Designs are usually 'cleaned up', so for example while an engineering drawing might need a whole lot of construction lines to aid in drawing it, those construction lines are removed in the final blueprint. If designs do evolve, designers usually re-factor, so for example if a programmer extends a piece of software and finds the original architecture was inadequate, he will (if he is a good programmer) re-design and strip out any old code that is no longer needed. Designs often require configuration management and attribution, so you might expect to find something like version numbers or signatures or copyright notices on them. Designs often evolve in quantum leaps, in which some change or improvement is accompanied by a radical departure from a previous architecture. Designs are usually modular and attempt to create minimal interfaces between components in order to manage complexity. And so on and so on.

These are all things we might reasonably expect to find in designed artifacts, and are things I would expect to follow from the intelligent design hypothesis. While not strictly speaking 'predictions' in a rigorous sense, identification of any one of these features would be taken as support for the intelligent design hypothesis. The absence of any one of these features can of course be explained away in any variety of ways, usually by special pleading, so absence does not absolutely disprove intelligent design. But absence certainly makes the ID hypothesis less tenable.

With the exception of quantum leaps in architecture for which Behe coined the term "Irreducible complexity", the ID'ers seem to have entirely ignored these other expected features of intelligently designed artifacts. Needless to say, this is because there is a total absence of such features to be found anywhere in biology, and irreducible complexity currently amounts to little more than argument from ignorance or personal incredulity. But why is the ID hypothesis simply being dismissed as 'unscientific'? It's a reasonable hypothesis, it does make predictions of a sort, so why aren't the bastards being called out and made to explain why their designer designs with all the smarts of a drunken coot?

Then the second point: the presumption that the designer must be god. No, this doesn't follow, maybe the Raelians are right and some space-alien did it. We know of at least one (semi) intelligent natural agent in this universe, and the most reasonable assumption is that if there has been intelligent designing going on, then it was done by some other intelligent natural agent; which may, for all we know, have evolved naturally. But again, god gets introduced and makes himself at home every time ID is discussed, whereas god is a complete non-sequitur. Why are the ID'ers allowed to run away over the hill with god every time?

I realise this has turned into a rant; but don't you think that ID'ers should rather be challenged on the absense of evidence for reasonably predictions made by ID, rather than just dismissing ID with the claim that it makes no predictions?
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Here's my prediction:

The world outside the US will laugh about America's "Intelligent Design".

...oh wait - they are ALREADY laughing.
 
CapelDodger said:
It's a prefectly reasonable argument. Evolution is a stupid process, which eventually gave rise to the level of intelligence we have. A level at which we design and build things, some of them pretty damn' cute. Of course we're in a position to criticise the results of the stupid process. Nobody intelligent would have designed things that way.

We're just starting into re-designing life on a more rational basis. It'll take time, though; given the choice, we wouldn't have started from here. It's a mess, frankly.
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It seems a fair point to me. Evolution does not require things to be good - merely good enough. We have lots of things that could be improved in our basic design - we are the Edsels of evolution - or the subject of unintelligent design if you prefer :)
 
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Oliver said:
Here's my prediction:

The world outside the US will laugh about America's "Intelligent Design".

...oh wait - they are ALREADY laughing.
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I can only speak for my small corner of it, but you're right. In this country Blair had to play down his religiosity to be politically credible (or even socially credible - Islington's a caustic environment).

The British impression of 'Murricans as naive and superficial is deep-seated, and is, of course, only validated by all the god referencing, from Oscar ceremonies to runs at the Presidency. It wasn't always like that, though (in the US, that is; the Brit sense of cultural superiority goes way back). I expect it to fade.
 
Nogbad said:
It seems a fair point to me. Evolution does not require things to be good - merely good enough. We have lots of things that could be improved in our basic design - we are the Edsels of evolution - or the subject of unintelligent design if you prefer :)
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This is quite possibly apocryphal, but there's a story that Neil Armstrong was asked "What was going through your mind during the Apollo 11 count-down?" and replied "That there were three million components in that baby, and every one was contracted out to the lowest bidder". It turned out to be good enough :).
 
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