So what's interesting?
by MikeGeneIn the comments section of a previous thread, I noted, "Yet if I were to abandon my hobby and rely on the experts, I'd find little more than screaming that ID = Creationism while arguing for the existence of evolution and demands to see the designer-in-action. It doesn't begin to address the really interesting stuff. So I am left with my hobby." This led fellow TT member, Aagcobb, to reply as follows:
What is the really interesting stuff to you, Mike? I thought that ID ended with the inference that a particular biological structure was designed. To me, the interesting stuff would be when, how, why and of course who designed the structure, but as I understand it all of that is outside the scope of ID.
Of course, what is deemed "interesting" is often dependent on the person. Thus, let me answer Aagcobb's question and lay out what I consider to be "the really interesting stuff."
Here is MikeGene's list.
1. How does one reasonably infer the existence of intelligent design without having independent information about the designer? I think this question is tremendously interesting largely because it is such a radical, big, difficult question and because it explores territory that is mostly uncharted. In fact, the question is so interesting to me that I was able to put together a 300+ page book that is devoted to it, The Design Matrix.
2. If one can reasonably infer design, just what was designed? It's not that interesting (to me) to point to this or that and declare design simply in order to be able to declare design. What intrigues me is whether some form of systematic approach to infer design uncovers any larger pattern.
3. Since I am an evolutionist, the design inference then leads to a deeper and more fascinating question "“ how does design relate to evolution? Just what aspects of evolutionary history have been shaped and influenced by design?
These are the three questions that deeply intrigue me. But what about the other questions raised by Aagcobb? I have addressed these questions before (for example, see here). So let me instead say a few more things about the questions that interest me.
First, I suppose the bottom-line here is to remember that we all have different brains and do not see the same. What is most interesting to someone like Aagcobb might not be as interesting to me. It would thus be folly to expect others to view the world as you do and thus expect them to share the exact same list of interests.
Second, while these are questions that genuinely fascinate me, they are also questions ignored by the scientific community. For example, there is really nothing in the scientific literature that addresses such questions, let alone even raises them. Therefore, I am forced to largely set out on my own to explore the uncharted territory.
Third, because of the socio-political undertones, this makes me a Bad Boy. How dare I think about such things aloud. How dare I ask such questions. Yet over the years, I have not heard a good argument for self-censorship. No one has come up with a good argument that compels me to ignore such questions.
So that leaves me in the following position. Unless one can a) come up with a good argument as to why MikeGene should ignore such questions and/or b) show that the scientific community has addressed these questions, why should I give up my hobby? Is there something wrong with it?
April 27th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Mike,
What is very interesting to me is that scientific community did address all your questions….using ad hominem, distortion, and misrepresentation.
The level and type of ad hominem and otherwise derogatory rhetoric is quite remarkable coming from the likes of Oxford University Press and top scientific journals.
One has to wonder what is going on in science when this kind of discourse can be published as serious argumentation in reputable scientific publications?
Comment by inunison — April 27, 2007 @ 8:28 am
April 27th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Hi MikeGene,
Thanks for your response, I was genuinely interested in knowing what you thought the interesting stuff was. The tough part for you is that there isn't really any way for you to get to points 2 and 3 until you have 1 licked, because you can't discern a pattern or track the influence of design until you have confidence that you can actually discern between what's designed and what isn't.
Nope, people have much weirder hobbies. I manage fantasy baseball teams. Of course I don't blog about it or expect anyone to take my fantasy seriously.
Comment by Aagcobb — April 27, 2007 @ 8:49 am
April 27th, 2007 at 9:43 am
That's not how Darwin and his succesors viewed it. Paley's design was evident to them but they explained it as a consequence of natural selection. If natural selection is an empirically verifiable concept then anomalies related to it suggest a means of distinguishing the design of an unguided natural selection process from design caused by a different process.
Comment by Bradford — April 27, 2007 @ 9:43 am
April 27th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Bradford, this is excellent, mind if I quote you?
First, of course, one must be convinced that there are only three possibly explanations: chance, necessity and design. Darwinian thought covers chance and necessity quite nicely. If it is true that there are only these three, then your statement is valid.
Additionally, if your statement is valid, then every negative case for Darwinism is, ipso facto a positive case for design.
