William Dembski, a proponent of Intelligent Design, clearly states in No Free Lunch that while ID as science would hinge on, among others, the "Optimality Problem--In what sense is the designed object optimal?" On the same page (313) he also claims that the "Intentionality Problem--What was the intention of the designer in producing a given designed object?" is not a scientific question. He further elaborates that some of ID as "science" would hinge upon moving beyond a "naturalistic framework."

How can we gather evidence about something if it is not natural?

On a separate point: The only evidence we have, if the world is designed, is the designed objects themselves; there is no claim as to what stage they were designed, to what purpose they were designed, or to how they were designed. Isn't that too many unknowns to make any inference from?

Another way of saying this is; we usually infer design in, for example, a watch because we know how humans make things--we even know some of the reasons humans might have to make things. But we do not have any scientific basis to say anything about this designer, even according to Dembski, so how can we infer something is designed?

In reference to Alfred Russel Wallace's claim about the utility of bananas, London dray-horses, and the Guernsey milch cow: The banana was cultivated and bred for human consumption in Papa New Guinea [1]--by humans. Horses, too, were domesticated [2]. And... so were cows [3].

Juice wrote:No fair Alun you are rushing ahead, I am really not ready to discuss complexity issues. I do not wish for this thread to be a personal debate between the two of us.

Me neither. I was actually just trying to clarify how ID can be scientific, not talk about complexity. I think you've filled out some more on that point, so I'll try again. First, I'm going to clean up a bit of your last unaddressed anecdotal point:

Juice wrote:Alun, bananas are cultivated/domesticated from the wild, they have a natural origin. The problem with bananas, noticed by Russel, is that they have no seeds and reproduce asexually, each plant is identical to the parent plant.

The fact of the matter is we humans selected polyploid bananas that suited us for agriculture. Wild bananas have huge seeds.

Juice wrote:The theory of intelligent design is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the "apparent design" in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations

The problem as I see it is that 'detecting' design is always done according to what we know about the design. We have no evidence of the mechanism of design, the aim of design, nor the extent of design. So how can we tell that something is designed? As I said, even Demski readily admits that we have no idea who the designer could be or how it might do any designing.

In contrast, when we seek design in anthropology or in SETI, we are looking for design that is done by humans or by beings of near-human development respectively. This type of inference is only possible because we can know what we're looking for. But ID seems to be saying, "Design occurred in some unknown way for some unknown purpose to some unknown extent." Aren't there too many permanent unknowns for ID to be able to say something meaningful?

Juice wrote:Alun-Bananas don't have seeds, none, nada, zip nonexistent. And I used no anecdotes.

I meant the whole example of bananas as an anecdote. (Not a personal example, but a small one meant to give a taste of the evidence. I didn't mean for it to be derogatory.)

And, no really, wild bananas have seeds.

Courtesy of Wikipedia - Banana.

Do you want me to bring a wild banana to your house, or do you believe me now?

Juice wrote:Any way I plan on adding a piece to the thread daily besides answering posts, and I have to prepare for the next installment.

Ok, I'm more interested in how ID would be applied scientifically than in bananas--just for the record.

Juice wrote:It is my feeling that once a person has a clear impression of Darwinism, with the criticisms then they will be better able to make an informed decision concerning its validity.

We should probably do that part in the Natural Selection thread.

Nick_A, from your quote:

Discovery wrote:Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI.

The first sentence is a sort of definition of intelligent agents, but I believe it is mistaken. Intelligence is not what produces 'information'; intelligence may interpolate information from something. But on a basic level this is just a response of an intelligent thing to stimulus. Rocks respond to stimulus too.

The idea is, "how does an organism know that its ribosome should respond to mRNA to start producing proteins?" But really the answer is comparable for, "how does a rock know to fall downward?" It can just be explained as a consequence of natural rules; it doesn't need to be information.

Juice, I'm sorry to overrun your thread with this example, but from your link:

The common cultivated types [of bananas] are generally seedless with just vestiges of ovules visible as brown specks. Occasionally, cross-pollination with wild types will result in a number of seeds in a normally seedless variety.

Your other link didn't seem to have an opinion on seeds in bananas. Also, as you said, there are many types of bananas and related fruit-bearing plants, so I'm sure some of the wild ones resemble culinary bananas more than others--e.g. some are red and some are yellow/green.

Juice wrote:I had to start talking about Darwin so as to put forth points on natural selection which Darwin expressed, and so that an idea of observation for scientific method can be introduced. Didn't mean to rain on your parade.

Ok, makes sense. Hope you can get to the science soon. I'm sure my thread is going to be less exciting anyway, since only yourself and Nick_A seem partial to disbelieving any of natural selection.

