Intelligent Design or Being Intelligent?

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• plunge

  Nah. The reality is that very few laypeople are actually willing to put in the time to understand the issues involved: getting a decent grasp of the relevant subjects takes at the very least a serious investment in time. It’s thus pretty darn rational for people to use consensus as a guide: all it means is that a lot of smart people from all walks of life evaluated a claim and found it to be BS. A journalistic article is not going to have time or space to give much more than a caricature-level picture of things.

  It’s not like there aren’t ample scholarly refutations of ID claims, but the problem with most creationist claims is that they aren’t really susceptible to logic or evidence: no matter how many times its shown that evolution can indeed increase information content, it just gets repeated back like a mantra that it can’t. No matter how many times it’s explained that CSI and IC are incompatible mathematically, people still run around acting as if they both are good arguments against evolutionary complexity.

• http://www.carmical.net Casey

  Hi there, plunge. I have no doubt that there are some “scholarly” refutations of ID claims, just as there are “scholarly” refutations of evolutionary claims. Apparently you choose to believe the scientists who provide former, because they are in the majority. I wonder if you would have stuck with the majority when the majority believed the sun revolved around the earth…An appeal to popularity isn’t always that great.

  Can evolution increase information? Sure. Down’s syndrome produces an extra chromosome 21. I imagine that could be called an “increase in information.” I wonder, though, do you have any examples of an increase in useful information? You might be on to something if you did. I don’t think you’re going to convince anyone that Down’s syndrome is an example of the kind of change needed to prove molecule to man evolution.

• plunge

  “I have no doubt that there are some “scholarly” refutations of ID claims, just as there are “scholarly” refutations of evolutionary claims.”

  The difference is that I’ve looked at both, and the only ones that hold up to scrutiny are the former. Given that, it’s relevant to discuss why their work is so shoddy and the larger political agenda of the movement.

  And it isn’t just a “majority”: it’s such an overwhelming majority that you literally have to believe that nearly every biologist in the world is in on a vast conspiracy to cover up the truth, against a bunch of critics who, honestly, are almost always working well outside their fields (a warning sign) and who publish articles aimed at convincing the public rather than trying to prove their ideas with hard research in journals (a HUGE warning sign).

  And yes, evolution most certainly can increase useful information. This is what I mean. This is idea is such a basic, commonplace point in biology that you can’t even get a paper published today if this is the ONLY finding you have to present: it’s too trivial and unsurprising. And yet out here, the idea that its impossible or never happens just gets repeated over and over. Meanwhile, bacteria are observed evolving whole new metabolic pathways, geneticists are tracing back mutations for, in a celebrated case, immunity to LDH cholesterol to a single founder individual, and so on.

  Not to mention that if the ONLY thing that organisms could do is LOSE genetic information (and, by that, variation) it would be quite obvious: species would over time become more and more like clones of each other (since functional variation can only be lost and never replenished) and, of course, ancient species would never be capable of adapting in the ways they have been clearly established to have done. Is this what we see? No: we see the opposite in nature: increasing trait diversification cut short not by mutational damage, but by natural selection itself.

  But somehow, people that repeat this stuff never consider that: they never go an check themselves what the evidence is. What matters is that it conforms with their beliefs… or at least that is what matters until knowledge of biology on that level becomes widespread enough that it will look too silly, in which case they’ll just move on to something else.

• http://www.carmical.net Casey

  Hi plunge,

  You said,

  The difference is that I’ve looked at both, and the only ones that hold up to scrutiny are the former. Given that, it’s relevant to discuss why their work is so shoddy and the larger political agenda of the movement.

  Funny, I could say the same thing about the latter. Depends on where you’re coming from.

  I don’t think there’s any kind of conspiracy in biology to intentionally supress evidence for intelligent design. The predominant mindset in most fields of science today is naturalism, which by definition precludes one from considering an intelligent designer. If you’ve eliminated the possibility of an intelligent designer from the outset, how would you ever come to the conclusion that an intelligent designer exists or interpret something as evidence for ID?

  I find it interesting that an atheistic evolutionist can look at a man sitting in a chair and recognize that a designer was required to create the chair but fail to understand that a designer was also required to create the much more complex man that’s sitting in it.

  I’m not familiar with the argument about new metabollic pathways. Do you have a reference that shows that it involves the production of new information and not simply the re-arrangement of existing information? To me, that defies logic. Bacterial resistance, on the other hand, most probably involves a loss of information. Carl Wieland, a retired doctor, has a good piece on that:
  http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/791
  Although his article is about resistance to viruses, I’m sure the same thing can be said about immunity to LDH cholesterol.

  A loss of information doesn’t necessarily mean a loss of variation. Dog breeders have produced several varieties of dogs. This involves a loss of genetic information. Granted, if all dog varieties except pure-bred poodles were wiped out, all you’d be able to get from there on would be poodles. It’s unlikely that would happen, though.

• http://controlled-hominization.com Lebon

  About Intelligent Design (ID)

  ID is most often and wrongly linked to God and creationism, as opposed to Darwinism and evolutionism. We are there in fact facing an old philosophical problem transposed this time from man to the universe: the difficult and even impossible distinction between what is innate and what is acquired. But the reader of my pages http://controlled-hominization.com/ will perhaps agree that evolutionism is not in contradiction with all forms of ID. As a materialist, I think that the confrontation between both concepts is sterile and that a synthesis is even possible.
  If any great complexity of a feature could not exclude evolutionism, science itself could not reject some forms of ID in the evolution of the universe, at least in some steps of the process. After all, man himself is already a local actor in this evolution, an actor showing little intelligence so far (global warming, life sciences …). He could however be led to play a greater and nobler part if he succeeds to survive long enough (dissemination of life in the cosmos, “terraforming” of planets, planetary and even stellar formation, artificial beings…). The development of this kind of “draft ID” could only be limited by our refusal to do so and by our ability to survive. We would be viewed as gods by our ancestors from the middle Ages, and we would also view our descendants as gods if we could return in a few hundreds or thousands years.
  By his refusal to consider that intelligence could already have played a significant part in the evolution of this universe, man takes in fact for granted that he is the most advanced being. It is in fact just another way for placing himself once again in the middle of everything, as for the Earth before Galileo. This anthropocentric view is not very rational.
  Within the frame of evolutionism, the concept of ID could however be applied to the future man if he manages to survive long enough to be able to play a significant part in the evolution of this solar system, in the galaxy, and why not more. And it could also apply to eventual advanced ET preceding man in this cosmic part, advanced ET who could for instance, thanks to their science, have already played a significant part, even if they were themselves born from random processes.
  Without going back to a controversial God, pure intelligence born from random processes is so far too easily ignored in the evolution of this universe, and I think that this choice has more to do with faith in man’s solitude in the universe than with true science. Even if it appears later that the ID concept has yet never been used by other beings in this universe, what could prevent man from applying it in the future? As with the Big Bang, ID would certainly remain in the field of hypotheses, but science progresses that way, and it would not be scientific to exclude one hypothesis that could be quite credible. ID is too easily discarded and laughed at, somewhat like continental drift not long ago, and a lot of other concepts too.
  Benoit Lebon