Comment by bFast — April 27, 2007 @ 10:46 am
April 27th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Hi Bradford,
You have a germ of an idea there, but you still have a long way to go before you can confidently start identifying biological structures as designed, and then you are going to have to study a whole lot of structures before you can start looking for patterns. It will be interesting to see if there is any follow-up by you or other IDists.
Comment by Aagcobb — April 27, 2007 @ 11:14 am
April 27th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Thank you Mike for clarifying.
Regarding your areas of inquiry, from an operational and medical industry standpoint, if evolution is designed (i.e. bacteria are designed to develop resistance to antibiotics), identifying and understanding the engineering principles behind the design could be very fruitful.
As an engineer, I reverse engineer many things where I have little clue who specifically the designer is. The presumption that designer acts with human like intelligence is usually enough as far as needing to know the designers identity.
Knowing the purpose of the designs is helpful, but not always essential. If I can find a specificaiton in the engineering repertoire and do a pattern matching of the artifact to existing blueprints, I can approximate the purpose of a design. For example, it is reasonable if one sees a particular architecture to say, the purpose of this design is:
1. error correction
2. feed back control loop
3. redundancy
4. contingency
5. digital to analog conversion
6. logic gate
The proximal purpose versus the ultimate purpose can often be readily identified, if the design is amenable to detection. In fact Bill Dembski and Walter ReMine assert a fundamental quality of biological design was that it was designed such that humans could and would be forced to recognize it, and even infer proxmal purposes. Biology was not designed to conceal its designs but to make them eventually apparent.
In fact, in today's analysis of biological systems, that is exactly how design identification is done, via accepted practices within the discipline of engineering.
I would go further and suggest that compaartive DNA sequencing will uncover steganography in biology, namely, it is optimized to help us reverse engineer it's structure. The sequence divergence patterns suggest intense linguistic design, not a random pattern. I speculate the sequence divergence pattern is design so that humans can decode biology more effectively.
If we look at primates butterflies and bacteria a part of a larger Biotic Message or Engineering Design Document, it is simply a matter of decoding the language the document was written in to discovery all sorts of intersting things in biology. To understand human biology, we must study all of biology. The secrets of human biology are reposited in the library of biotic reality, and the God's creatures are the library's books.
Rosetta Genomics (a huge biotech firm) unwittingly has the right approach….
We see designed evolution in the adaptive mutational strategies in the immune sytem. I believe bacterial populations exhibit designed cooperative strategies to self-evolve. I also believe if one can reverse engineer the front-loaded evolution of marsupials and placentals, that would be an outstanding accomplishment.
Although, above the level of the major phyla, it seems too difficult to me to have front loaded evolution, but that is another discussion….
Aagcobb asked:
That is my strongest interest as well (with the things I listed above following).
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — April 27, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I think this depends a lot on how interesting others find your hobby, and just how good you are at it. Take this guy's hobby for instance…
Comment by Wonders For Oyarsa — April 27, 2007 @ 3:33 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Hi Aagcobb,
I think we are entering a very interesting time where it is not possible to draw sharp lines between science and theology. We are already seeing this in physics and philosophy of mind. Some want to maintain this sharp demarcation, but that will not stop others from following a more integrative approach. I also think the ID can no longer be defined by a certain select group of individuals or a socio/political movement. While some individuals may see ID as a way to counter the putative materialistic tendencies within society, others see it as a promising extension of classic natural theology. That is my primary interest.
Like Sal I am an engineer and have also reverse engineered many designs over the years. I have found that one can tell a lot about the artisan from the artifact. If nothing else ID and science in general can dispell many misconceptions about God and how God works. Of course, there are limits to the questions that can be answered through scientific discovery. Many of the interests you have will not find definitive answers from ID explorations. That's where theology comes in. Granted, the answers that come from theology cannot have the same kind of verisimilitude that that science offers but for those who are faithing individuals the verisimilitude of theology can be just as strong albeit of a different kind and on a different basis.
If you are interested in "why and of course who designed the structure" I don't think ID will be providing answers. There is, instead, an enormous resource of philosophy and theology throughout the ages that attempts to address these profound questions. If you are willing to probe into this area you will be a rarity among ID critics.
