[CS] Notes on the "Designing Controversy" panel discussion

[Elton Joe]

Hello all,

A student on the CS list recently requested some notes from the ID
discussion.  Here are mine.  Regular text is paraphrased from what was
said, and my own thoughts and responses are labeled.

!= means "not equal"


elton

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Nothing in biology makes sense except through the process of natural selection.

ID - a way to teach creationism while keeping state and church separated?

ID violates science (supernaturalism)
ID is based on irreducible complexity
ID has not produced any scientific results

Behe and Dembski's ID is different from creationism:
Empirical conjecture without appeal to the Bible for justification
No attributions of omnipotence, etc. to the intelligent designer
"intelligence and design are redundant" - the designer is assumed to
be intelligent, what is key is how the design happens
No claims about the purposes or goals of the designer, other than the
designer works to create specific functions.

Behe - no reason to doubt common descent, universe is billions of
years old, evolution on the large scale
DOES NOT explain "molecular life"

***Dembski - there are reliable ways to detect the difference between
intelligence and natural action, which are in fact two distinctly
different things***

The mousetrap
In order for it to work, it needs all the essential parts to be
organized in a particular way (complexity)
To explain the arrangement of the parts, you must have a designer

ID says there is no way to make all the different complex parts fit
together gradually - they must be designed

Design argument - observations about the natural world indicate that
there is an intelligence that transcends nature

St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century) - teleological (purposeful) argument
for design

William Paley - if we found a watch, we would assume because of its
complexity that someone had made it - it would be absurd to assume it
came about randomly (WHAT IS RANDOM?)

"intelligence and mind"

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Abductive argument - an inference to the best explanation

Organisms are complexly suited for their environments.
Hypothesis 1:  randomly came about
Hypothesis 2:  designed

Likelihood principle - it is extremely unlikely to observe biological
complexity coming about randomly, it is extremely likely to see design

Darwin
Hypothesis 3:  evolution through natural selection

There are a lot of examples of organisms with bad design. 
Furthermore, there are many examples of the wheel being reinvented. 
Many species have gone extinct.  Is this suboptimal design?  (The
designer doesn't have to be perfect.)  But, this all makes sense in
the light of natural selection.

Dembski:
intelligence != mastery or skill
ID != optimal design
design *argument* is philosophical/theological
design *inference* is an empirically testable scientific claim

Specified complexity
Probabilistic complexity:  greater complexity = smaller probability of chance
Conditionally independent patterns:  patterns are independent of the
event (anti-causality?)
Probabilistic resources:  less chances for something special to happen
= more chance for design
Specificational complexity:  low spec complexity + high probabilistic
complexity = unlikely that it came about through chance

Spec complexity is used by SETI to figure out what's intelligent
(Elton's Note:  interesting links to what Contact says about ID, god,
and faith/science)

Chance vs. ID - there is a third choice of natural selection.

Even if SETI got a "message", they would work extremely hard to rule
out every other possibility

(Elton's Note:  What created the rules behind natural selection?  If
causality is the rule of the universe, then what was the first cause?)

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Complexity in computer science - algorithmic complexity, computational
complexity

Irreducible complexity:

Behe - Irrreducibly complex systems - when something is removed, cease
to function
(Elton's Note:  does this mean that living things have no backups? 
why 2 kidneys?  why would a designer make something that didn't adapt?
 is ID != adaptation/change?)

Fitness landscape (Wikipedia diagram)
Fitness spikes (complex organisms) make such huge leaps that they're
unreachable.  Intuitive but wrong.

Apparent spikes turn out not to be spikes.
Darwinian processes really can traverse complex spikes (even if there
were spikes).

Why are there no spikes?
Unknown dimensions of variation (such as development over a lifetime)
Recombinations can create jumps (sexual reproduction)
Exaptation (things can serve different functions depending on the situation)

Fossil record and biology - fill in the missing data in the fitness landscape
Computer science - Darwinian evolution can simulate the artifacts that
appear irreducibly complex without ID

Genetic Algorithms

Genetic programming:
Parts of code can be replaced by mutation, sexual reproduction
(Elton's Note:  how about combining genetic mutation with generative grammars)

Evolved quantum and-or gates
(Elton's Note:  I must look into quantum computing and potential for
algorithmic creativity)

"Darwinian evolution is itself a designer" - Lee Spector

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Bacterial flagella

Bacterial flagellum - paddle, rotor, and motor

"*the* bacterial flagellum" - there is no one flagellum design

30-50 different types of proteins make up the flagellum

Archaeal flagellum - 2 part design

There are more types of motility complexes than flagella

Original function of bacterial flagella is secretion, not motility. 
It's a variation on secretion systems.  Type-III secretion system - a
hollow needle-like device for injecting proteins into other cells. 
Flagellum is similarly hollow, but is a filament instead of a needle.

Flagellin (protein) is used in other systems as well.

The genes that code for Type III secretion and flagella are similar,
and similar across organisms.

"unity and diversity"

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At the time of Darwin, the accepted belief was that species didn't
change over time.  Now, natural selection is accepted.

How do the mechanisms of natural selection work?

Making a friendlier fox:
Breeding foxes with smaller flight distances (won't run away)
Foxes got black and white coats, floppy ears, sought human attention

Vestigial organs - only make sense if we think about ancestors

Fossil evidence of reduction of inner ear bones correlated with the
growth in brain size.

The growth of the brain pushed the bones over a line of species
exactly to where they are now.

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Should we teach intelligent design in schools?

People who aren't experts are going to have to rely on the scientific community.
(Elton's Note:  Ideally, the wider populace would be educated enough
to know how to think critically and independently.)

Demarcation - how do we draw the line between philosophy and science
(Elton's Note:  If science is a way of studying what is true about the
world, then science is a philosophy.)

Should we teach the controversy?  The controversy that should be
taught is not ID, this is a very poor example of how science really
works.

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Majority of Americans don't believe in evolution - why?
Robs us of morals, selflessness, meaning, not compatible with god

Evolutionism - ideological worldview of origins and place of humans

Dawkins - faith is one of the world's greatest evils
(Elton's Note:  and a lot of so-called faithful in the popular sense
are really quite anti-faithful in the Kiekegaardian sense)

Is evolution anti-religion?

Does evolution say anything about human nature and morality?  Purpose
and meaning of life?
(Elton's Note:  This is not, in my view, what religion is about, since
atheistic humanism can provide answers to these.  The problem with
religion is that it confuses the search for what is really real and
what is truly true.)

How do we reconcile the mechanism of evolution with the search for meaning?

(Elton's Note:  In ID, (Dembski says) if we can easily make
distinction between two sorts of creations in the universe, natural
and designed (or artificial), where do we draw the line between the
natural and the artificial?  Referring to the 1st law of
thermodynamics, people are part of the closed system of the universe,
so where does the artificial come from?  If it comes from somewhere
else, then that is part of the system as well.  Otherwise, the
spiritual or the supernatural interacts with the physical and the
natural.  Does ID assume that intelligence is non-algorithmic?  Does
this mean that nature is algorithmic (algorithmic = materialistic,
perhaps deterministic)?)

Design can be natural (Elton's Note:  Which is my point.  IDists seem
to imply that ID is in fact supernatural or spiritual, which is
totally lame science.)

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ID is related to stem cell or global warming in that it is one of the
symptoms of a poor state of public debate about societal issues.