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55 Responses to “Welcome To The Molecular Machines”
Someone should do a version that explains what is happening"¦
"I put the Pink Floyd song at the beginning here… okay, now you see this supercool zoom-in clip I inserted…"
That'd kill the whole mood, man. It's like that guy lying on the sofa who always wants to giggle a little too loudly while I'm trying to line up Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz.
I'd like to know which sections of the video are "real time" and which are not. From what little I know I would guess the mRNA creation section is about real-time, but I'm not sure. In any case the cell sure is an amazing thing and the more you know about it the more wondrous it gets.
For a longer clip of the DNA replication sequence you can look at the source video here. In the longer clip you can really see the kludgy mechanism that works "backwards" to replicate the lagging strand. It doesn't show the polymerase I or ligase I repairing the lagging strand so you don't get the full effect of how kludgy DNA replication really is. Also, shouldn't the lagging strand have RNA primers when it leaves the helicase?
I'm sure this particular kludge must just be front-loading to make various favorable replication mistakes more likely and not simply evidence of evolution in the form of bad design.
Doug: Did you know that lagging strand synthesis replicates with greater fidelity than the leading strand?
Fine, then the bad design is the fact that the leading strand replicates from the 3' to 5' direction. The oddity is having two extremely different mechanisms to perform exactly the same operation. We certainly avoid this sort of thing in human designs and human designs are used as the justification for ID analogies.
Guts,
I read the linked page and find it particularly weak. For example:
Mike: Thus, the existence of lagging strand synthesis may actually be a place exhibiting a foresight that imparts priority to accuracy of replication over efficiency
If the lagging strand process seems "more designed" why isn't it used for both halves of the DNA? The designer was obviously smart enough to design both mechanisms, an ID perspective would have to explain why it is useful to have two different systems instead of simply two copies of whichever system is "best".
Lagging strand synthesis would also seem more of a problem for the non-teleological perspective which can not draw upon foresight. How? Proofreading is supposed to be a latecomer. This means, for millions of years, genomes were being replicated without proofreading. Now, it would seem that any genome that evolved a 3'-to-5' polymerase would now be able to replicate more quickly. And since evolution has no foresight, this polymerase would quickly spread and replace the 5'-to-3' function on the "lagging strand" (since evolution cares only about one thing - getting out more offspring).
This argument seems to assume that both 3' to 5' and 5' to 3' mechanisms were available from the beginning to compete against one another, which seems like an unjustified assumption. Both the leading and lagging strands use Polymerase III to which the lagging strand adds the need for Primase to add primers and Polymerase I to replace the primers and Ligase I to join the ozaki fragments. From an evolutionary perspective this suggest the leading strand mechanism likely existed before the lagging strand mechanism. Despite being kludgy the lagging strand mechanism could have a selective advantage in complex organisms due to higher fidelity copies, but it first required a lot more error correcting proteins to evolve.
Mike: Of course, periodically I have encountered people who argue that the mere fact DNA polymerase makes errors speaks against its intelligent origin. Yet even if it were possible to design an error-free DNA polymerase, an error-free mode of replication would hinder one's attempt to front-load evolution.
If ID tries to justify the existence of two different copying mechanisms by claiming that one method is meant to inject variation while the other method is meant to maintain fidelity then this argument against ID becomes valid. If the lagging strand mechanism had perfect fidelity you would still have variation in the leading strand. Why risk the viability of the entire cell line by allowing mutations on both strands?
So Todd's argument seems to boil down to: it's not perfect, therefore it's not designed.
If the lagging strand mechanism had perfect fidelity you would still have variation in the leading strand. Why risk the viability of the entire cell line by allowing mutations on both strands?
You really need to read the Design Matrix (I forgot, you said you did).
But even aside from that, have you ever read Mike's position before on evolution and ID? Because it doesn't seem as if you had.
Why would a designer want perfect fidelity? How would that allow the design to propagate into the future? Perfect fidelity in repliciation + insult in environment arises = no variability to allow the organism the ability to escape the insult. Todd, THAT would be a bad design.
We know that environments change and obstacles in those environments come up…. if the organism has no way (if the designer had no foresight) to overcome the 'hurdle' it would be effectively done.