Comment by Steve Petermann — April 27, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
bFast:
I cannot think of a causal scenario that would not fit into one of the three categories you allude to. I would agree that a logical elimination strategy could produce evidence for a particular paradigm particularly when the number of options is both finite and small. And yes, you can quote me even when my comments are of lesser quality; as occurs from time to time.:smile:
Comment by Bradford — April 27, 2007 @ 7:15 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
I agree Aagcobb but think the challenge is what makes this subject matter interesting. I'm one of the more optimistic IDists you will encounter and believe a combination of analytical thought, imagination and plain old hard work will eventually produce results.
Comment by Bradford — April 27, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Salvador:
Differing perspectives make the world a more interesting place. You and I often come to the same fork in the road by different means of travel. It is striking how much computer engineering and molecular biology have in common. All six of the above have parallels to biological structures or processes.
Comment by Bradford — April 27, 2007 @ 7:27 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Wonders for Oyarsa:
Whoa. I would have loved to have an aircraft carrier like that when I was a kid. BTW, I almost got sidetracked by the blond. MG might not notice given the bunnies in her vicinity.
Comment by Bradford — April 27, 2007 @ 7:35 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Steve Petermann:
It looks like philosphical predilections will give way to physical and intellectual realities in the end. If the demarcation is not real, as I suspect it is not, then an integrative approach is inevitable.
Agreed. It will acquire a life of its own that is dictated by what we learn and how it fits within theoretical frameworks.
Comment by Bradford — April 27, 2007 @ 7:43 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Hi Aagcobb,
Sure, that's why I wrote The Design Matrix.
Like I said, we're all different (which is one of the things that makes life interesting). For me, the Internet is an integral part of my hobby. In fact, one might go so far as to say that MikeGene is a function of the Internet. Consider all the ways the Internet has helped to make MikeGene and his hobby over the years. First, as I said before, I just love to argue and is there really a better medium for the expression of this addiction? Second, over the years, I have found people who share the same interests as I do. It's people like Krauze, Guts, Deuce, and many others who keep me going. Third, as you know, there is an army of highly educated, highly motivated, highly skeptical, and highly intelligent critics on the Internet. Over the years, they have offered countless hours of free "peer review."
Comment by MikeGene — April 27, 2007 @ 9:04 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Hi inunison ,
As far as I am concerned, the scientific community expresses itself through its peer reviewed literature and as such, there is mostly silence there. The ad hominems, distortions, and misrepresentations come mostly from magazine and newspaper essays and, of course, the streets of cyberspace.
Comment by MikeGene — April 27, 2007 @ 9:10 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Hi MikeGene,
No there isn't; in fact I spend way too much time on boards like this feeding my addiction!
Comment by Aagcobb — April 27, 2007 @ 10:07 pm
April 27th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
I hear ya. The funny thing is that I don't use the term 'addiction' as a metaphor. If I have to be away from the computer for a couple of days, I do suffer withdraw symptoms. LOL
Comment by MikeGene — April 27, 2007 @ 11:21 pm
April 28th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Bradford, "I cannot think of a causal scenario that would not fit into one of the three categories you allude to."
In a way there is a potential fourth. We have chance, necessity, and design. The potential fourth, if the neo-Darwinian model is correct, is "mechanism that was developed via chance + necessity". Alas, if we are the product of chance + necessity alone, though we would tout our work as "design", yet our work can be diminished to chance + necessity. There are also many other less "design" type mechanisms floating around. I think of the O2/CO2 cycle. A mechanism, presumably the product of chance & necessity, has become the causal agent for a whole bunch of other stuff.
Just a thought, to be complete.
Comment by bFast — April 28, 2007 @ 12:05 pm
April 28th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
bFast:
Biology is really the study of necessity. Despite the emphasis on chance and selection, that with which we actually observe and interact with, are almost completely causal phenomenon that would fall in the necessity category. If we attempt to trace an historic causal trail to origins, it becomes apparent that whatever is the correct paradigm describing initial conditions is also the reigning paradigm for what follows. So if initial life forms are the result of an intelligent design process then all life forms that descend from them are also products of intelligent design. This makes disputes over an evolutionary process largely irrelevant to the more encompassing issue of ID. If evolution is strictly described in terms of chance and chemical necessity, but initial life forms include the element of design, then evolution itself would be a manifestation of design.
Telic vs. non-telic approaches are ultimately viewed in origin terms; making them philosophical equivalents in the absence of a smoking gun favoring either one. So you are right in that a chance and selection process could theoretically generate a necessity mechanism but the reverse is also true. Purposeful causality can generate the appearance of a chance process.
