There seems to be a misapprehension here that science has somehow avoided the issue of biological complexity. Nothing could be further from the case- there is a vast literature on the subject much of which is, admittedly, pretty technical.

If anyone is interested, then I'd recommend the following:

Some Introductory Books
- Stuart Kauffman, 'At Home in the Universe' (Oxford UP 1995).
- Ricard Sole and Brian Godwin, 'Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology' (Basic Books 2000).
- Steven Strogatz, 'Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order' (Penguin 2004).

More Advanced:
- Stuart Kauffman, 'The Origins of Order' (Oxford UP 1993). This is a seminal work but very mathematical.
- Ricard Sole and Jordi Bascompte, 'Self-Organization in Complex Ecosystems' (Princeton UP 2006). Again, a lot of maths.
- Mary Jane West-Eberhard, 'Developmental Plasticity and Evolution' (Oxford UP 2003).
- J. Scott Turner, 'The Tinkerer's Apprentice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself' (Harvard UP 2007).

Re: Intelligent Design. It isn't science, and there simply isn't any science behind it. Its religion dressed up as pseudo-science. For a point-by-point refutation of Dembski try:
- Sahotra Sarkar, 'Doubting Darwin?' (Blackwell 2007).

Generaly, highly complex, interdependent, functional machinery with instructional coding and regulatory meta-code doesn't come into existence via artistic free-wheeling; it must be deliberately planned for in advance by a highly skilled engineer. The engineer might be artistic too, and might use creativity to overcome unforseen challenges, but without a planned design goal any engineer and software programmer will tell you that a functioning computer just cannot be built.

Its this kind of statement that led my comment on biological complexity. There is, I repeat, a vast literature that deals with the issue of how highly interdependent functional biological systems come into existence without being designed. It all makes perfect sense without the need for a supernatural designer.


The Post # 56 Challenge

As I understand it, the question is this:

I arrive on an alien planet and discover an artifact. I want to know how the artifact originated, and there are 2 possible explanations: either it evolved, or it is the product of conscious design. How can I determine which hypothesis is correct?

Well, my first step is to closely examine how the artifact works. Is it an organism? In other words, is the artifact:
a) homeostatic
b) able to physiologically adapt to perturbation
c) able to recursively re-create a boundary around itself (some sort of membrane)
and
d) able to reproduce, either by itself or in conjunction with another, similar artifact? Note that this condition implies some sort of mechanism for ensuring accurate replication, analogous to our DNA.

If not, then there would be a very strong implication that the artifact was designed- simply because there wouldn't be any apparent way that it could have evolved.

If the artifact was an organism, then my next step would be to examine the environment. Are there any other organisms with the same biochemistry extant? Are there any fossils?

If not, then I would remain unsure about the artifact/ organism. It might have evolved elsewhere, and ended up where I found it. Or it might be a product of bioengineering. I simply wouldn't know, and I'd have to reserve judgement.

On the other hand, if the environment did have lots of orther organisms with similar biochemistry, and there were also lots of fossil organisms, many of which appeared to be related to the organisms that were around me, I would conclude that the best explanation for the artifact/ organism was evolution.

And thats all science is, really- inference to the best explanation.


[/i]

Juice wrote:Gecko-You need to read through the whole thread. The argument that you make is that there is a material cause for reproducible transcription and the evidence you define points to a material cause for the origin of life. The challenge is that there is no evidence that the origin of life has a material cause since the features observed are of such specified complexity that since they appear designed and since the new paradigms in information theories and functionally specified information complexity necessitate design then one must conclude that life is designed.

a) homeostatic
b) able to physiologically adapt to perturbation
c) able to recursively re-create a boundary around itself (some sort of membrane)
and
d) able to reproduce, either by itself or in conjunction with another, similar artifact? Note that this condition implies some sort of mechanism for ensuring accurate replication, analogous to our DNA.

These indicators sited are questionable, particularly sexual reproduction, which has not been even remotely explained as an evolutionary advantage let alone a product of evolutionary progression, or at the very least challenged by lack of a viable material explanation for the origin of life. Like Darwin you wish to complement the middle of the story without any knowledge of the beginning.

Even the obscure horseshoe crab is an enigma to those proposals.

With the advancement of technological insight I am able to determine that the structures that communicate the definition of life are of such ethereal ambiguity of specified information processes that I must conclude that they are designed since the probability of that having arisen by chance is greater than the amount of known matter in the entire universe.

There is a big difference between coming across the letters "DwoR" and coming across the letters "WORD" etched into the sand, with very different conclusions to each, particularly if those letters in WORD are the precise same height and of the precise same spacing.

More confusion

Okay, first of all I'll own up to not having read the entire thread. Apologies for misinterpreting the 'found artifact X' question.

Juice:

Your first paragraph doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. What 'new paradigms in information theory' are you talking about? Not Dembski, I hope.

If you read what I wrote you'll find that I specify replication 'either by itself or with another' i.e. asexual or sexual reproduction. In what way are these indicators for life 'questionable'? Please explain.

Your point about the horshoe crab is obscure. Do you actually mean anything here? I strongly suspect not.

Your next paragraph is again very difficult to make sense of. It does not contain any arguments to support the conclusion that you make.

Your final point is irrelevant. What are you trying to argue here, if anything? That life isn't random? No one is saying that it is.


Meleagar:

Oh, well, if you say so.

You don't have to make my word for it. You could actually go out and read some science.
You might even find that having a degree of scientific literacy is useful when discussing issues in the Philosophy of Science.