No speciation, no propagation of a design signal, no life.
If the lagging strand process seems "more designed" why isn't it used for both halves of the DNA? The designer was obviously smart enough to design both mechanisms, an ID perspective would have to explain why it is useful to have two different systems instead of simply two copies of whichever system is "best".
Thats answered within the essay:
Therefore, in the presence of chromosomal lesions, it is possible that DNA primase activity must be inhibited to prevent priming downstream of the damage, and to slow down DNA replication, thus, providing enough time to repair the lesions.
Trends Biochem Sci 1997 Nov;22(11):424-427
Todd writes:
This argument seems to assume that both 3' to 5' and 5' to 3' mechanisms were available from the beginning to compete against one another, which seems like an unjustified assumption. Both the leading and lagging strands use Polymerase III to which the lagging strand adds the need for Primase to add primers and Polymerase I to replace the primers and Ligase I to join the ozaki fragments. From an evolutionary perspective this suggest the leading strand mechanism likely existed before the lagging strand mechanism.
I think you misunderstood. The leading-lagging strand mechanism do not "compete with one another", they are simply a consequence of the fact that the DNA polyermases can only read 5->3 (probably because DNA pol can only elongate strands using 5'dNTP AFAIK). Replication requires this functionality. So it doesn't even matter whether you're right about the evolutionary belief about which came first, leading or lagging, it's irrelevant. Mike Gene is postulating the evolution of a polymerase that can read 3->5 and then these would do away with the need for a 5->3 polymerase on the lagging strand and thus replication would be faster.
Todd writes:
If ID tries to justify the existence to two different copying mechanisms by claiming that one method is meant to inject variation while the other method is meant to maintain fidelity then this argument against ID becomes valid. If the lagging strand mechanism had perfect fidelity you would still have variation. Why risk the viability of the entire cell line by allowing mutations on both strands?
Probably because of the changing need for low/high mutation rates in evolution. In this section, Gene is simply talking about proofreading in general. Why should any design need any proofreading at all, why not have it always be perfect? The answer is "any error-free mode of replication would hinder one's attempt to front-load evolution".
Its not perfect fidelity for the DNA copy, its only perfect fidelity for the lagging strand. Variation would still exist on the leading strand. He might want that to ensure the information he front-loaded into our genes would survive long enough until external factors create the correct environment for his design to work its mojo.
Doug: How would that allow the design to propagate into the future?
The better question is how could the design be guaranteed to propagate into the future without that. If god was simply rolling a big crap shoot then it would seem ID is more about random chance than evolution.
Doug: Perfect fidelity in repliciation + insult in environment arises = no variability to allow the organism the ability to escape the insult. Todd, THAT would be a bad design.
We know that environments change and obstacles in those environments come up"¦. if the organism has no way (if the designer had no foresight) to overcome the 'hurdle' it would be effectively done.
No speciation, no propagation of a design signal, no life
Here you are attacking a straw man based on the incorrect assumption that I claimed there would be no variation. In fact I specifically said, "If the lagging strand mechanism had perfect fidelity you would still have variation in the leading strand."
Guts: Thats answered within the essay
I fail to see how the quoted section answers the question. Great, the lagging method has a built in brake. What does that have to do with having two different methods? None of these pro-ID arguments have justified the need for two separate copying mechanisms.
Guts: Mike Gene is postulating the evolution of a polymerase that can read 3->5 and then these would do away with the need for a 5->3 polymerase on the lagging strand and thus replication would be faster.
I guess I still don't understand then. No one has ever claimed that evolution optimally removes unnecessary components or optimally creates new components. Instead helicase happens to perform the useful function of splitting a DNA in the 5' to 3' direction so evolution takes advantage of that. How could it possibly speak against evolution that a 3'->5' replication hasn't evolved? Perhaps if there was a designer then perhaps he could make a 3'->5' polymerase that might be able to both replicate faster and also avoid errors that would require there to be an additional braking mechanism. While a designer might be expected to find such a solution (if its even possible) evolution is lacking in purpose and cannot deliberately find any particular solution.
Guts: In this section, Gene is simply talking about proofreading in general. Why should any design need any proofreading at all, why not have it always be perfect? The answer is "any error-free mode of replication would hinder one's attempt to front-load evolution".