Comment by Bradford — April 28, 2007 @ 1:49 pm
April 28th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Bradford, "Purposeful causality can generate the appearance of a chance process."
It is my impression that chance and necessity are significant players in the development of life as we know it. For instance, on the ISCID Brainstorms forum there was a discussion of disease producing mutations that were common between the rhesus, the chimp and the human. My best interpretation of the presented data was that the disease producing mutations were, in fact, the product of pure chance. Further the 80ish mutations that were common between the rhesus and human but not the chimp represented mutations that the chimp line perged after the split with the common ancestor. This data seems to indicate that natural selection is a rather strong preservative, and even a repairative mechanism.
Some have suggested that ID is a "science stopper". (Somehow extending that for this reason science may not consider it, despite acceptance of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a clear science stopper.) It seems to me that there is lots of room to tease out the "it's designed" from chance + necessity explains it equation.
Bottom line as I see it, chance, yes; necessity, yes; design, yes. Where chance + neccessity end and design begins — highly unclear.
Comment by bFast — April 28, 2007 @ 10:05 pm
April 28th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Bradford wrote:
From this and previous posts, I take it you see the OOL issue as key. I'm wondering if there is not another one, either in addition to, or even instead of OOL. And that is the origin of human reason—the type of rationality that enables us to discuss this issue, as well as do very abstract mathematics and apply it, translate Japanese into Finnish, and fret about the limits of free speech, the causes of rising gas prices, and what to do about global warming.
Of course, I've long doubted that reason can be given a complete naturalistic reduction. But I was struck by a specific objection to that project that I had never come across before, and in a place I wouldn't have ordinarily expected to find it—-in Peter van Inwagen's book, The Problem of Evil. His objection is that human rationality simply did not have enough time to evolve naturally.
It should be noted that van Inwagen, though a Christian, is also a materialist in his philosophy of mind. So he has a pressing need to make it the case that whatever our minds are capable of is just the same thing as what our brains are capable of. But natural evolution of our brains, he thinks, cannot plausibly make the jump from what our ancestor primates' brains were capable of 500,000 years or 300,000 years ago to what they are capable of now. 500,000 years is just too short for natural evolutionary mechanisms to accomplish the leap. So he thinks God intervened by a special act that went beyond anything one could have expected to occur from the operation of natural laws. He guesses that this special act affected a small, geographically isolated breeding group of human primates and, for the sake of argument, speculates upon the date: about 190,000 years ago.
And if I was to agree with van Inwagen's idea, I might put the date even closer to the present. If we look at the emergence of modern homo sapiens, something very dramatic does seem to have occurred roughly 50,000 years ago.
Since I'm not inclined to materialism in philosophy of mind, I'm happy enough to let brains evolve naturally. My theory would instead be that God, say 50,000 years ago, created a new contingent connection between certain human brain states and certain types of essentially non-material higher mental states—-those, for instance, involving language, abstract thought, morality, and so forth. I think I would also say that earlier, either at the OOL point or subsequently, God created a contingent connection between physical life (or forms of physical life of a certain minimal degree of complexity), and what we can call broadly sentience —which would include a lot of different kinds of consciousness: frog consciousness, bat consciousness, dolphin consciousness, bonobo consciousness, human baby consciousness, all the way up to fully mature human consciousness.
My reason for insisting on the contingent nature of organism-consciousness connections derives from one of Saul Kripke's celebrated arguments against mind-brain identity: roughly, if the mind just is the brain, this would have to be necessary truth (since for all x, x=x); and surely it is not. For if it were a necessary truth, that would entail that in every possible world containing minds, those minds would all be brains. But that seems extremely implausible. It seems quite possible to conceive of minds that are not brains. These could be angelic minds, alien minds, robot minds, Cartesian soul minds, etc; or, perhaps just as plausibly, our minds.
But it's extremely implausible that an impersonal natural process would generate a contingent connection to such a thing as a rational mind (with all its knowledge of the basic necessary truths of math, logic, etc). So, such a connection in my view almost certainly had to have been created on purpose by a very intelligent non-material agent. By the way, not just Descartes and Leibniz but also Locke essentially argued along similar lines that human rationality had to be specifically created by God. So my view has a decent enough pedigree.