Straw man. ID doesn't postulate a superntural designer

I don't think so. Know any ID enthusiasts who aren't also Theists? No, neither do I. But if it makes you happy, you can cross out the 'supernatural'. The argument remains the same.

Re: Artifact X

So first of all you consider the object in its environment, and ask the question: Are there natural forces other than evolution that can plausibly account for the existence of the object?

If the answer is 'Yes' then you have your explanation.

If the answer is 'No' then start the procedure described in my previous post.

Meleagar:

Or, you could stop assuming that because people disagree with you, they are ignorant of the subject. But then, that would mean you actually have to make a signifiant effort in your debate. It's so much easier just to assert that those you are debating are ignorant.

Well unfortunately you do at least give the appearance of someone who is uninformed about the basic science, at least where Evolutionary Biology is concerned.

For example:

Not only is natural selection an insufficient sorting process; it has been largely abandoned by evolutionary biologists for a long time in favor of Motoo Kimura's neutral molecular evolution theories

Could only be written by a person with very little knowledge of the field. As someone who has been studying Philosophy of Biology for some years as a postgrad, I know the literature pretty well, and I have to say that the ascendancy of the Neo-Darwinian Paradigm is still very much with us. And I say this as part of the minority that does not view the natural selection of genetic mutations as the most important driving force behind the evolutionary process. But you don't have to take my word for it- the information is out there for you.

And BTW, making ill-informed comments about books that you haven't read isn't very impressive either.

What people personally believe that a theory implies doesn't mean the implication is a necessary aspect of the theory. Most people who got on board with Darwinism believed the theory implied that some races of humans were intrinsically superior to others; most people who originally supported the big bang theory believed it implied a creation point and thus a god

You're ignoring a basic point here. ID posits that biological complexity is the result of a design. Designs imply designers. So who or what could the designer be, if not God? Well, perhaps an alien, or some unknown mysterious force. But then where does that come from? Perhaps it was designed too? Its a vicious regress of designers, which can only end with either evolution or God. So ID does imply Theism, as various court decisions in the US have recognized.

All you've done here is restate the challenge, you haven't explained your methodology. How does one go about demonstrating that natural forces are insufficient to explain X?

Your methodology for trying to explain X would depend on what and where X was. For example, if X was a ruin-like structure in a desert, you would probably consider geological factors, but you'd rule out marine erosion (unless you dated X to a period when the area was flooded).

BTW, your "evolution" argument doesn't make a case, it just describes a living or evolved entity and then arbitrarily asserts that it sufficiently described by unintelligent processes by assuming those processes are unintelligent, a classic case of affirming the consequent.

The procedure that I describe is not an argument for or against anything. Nor is it intended to be. Its a procedure, nothing else.

There's no way that myself or anyone else could 'prove' the theory of Evolution in a few posts. If you're really interested in the subject then go and do some reading. Arun has posted some excellent links, and I'll be posting more as soon as I'm allowed to (you need to be a member for 10 days in order to post links, and I'm too new ).

While tautological arguments are not necessarily invalid, yours is empirically invalid, because the existence of purebred and domesticated organisms - like the pekingese - demonstrate that some organsims actually exist which can only be sufficiently explained if one includes intelligent design.

Domesticated animals are certainly tricky, and since they are members of lineages that have evolved and then been subsequently deliberately modified, they are in any case borderline between natural/ artificial. There are obviously indicators that you could look for to try to pick them out- evidence of civilizations that might of domesticated them, for example. But if Artifact X really is a domesticated species, then the probability of error is pretty high.

None of which is of any relevance to Evolution. Unless you think that domesticated species are a lot more common than is actually the case.

Meleagar:

Or, by someone who simply disagrees with you. Less posturing, more logic and facts

As I said in my previous post, you can easily check this one out for yourself.

ID makes no comment on the nature or identity of any supposed Designer, and "infinite regress" of a designer is no more an issue than it is in archaelogy or forensics investigations. Before a finding of arson is found, must we not only identify the arsonist, but his entire lineage as well? No. We don't even need to know the identity of the arsonist to gain a finding deliberate fire-setting.

This is a false analogy. Positing a Designer, unlike positing an arsonist, is a very big move in terms of what it adds to the 'furniture of the Universe' (i.e. to the class of extant phenomena). It requires further explanation.

The implications of a theory are irrelevant as to whether or not a theory is scientifically sound

Ah. So you do agree that ID implies Theism.

So your method of establishing ID as best explanation is simply by establishing that known unintelligent forces cannot account for the thing in question?

Almost. We have to take into account the fact that unintelligent processes that we don't currently have an explanation for might be involved. To return to the example of the 'ruins': We might suspect that they were the result of previous unknown geological forces that we couldn't explain with our current theories. In such a case, we would accept a provisional naturalistic explanation, and try to find out more about the geological forces involved. Of course, we would need evidence for the existence of such forces to make such a move.

Otherwise, calling it "natural" (unintelligent) selection and "random" (unintelligent) mutation are unwarranted, ideological characterizations.

As I said in my previous post, I don't think that natural selection of random genetic mutations is the main driving force behind evolution- I'm not a 'Darwinist'. Its a minority view, but the minority is growing.

You seem to think that the example of domesticated animals is somehow important. I'm not sure why. Chairs are designed. So, in part, are domesticated animals. I fail to see why domesticated animals are any more of a threat to evolution than chairs are.

Unless, of course, you think that we can't explain organisms in terms of evolution because we don't know if they were previously domesticated. I really, really hope that isn't what you mean.