As I pointed out there would still be variation even if the lagging method was perfect in its fidelity so front-loading would not seem to be hindered. Instead the perfect copy would ensure that the original "front-loaded" data would stick around longer to ensure insure the critical information god hid in our DNA would not be lost to the random noise of variation. From an information theory perspective this would seem to counter the signal loss that otherwise seems to severely hinder the front-loaders ability to accomplish specific goals down the road. Otherwise you're left with a front-loader who's only feasible goal is mere propagation with variation (in other words, his only goal is apparently to study the blind watchmaker).
Here you are attacking a straw man based on the incorrect assumption that I claimed there would be no variation. In fact I specifically said, "If the lagging strand mechanism had perfect fidelity you would still have variation in the leading strand."
You are right, Todd. Sorry about that.
I stand corrected. I was arguing against a point you weren't making.
I fail to see how the quoted section answers the question. Great, the lagging method has a built in brake. What does that have to do with having two different methods? None of these pro-ID arguments have justified the need to two separate copying mechanisms.
If you're just asking for a need for two different methods, it's because the DNA polymerase can only read 5->3.
Todd:
How could it possibly speak against evolution that a 3'->5' replication hasn't evolved? Perhaps if there was a designer then perhaps he could make a 3'->5' polymerase that might be able to both replicate faster and also avoid errors that would require there to be an additional braking mechanism.
I can see Mike's point about that, billions of years of evolution, I don't see anything impossible about it. It would be selected for if evolution has no foresight. Why not? A front-loading designer would not want to avoid errors.
Todd:
As I pointed out there would still be variation even if the lagging method was perfect in its fidelity so front-loading would not seem to be hindered.
There is also the problem of being able to respond to the need for alternatating high/low mutation rates. That is one explanation as to why one strand is more accurate than the other.
Guts: If you're just asking for a need for two different methods, it's because the DNA polymerase can only read 5->3.
Polymerase reading in only one direction does not intrinsically require two separate copy methods, a Polymerase III based leading strand mechanism would seem to geometrically fit just fine on both sides of the helicase. As mentioned an evolutionary perspective would predict that at some point only one of these methods existed, likely the leading strand method. Try again.
Guts: It would be selected for if evolution has no foresight. Why not? A front-loading designer would not want to avoid errors.
If it happened to get created in the first place then maybe evolution would favor it. But because it lacks foresight evolution can not simply choose to create it just to see if it might work better. You can speculate about the exact error rate your front loader might want but evolution doesn't "want" anything. Actually your front loader is a lot like Goldilocks, she obviously wants to avoid too many errors what with the whole proof reading argument, but not all errors what with the utilizing evolution argument. This conviniently allows you to claim that whatever you observe supports front loading.
Todd: Otherwise you're left with a front-loader who's only feasible goal is mere propagation with variation (in other words, his only goal is apparently to study the blind watchmaker).
His goal is a biological entity capable of sustaining itself and replicating while maintaining genomic integrity. A neat unexplained trick for a blind watchmaker but I get the impression this blind watchmaker was handed the watch and all he had to do was observe the winding mechanism in action.
Polymerase reading in only one direction does not intrinsically require two separate copy methods, a Polymerase III based leading strand mechanism would seem to geometrically fit just fine on both sides of the helicase.
The opposite side of the replication fork runs 3->5, DNA polymerases can't read 3->5, it has to use a different method. If you disagree, show me a reference that shows successful DNA replication that doesn't have the two different methods.
Todd:
Actually your front loader is a lot like Goldilocks, she obviously wants to avoid too many errors what with the whole proof reading argument, but not all errors what with the utilizing evolution argument. This conviniently allows you to claim that whatever you observe supports front loading.
It's just a consequence of both the data and the logic that flows naturally from the Front-Loading hypothesis.
Fine, then the bad design is the fact that the leading strand replicates from the 3' to 5' direction. The oddity is having two extremely different mechanisms to perform exactly the same operation. We certainly avoid this sort of thing in human designs and human designs are used as the justification for ID analogies.
Very good "“ you're inching toward the Matrix. The next step would be to file this argument under one of the four criteria of the Matrix. I'd place this bad/good design argument in the Rationality category.