Juice wrote:He presented a theory of how species became better (fitter) but he never attempted to explain how different species emerged from previous or ancestor species. Neither does evolution: Change in the genetic composition of a population during successive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species.

Do you mean neither does evolution by natural selection? Can you explain this in terms of the argument I made in the natural selection thread? (Where I explicitly give a theoretical background for how species divergence occurs and show how this is consistent with experiments.) I mean, it seems to be fairly lacking support when we have watched evolution by natural selection occur.

Meleagar wrote:Note that the theory itself doesn't necessarily implicate a god of any sort. ID theory is based on the observable, quantifiable difference between what humans intelligently design, and that which appears to be not guided by intelligence (chance, natural law, etc.)

Part of the problem here is that we know how humans work and what purposes humans are interested in. Certainly, it is possible that every rock on the planet serves the purposes of some alien geological nerds; does that mean rocks have the "signature of design"? No; such an explanation is both too vague to offer us anything useful and too expansive to be justified by the evidence. In fact this is exactly the problem with ID for evolution.

Meleagar wrote:Forms of ID are already in use in the scientific community, whether by name or not, whether denied as ID or not; forensics, for example, determines if a murder or a fire was intentionally designed by a deliberate agent, or if it was an accident. SETI, for example, is searching for evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence (although now they'd like to change their name to "artificiality", which is again simply sidestepping the issue via dishonest semantics).

No, I'm afraid you're the one who has been sucked in by dishonest semantics. ID as proposed by the Discovery Institute is not scientific; there is not a single hypothesis or experiment that has been done in support of ID behind evolution. Yes, we look for intelligence--but for particular kinds. SETI is looking for human-like species, which it hypothesizes will also use light as a signaling device. Forensics is looking for human causes in particular; as I said above, we know what people do and why they do it, so it's easy to know what we're looking for.

Meleagar wrote:Science itself relies on the intelligent design of theories and experiments to advance.

What does the ubiquitous applicability of the words "intelligent" and "design" have to do with how the world works?

Meleagar wrote:ID theorists are currently attempting to develop a rigorous, predictive model for identifying when a phenomena is best explained as the product of ID; some of those attempts are: irreducible complexity (Behe), the explanatory filter (Dembski), and the FSCI limitation of 500-1000 bits (Meyer).

None of those models are valid or useful. As I already showed you, we know that stonehenge was designed not because its complicated, but because it fits the behavior of humans--and because there is not a natural cause behind it. Dembski comes closest, but you cannot use the process of elimination to find the answer; there needs to be affirmative evidence of something, not just incredulity toward alternatives. Further, ID proponents only have fallacious criticisms of evolution by natural selection--criticisms that are designed only to mislead the general population, not pursue science.

Juice wrote:If the "empirical data" from observed biological structures gives the appearance of design then why can it not be considered intelligently designed?

Neither you nor any ID proponent has defined "design" sufficiently for this to work as an hypothesis.

Juice wrote:You are not keeping up Alun . Material evolutionists have long ago agreed that evolution appears designed but contend that the appearance of design is illusory. "A magician’s trick, slight of hand, MYSTICISM!"

No, you're not getting it. "Appearing designed" is an intuitive response--and every formulation that is scientifically feasible (as described in sociology/psychology) that I've seen does not imply an actual designer. So in order to get a formulation that does what you want, you need to talk about something other than this.

Juice wrote:Design-Is a plan with a definitive purpose. The "Design Inference" takes the chance out of creation by calculating mathematical probabilities to events. The more complex a structure or event the less chance there is that it came about by chance. Intelligent Design merely studies signs of intelligence not the intelligence itself.

This is invalid. As I've said, complexity is not a sign of design. Snowflakes are complex. Stonehenge is simple. Fractals are complex. Murder is simple. Etc. Sure, you can study complexity--in fact this is done heavily, e.g. in mathematics--but doing so will just turn up more evidence that complexity is not correlated to a plan to be complex. Most of the complexity we observe in the world emerges from extremely simple rules.

Juice wrote:One of the properties of design is "regularity". Even if one considers a material process for natural selection one must consider the regularity which the reactions to stresses occur.

??? pH buffer solutions, planetary orbit, and breathing are regular. How does regularity imply design?

Juice wrote:A snowflake is not sentient and neither is Stonehenge, unless one is willing to proclaim them able to speak.

Uh huh. The point is that Stonehenge is designed, and yet not complex. A snowflake is complex, but not designed. So complexity is not evidence of design.

Juice wrote:a specified complex information processing system such as DNA and protein macromolecules are.

So now you're arguing that anything which operates as "a specified complex information processing system" must be designed? And where's your evidence for this assertion?

Juice wrote:Also, consider that the protein must be specifically folded and strongly dependent on specified spatial ordering.