At any rate, that's why I think the mind-brain connection has to be treated as a contingent one. Van Inwagen, being a materialist about our minds, can't afford that luxury, and so thinks that God miraculously made our brains as such different. For me, the brain is the same in terms of its material composition, but it, or some part of it, is connected by God to the realm of non-material reason that on its own it could not ever, no matter how evolved, connect to.
People say nice things about the mental abilities of chimpanzees and such like. But chimpanzees and other similar primates are no closer to mastering theoretical physics than their ancestors of 1,000,000 years ago. And as I wrote in another thread:
Incidentally, van Inwagen remarks:
So Bradford et al, I'd like to read your and others' thoughts on this question. Presumably ID can only advance by looking for anomalies in the RV+NS paradigm. OOL may or may not be one—I am genuinely agnostic about whether a persuasive naturalistic theory regarding OOL can be constructed.
But it strikes me that the origin of human rationality is, if anything, an even tougher nut to crack for the naturalist.
Comment by stunney — April 28, 2007 @ 11:35 pm
April 29th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Hello stunney and bFast. I've combined comments from your recent posts into my response.
That last claim is hard to assess given the disparate natures of brains and rational thought processes. I do not believe there is a means of predicting how a brain could be constructed so as to yield a capacity for human like reasoning. There is more to this than the quantity of brain matter or even associated biochemistry. Can anyone explain why John Doe is a physics dunce and Einstein a genius based on an analysis of their respective brains? Stunney, I am in accord with your statements about human reason. My focus on OOL has a number of advantages though. I believe it to be the wormhole through which support for ID friendly concepts most easily flows.
I did not intend to convey the impression that anomalies in the RV+NS paradigm are an exclusive means by which ID can be advanced. However it could clearly be useful. I'm very receptive to the view that consciousness and reasoning have a non-material basis. My concern is how to put the claim on an empirical footing. I've previously suggested that timing is revealing although I see numerous practical difficulties with experiments intended to demonstrate a timing linkage. It seems to me that if reasoning is nothing other than a manifestation of underlying physical processes then there should be a definite flow to events. Changes in the underlying physical processes should preceed, even by the briefest of nanoseconds, changes in rational thought processes. If the pattern is found to be reversed then one can build the case for an independence of reasoning and a relationship between brain matter and reasoning thought processes that is reciprocal in terms of causes and effects.
If the "emergent property" view is wrong it is even worse than that. In that case there is simply no means of matching evidence to the claim. I have more that is relevant to your views which will appear in my response to bFast.
Then I'll try to provide you and stunney with reasons to believe its best chance is linked to origins. When we observe unicellular organisms adapt to environmental changes we are witnessing events that could be ascribed to any of the three depending on the exact nature of the response in question. ID critics believe such events are evidence for mainstream evolution and therefore counter an intelligent inference. I believe the first claim is irrelevant to the second. It is as if we begin a movie at midpoint and base all our assessments of it on its second half.
All that is needed to enable cells to reproduce and vary is found within the cells themselves. One can get into arguments about limits to variation within time frames if one wishes, but even this does not directly address the question of how it is that self-replicating capacities and mechanisms that support replication were derived in the first place. I believe the correct theoretical framework was supplied by von Neumann and that he was correct about making a distinction between replicating machinery and a transcripting tape containing the information required by replicating mechanisms.
Mike Gene posted a blog entry some months ago which briefly delved into the history of what is now referred to as information and its transmission. There was one remark about which I had been unaware. It indicated that the initial term for what we now describe as information was intelligence. That intuitively correct term was abandoned in favor of information for unknown reasons.
Information is made manifest through physical patterns. It is through such patterns and their preconceived encoding convention that we are able to both express and record intelligent reasoning. The ink in your newspaper is not information; only a useful tool to convey it.
From Huxley to PZ materialists have ultimately relied on assertions and verbal bullying to define rules that make desired outcomes inevitable. We are taught to assume that the only acceptable logical flow is reason eminating from pre-existing matter. That is the unspoken guiding assumption behind OOL and a belief that a genetic code and the functional order of nucleotides found in an initial genome was caused by unspecified and unknown forces of nature. What would you look for however, if that assumption is untrue?