The next step is to then score it. So considering what you know about DNA replication, including the lagging strand concern, on a scale of -5 to +5 (-5 being most irrational and +5 being most rational), how would you score it, Todd?
Guts: The opposite side of the replication fork runs 3->5, DNA polymerases can't read 3->5, it has to use a different method. If you disagree, show me a reference that shows successful DNA replication that doesn't have the two different methods.
Oh yeah, guh, I see where my confusion was. I forgot that the lagging strand is flipped so its running 5->3. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing ;).
Mike: The next step is to then score it. So considering what you know about DNA replication, including the lagging strand concern, on a scale of -5 to +5 (-5 being most irrational and +5 being most rational), how would you score it, Todd?
My problem with the Rationality Score is that I would expect both a Designer and Evolution to score high in this category. I guess I might expect a designer to always score a perfect 5 whereas evolution might only be expected to score a 4. Of course in this case it only scores a 3 since it loses a point for extreme kludginess.
My problem with the Rationality Score is that I would expect both a Designer and Evolution to score high in this category.
So a low Rationality Score not only reflects evidence against intelligent design, but also evidence against evolution? I doubt many would argue that the backward-wired retina is evidence against evolution.
Here's your problem. The Design Matrix clearly and explicitly explains there is no reason that a designer cannot shape or work through evolution. Thus there is no reason to insist on the false dichotomy of a Designer vs. Evolution. The Rationality Score does not get close to that choice(the Discontinuity Score is better for that).
As I also explain in the book, the Rationality Score helps us tease apart the blind watchmaker from an intelligent watchmaker.
From the DM:
Biologist Massimo Pigliucci, from the University of Tennessee, spells out the implications of Jacob's tinkerer. Pigliucci argues that organisms are "made of several parts that have no unique and irreplaceable function." He adds:
"As biologist Francois Jacob put it, this is exactly what you would expect if natural selection worked like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer. A bricoleur is somebody who assembles new things out of old parts that are easily available. Th e result is bound to be complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty. Exactly like living organisms, and precisely what you would expect from a natural phenomenon."
Thus, the blind watchmaker gives us a messy, redundant complexity. Ken Miller captures the essence of this form of design as he describes the genome as a product of the blind watchmaker: "In fact, the genome resembles nothing so much as a hodgepodge of borrowed, copied, mutated, and discarded sequences and commands that has been cobbled together by millions of years of trial and error against the relentless test of survival."
The blind watchmaker works like a "like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer," and cobbles things together willy-nilly such that those things that just happen to work better than the competitors' systems get passed on. That's it; that's all. Why would you expect this type of design process to spit out high Rationality Scores?
Of course, maybe the blind watchmaker explains it all "good design, bad design, no design, and every thing in between, such that nothing counts against it. Like I also write, "The Duck absorbs all data."
The Rabbit comes with more methodological constraint.
Mike: Here's your problem. The Design Matrix clearly and explicitly explains there is no reason that a designer cannot shape or work through evolution. Thus there is no reason to insist on the false dichotomy of a Designer vs. Evolution.
The result of the DM's synthesis of both designer and evolution is that you end up with no way of telling which is responsible for what. We all know that a Designer can do absolutely anything and on this forum we mostly all agree that evolution can turn simple life into all of the varieties we observe. The front-loader simply claims that the reason evolution can do all the things we all agree it can do is because of front loading where MET says evolution is able to do all these things without that initial push-start. The rationality or lack of rationality of the final result hardly seems to tell us anything about whether that initial push-start was required.
Mike: The blind watchmaker works like a "like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer," and cobbles things together willy-nilly such that those things that just happen to work better than the competitors' systems get passed on. That's it; that's all. Why would you expect this type of design process to spit out high Rationality Scores?
Because in order to survive the solution that is stumbled upon will still have to function extremely well even if it is obviously kludged together like DNA replication or the backwards retina. And whenever a rational solution is placed in competition with an less rational solution you would expect the more rational solution to have the survival advantage. In other words evolution is like a collector gathering up and propagating all of the most rational solutions that are stumbled upon. As I've stated before, the process of evolution seems like it could be described as intelligent in many of the same ways a human is described as intelligent, it has memory and problem solving. I can't justify giving anything that functions so well a negative rationality score, I'd say anything with a score less than zero couldn't even be expected to work. This is a problem with highly subjective scales though, my 0 score is "barely even works at performing any sort of function" whereas that might be your -5 score.