... This is totally irrelevant. Do not throw scientific facts into the mix and proclaim that they support your position when they have no relation to it whatsoever. Proteins fold as a matter of aqueous chemistry. I.e. they do it spontaneously in water. That is just like how water spontaneously freezes in a specific crystalline structure when exposed to certain atmospheric conditions.

Juice wrote:The chimp breaths and has a regular heartbeat but can it count its breaths or heartbeat let alone calculate a planets orbit?

Actually chimps can count, but again you're citing irrelevant facts.

Juice wrote:A fish who finds itself with the need to survive in air does not have long to wait for the irregularities of random chance mutations.

Please stop scaring me. It's like you don't even know what the theory you're arguing against is talking about. Fish are theorized to have evolved into amphibians when fish who developed the capacity to breathe oxygen from the air had an advantage over fish who could only get nutrients while in the water. The theory does not claim that fish who are tossed onto the boat will spontaneously evolve to breathe the air.

Come on, I think we've got 3 threads about the evidence behind evolution by natural selection. How about someone gives a serious account of the evidence for ID, like I've been asking for? To recap:

What does 'design' mean?
* How do we detect it?
* Do we need to know about the designer, or the designer's motives, to detect it?
* Do we need to know about the mechanism of the designing to detect it?
* What does 'design' rule out; i.e. how can hypotheses of design be falsified?

Using the above definition and methodology, what can we conclude is designed, and based on what evidence?

Meleagar wrote:

Alun wrote:What does 'design' mean?

Do you mean intelligent design?

Yes.

Meleagar wrote:ID theory can only make a finding of ID as "best explanation" without having direct knowledge of the designer. Some of the models used for detecting ID in this manner are irreducible complexity; the explanatory filter, and FSCI of 1000 bits or more.

I would prefer an affirmative model. Besides what I would consider to be the misuse of those models, they also do not say anything except what intelligent design is not. I.e. they all come down to our inability to explain phenomena. Is it really true that if we cannot explain something's occurrence, it must have been done on purpose?

Meleagar wrote:There is no "mechanism" per se in intelligent design; intelligent acts are not "mechanisms".
Intelligence can use tools and can establish mechanisms to carry out its design goal; however, quantum experiments have shown that just the presence of a conscious observer can affect the outcome of subatomic states,

We affect subatomic states because we're hitting them with light, or letting them hit a sensitive wall. All of our tools actually affect subatomic states. Now, it could be that Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle is actually true just because we're intelligently watching what's happening, but the principle is derived from the fact that we'll always be hitting the electron with light to judge what it's doing, and this will always change what the electron is doing. Whether someone is watching an electron or not, it behaves a standard probability rule--i.e., despite being a particle, it behaves like a wave.

You have to talk about the empirical mechanism. There is nothing else that we do talk about when we do science. E.g. one of the prime factors in forensics is not the nature of a scene itself (it looks like someone did it), but the means by which the accused could've acted. It looks like stonehenge was built by people partly because people can lift and arrange things that way, not just because natural causes cannot.

Meleagar wrote:it is not just ruling out unintelligent causation that leads to a finding of ID, but by comparing the phenomena to that which is known to be produced by ID agents - humans. Humans, using intelligent design, regularly generate irreducibly complex phenomena, and phenomena with FSCI of over 1000 bits.

We see complex things all the time that aren't caused by humans. How does FSCI apply to a chair, but not to a snowflake? Or a nebula? Or a fractal?

Meleagar wrote:

Alun wrote:What does 'design' rule out; i.e. how can hypotheses of design be falsified?

By showing chance and necessity (natural law) to be sufficient explanations.

This is what I mean by not offering any affirmative explanations. It is not necessarily scientific to just ask, "Well how else could it have happened?" You need someone to say, "It happened in x and y fashion," so that we can go and see whether x and y really produce those results. Or at least predict something about the results successfully using x and y.

Meleagar wrote:

Unrealist42 wrote:How are the models that ID uses falsifiable?

By showing how non-ID sources are sufficient to produce the phenomena in question - or, by demonstrating it to have less than 500 bits of FSCI.

I just want to point out that this is not really a scientific approach. You're saying the only way to falsify your theory is to prove another theory is true. Seems a bit unfair, don't you think? The point of having an empirically falsifiable theory is to have an empirically relevant theory--i.e. one that makes predictions. If your theory cannot make any predictions, then there is not much scientific reason to uphold it.

Meleagar wrote:No, I didn't say that, nor did I imply that. A finding of under 500 bits of FSCI doesn't prove any other theory, it just means that ID isn't required in order to provide a sufficient, "best" explanation. That doesn't mean some other natural force or commodity has been proven.

The more important claim is that ID is required for that amount of FSCI. How is that claim falsifiable?