When you absorb information through the symbols you see on your computer screen you know the sender's pet cat or infant toddler cannot be implicated. That type of chance event is ruled out by probability. But what about selection? If a mutation in a unicellular organism can generate an adaptive response then why could a similar process not generate an initial genome? The reason lies in the properties of functional genomes. In contrast to "emergent properties" these ones are identifiable. Selection is linked to replication. If a self-replicating molecule is the object of study the only valid assumption that can be made, from a selection POV, is that changes disrupting replication will not be passed on. One cannot even assume that changes that make a replicator a more efficient one will be selected without knowledge of the supply of relevant nucleotides or AAs. A theoretical change that enhances efficiency might exhaust a natural supply source. In any case there is still no directional indicator pointing toward a cell. There is no theoretical support for von Neumann's insight when "information" and its replicating mechanism are one and the same. The type of materialist preconceptions represented by self-replicating molecules are inconsistent with what we actually observe. We observe encoding conventions and symbolic representations and accurately attribute their cause to intelligence. We are more justified in logically linking codes to intelligence than the materialist is in linking them to unknown forces of nature. The intelligence linkage needs to be the base assumption. When it is, ID arguments for an independence of reason from brain matter easily flow. Intelligence predates brains, stunney and the design you are looking for, bFast, is found in biology's first von Neumann transcriptor.
Comment by Bradford — April 29, 2007 @ 9:03 pm
April 29th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
What is happening is a paradigm shift, and this is how they proceed.
For example, it was not so long ago that the idea of rocks falling out of the heavens was regarded as ridiculous. Aristotle's view of the content of the heavens still held sway. Those that reported events to the contrary were dismissed. And those who took it seriously were ridiculed. IIRC, it took around 100 years to move all the way from ignoring the idea, to laughing at it, to attacking it, to eventually reaching acceptance.
Gandi's quote applies to scientific paradigm shifts:
Comment by eric — April 29, 2007 @ 11:41 pm
April 29th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
eric:
This is a good example of ridicule and subsequent acceptance. A rock falling from the sky would have appeared ridiculous and counter to normal experiences. It also seemed to lack a cause and effect explanation.
Rocks falling from heaven huh.:roll: We'll rid ourselves of such notions when we all become atheists.
Comment by Bradford — April 29, 2007 @ 11:49 pm
April 29th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
That is because the question "Could natural processes accomplish this on their own? (i.e. with no aid of intelligent agency)" is a forbidden question. It is not allowed in the current paradigm, because the definition itself requires that we axiomatically assume that natural processes are sufficient.
You're a "Bad Boy" because you're asking the forbidden questions.
I recall that Phillip Johnson once reflected on a very long pause by Richard Dawkins when he had been asked a question about evolutionary evidence and had trouble coming up with an answer. Johnson generously and correctly observed that anyone can be caught off guard or have a momentary lapse, so the long pause wasn't itself the interesting thing. The interesting thing was what Dawkins said about the question. He realised that that was a question only a creationist would ask.
What Johnson was interested in was why only a creationist would ask such a question about evidence.
p.s. The old non-telic paradigm will fall (as failed paradigms consistently do) because a new generation appears that is not willing to not ask the forbidden questions.
Comment by eric — April 29, 2007 @ 11:51 pm
May 1st, 2007 at 10:09 pm
p.p.s. If anyone can remember where Phillip Johnson discussed what is interesting about Dawkins' long pause and the question only a creationist would ask, I cannot place it at present but I'd be interested to know. [Ahh, found a reference. It was at the beginning of Chapter 2: Information Quandry -- Can Natural Law & Chance Create Genetic Information, in The Wedge of Truth.]
As to particulars, the question that Dawkins was asked was
The time he took to answer was actually longer than the eleven second pause in the published video. According to Dawkins, his reason for pausing was that the question itself indicated to him that the interviewers were creationists.
However, when he finally did answer this supposedly easy question, his response did not answer the question at all. (In a relevant thread, it would be fun to discuss why his after-the-fact retrospective answer is also nonsense. Natural selection can never add genetic information. It only subtracts genetic information.)
Johnson found it interesting that supposedly only creationists would actually ask for "an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome".
I also find that very interesting.
Comment by eric — May 1, 2007 @ 10:09 pm
May 30th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Gandi's quote applies to scientific paradigm shifts
You are not the first ID / Creation-science person to compare your struggle to that of Indian independence, it's quite absurd to compare the two "struggles". Here is a variant of the argument that is even more absurd than your own:
http://www.overwhelmingevidenc...
It's quite a hoot, as are most of the articles on OE.com.
Comment by salimfadhley — May 30, 2007 @ 7:55 am