What I suggested (above) was that one process provides a check, a comparative test, upon the other. It's a way of obtaining independent verification. Which sounds "rational" to me.
To describe what he observes, TB borrows the term "kludge" from software engineering. Drawing upon the same source I'll describe it differently: Bisimulation.
The result of the DM's synthesis of both designer and evolution is that you end up with no way of telling which is responsible for what.
Unless someone can prove that design and evolution are mutually exclusive, such that design could not possibly involve evolution and evolution would necessarily exclude design, this is an option we cannot ignore.
The rationality or lack of rationality of the final result hardly seems to tell us anything about whether that initial push-start was required.
The Rationality Score helps us tease apart the blind watchmaker from an intelligent watchmaker.
Because in order to survive the solution that is stumbled upon will still have to function extremely well even if it is obviously kludged together like DNA replication or the backwards retina.
So as long as it is functioning well, the existence or non-existence of kludge both point to the blind watchmaker?
And whenever a rational solution is placed in competition with an less rational solution you would expect the more rational solution to have the survival advantage. In other words evolution is like a collector gathering up and propagating all of the most rational solutions that are stumbled upon.
This would mean there is a selective pressure against kludges and hodgepodges. But there is not. Otherwise, the existence of kludge would argue against the blind watchmaker.
The blind watchmakers mimics a designer because it crafts adaptations, not rational solutions. While a rational solution would be an adaptation, not all adaptations are rational solutions (a rational solution is a subset of adaptations). An adaptation is simply about coming up with a solution that works better than the immediate competition. And the metric for what works is whether the solution helps the organism produce more offspring than the next fella, not if the solution is perceived by intelligent beings to be rational.
Again:
Biologist Massimo Pigliucci, from the University of Tennessee, spells out the implications of Jacob’s tinkerer. Pigliucci argues that organisms are “made of several parts that have no unique and irreplaceable function.” He adds:
“As biologist François Jacob put it, this is exactly what you would expect if natural selection worked like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer. A bricoleur is somebody who assembles new things out of old parts that are easily available. The result is bound to be complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty. Exactly like living organisms, and precisely what you would expect from a natural phenomenon.”
You don’t expect rational solutions from the blind, meandering, cobbling watchmaker; you expect something that is “complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty.”
As I've stated before, the process of evolution seems like it could be described as intelligent in many of the same ways a human is described as intelligent, it has memory and problem solving.
Again, don’t confuse the blind watchmaker with the process of the evolution. While the latter includes the former, the two are not equivalent. So if the process of evolution seems like it could be described as intelligent in many of the same ways a human is described as intelligent, you may want to pause and rethink any insistence that evolution is a non-telic process.
I can't justify giving anything that functions so well a negative rationality score, I'd say anything with a score less than zero couldn't even be expected to work.
If it didn’t work, it is unlikely there would be anything to score. The Rationality Score is not really about whether or not something works; it’s about how things work.
This is a problem with highly subjective scales though, my 0 score is "barely even works at performing any sort of function" whereas that might be your -5 score.
Which is why score should come with justifications. That way, people can assess the score to see if it resonates.
Rock: What I suggested (above) was that one process provides a check, a comparative test, upon the other. It's a way of obtaining independent verification. Which sounds "rational" to me.
To describe what he observes, TB borrows the term "kludge" from software engineering. Drawing upon the same source I'll describe it differently: Bisimulation.
Duck/Rabbit.
Anyway, this is why the DM gives engineers a prominant place at the table.
Mike: The Rationality Score helps us tease apart the blind watchmaker from an intelligent watchmaker.
Obviously that's exactly the claim I'm questioning, so simply restating the claim doesn't help.
So as long as it is functioning well, the existence or non-existence of kludge both point to the blind watchmaker?
I did not claim that, I claim it tells us nothing. I would expect evolution to be more likely then a designer to result in a kludge but I would expect evolution to create some really cleaver solutions as well. Likewise even a YEC could justify a kludge by rationalizing why their imaginary designer might have created it or what hidden benefit it actually has.
This would mean there is a selective pressure against kludges and hodgepodges. But there is not. Otherwise, the existence of kludge would argue against the blind watchmaker.
I'm surprised to hear you say that as it seems to show a fairly significant misunderstanding about MET. Even given the axiom that kludges would be selected against what leads you to claim there is no selective pressure against kludges just because some kludges exist? That's like saying there's no selective pressure against death because things die, it just doesn't follow from the axiom. First a kludge is not a boolean choice between kludge and utterly optimal, and second a selective pressure against something doesn't simply wipe that thing from existence. I'm claiming there is absolutely a selective pressure against kludges which is why we often see highly rational solutions.
The blind watchmakers mimics a designer because it crafts adaptations, not rational solutions.
I would say the blind watchmaker mimics a designer because the adaptations it crafts are often very rational solutions. This is a common theme among ID supporters though, they apply metaphysical limits on what they think the capabilities of the blind watcher might be and then they claim design because life exceeds their arbitrarily imagined limits. Although evolution is certainly constrained in ways a designer is not there is no arbitrary limit to the complexity or rationality of its final products.
While a rational solution would be an adaptation, not all adaptations are rational solutions (a rational solution is a subset of adaptations). An adaptation is simply about coming up with a solution that works better than the immediate competition. And the metric for what works is whether the solution helps the organism produce more offspring than the next fella, not if the solution is perceived by intelligent beings to be rational.
What leads us to call one thing more rational than another? We use various factors like how many steps are required, how directly it carries out its function, how many parts must interact, and how successfully the function is carried out. These are all related and could be generalized as 'efficiency'. Wouldn't you expect the most efficient adaptation to have the survival advantage? It seems intuitive that the most rational solution according to our perceptions would also be the most efficient solution and thus have a selective advantage. To be honest I can't fathom why anyone would expect 'rationality' and 'survival advantage' not to highly correlated.
You don’t expect rational solutions from the blind, meandering, cobbling watchmaker; you expect something that is “complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty.”
No, YOU don't expect a rational solution, I obviously do ;). I might expect to find mostly kludges, which seems to be confirmed by my casual observations, but I would also expect to find some absolutely brilliant solutions too. I would also predict that the "older" a system is the more likely it would be to contain highly rational solutions. This follows from my belief that 'rational' solutions do, in fact, have a survival advantage so the more deep time a system has endured the more rational I would expect the result to be from a statistical standpoint (in other words I would expect individual cases to violate this but to form a general pattern). Also note that these people you are quoting are claiming that life as we know it meets their definition of “complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty.” He says, "Exactly like living organisms, and precisely what you would expect from a natural phenomenon." Those quotes seem to completely agree with what I'm saying.
Again, don’t confuse the blind watchmaker with the process of the evolution. While the latter includes the former, the two are not equivalent. So if the process of evolution seems like it could be described as intelligent in many of the same ways a human is described as intelligent, you may want to pause and rethink any insistence that evolution is a non-telic process.
I use the blind watchmaker as a metaphor for evolution, so they really are the same in my mind. But the very essence of my claim is precisely that a non-telic process can exhibit certain behaviors identical to a telic process. The element that I see as superfluous is purpose or intent. I've seen nothing to justify the claim of purpose or intent so my bias towards minimalism compels me to challenge the telic perspective.
If it didn’t work, it is unlikely there would be anything to score. The Rationality Score is not really about whether or not something works; it’s about how things work.
It's your scale so you are free to define it however you like, it just seems to me that the possibility space goes from "extremely bad" through "neutral" to "extremely good." An extremely bad design would be one that, say, ensured the eventual extinction of the species and that would be highly irrational (-5 score).
Then again this points out another weakness of your scale. In nature if you found a -5 rationality design it would almost certainly be an indication of telic interference since, as you point out, nothing in nature would survive to be scored with such a bad design. Yet you add a telic agent and they can, for example, breed dogs with faces so flat they would die of sinus infections if left to survive on their own. Or breed fruit trees with fruit that is completely sterile such that it cannot reproduce in the absence of the telic agent. In these cases only though knowledge of the intelligent agent can any sort of rationality be inferred in the result (for example, the agent likes furry human-proportioned faces for aesthetic reasons and likes to eat bananas but only if they do not contain large hard seeds). So it seems both extremes of the Rationality scale might imply telic agency.
Those are awful statements attributed to Jacob and Miller. They are FOS. I think I highlighted before the profound difference between the “blind watchmaker” and Darwin’s conception of evolution via natural selection. For Darwin evolution tended to progress to perfection and he even spoke of the “absolute perfection” of life’s adaptations, and wrote that life forms bear the stamp of higher workmanship, “immeasurably superior” to man’s artifice. He also wisely advised against trusting our intuitions, impressions, or expectations for life in that regard.
I've read many reprots published by engineers investigating biological adaptations (e.g., the human eye, the Heat Shock Response system, the bacterial flagellum, the wiring of the human brain, etc.) using design theories, their methods of analysis ,and applying their standards, and they come to quite different conclusions then Jacob and Miller.
And, as an aside, in many fields (computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, and economics) scientists assume the position that to be “rational” is to think -> act in a way that s consistent with the biological imperative : adapt. (What Joy calls the “Prime Directive.”) Rationality is not assumed to be some form of a priori prescriptive logic. To be rational is to adapt.
I would say the blind watchmaker mimics a designer because the adaptations it crafts are often very rational solutions. This is a common theme among ID supporters though, they apply metaphysical limits on what they think the capabilities of the blind watcher might be and then they claim design because life exceeds their arbitrarily imagined limits.
Why metaphysical limits when physical processes themselves indicate physical limits? A very practical limit is imposed by scientific methodology. Limits are delineated by our capacity to make accurate predictions. What predictions are we accurately able to make about the conditions that would give rise to life in our universe?
Although evolution is certainly constrained in ways a designer is not there is no arbitrary limit to the complexity or rationality of its final products.
Who is claiming arbitrary limits? If there are constraints to the process, as you claim, limits should be evidenced by constraints.
This is off topic, but it does have something to do with design, though not at the cellular level. Since the ribcage's main function is to protect the body's vital organs, why didn't it evolve, be created, be designed, however you want to call it, to be solid, which would have resulted in better protection? The spinal cord is much better protected, for example. What would the extra weight be, ten pounds or so? Twenty? I'm lugged that much and more just in extra fat alone and still been able to get around the track at a decent clip.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 1, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
AnaxagorasRules: why didn't it evolve, be created, be designed, however you want to call it, to be solid, which would have resulted in better protection?
If it was "blindly" generated, there is no "why."
If it was designed by an intelligent agent, perhaps the designer wanted to make it easier for the internal organs to get stabbed or run thru with a spear. No reason to assume that the design is optimized for protection, unless you have a particular theological agenda. There may be other telic considerations.
AnaxagorasRules: Since the ribcage's main function is to protect the body's vital organs, why didn't it evolve, be created, be designed, however you want to call it, to be solid, which would have resulted in better protection?
Whether evolved, created, or designed, there is a balance of factors. The loss of flexibility, agility, and higher energy requirements can be a far greater disadvantage than the minimal protection offered by a solid rib cage. Keep in mind that in nature a crippling leg wound can be deadly, while a bite to the ribs will often not pierce a major organ or might be deadly anyway. If you are going to have body armor, it might be best to have it on the outside, e.g. turtles, ankylosauria.
If it was designed by an intelligent agent, perhaps the designer wanted to make it easier for the internal organs to get stabbed or run thru with a spear. No reason to assume that the design is optimized for protection, unless you have a particular theological agenda. There may be other telic considerations.
I just realized something that could explain why the ribcage is not solid. It might have to do with respiration. If I remember correctly (not swearing that I am), the ribs move up and out on inhales, creating a larger rib cavity, and the ribs move down and inward on exhales, creating a smaller rib cavity as the lungs compress. Perhaps this expansion and contraction of the ribcage would not work well if it were solid, and since breathing is of paramount importance, it makes sense that the ribs, besides offering protection to the organs, must also accomodate respiration.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 1, 2008 @ 3:20 pm
AnaxagorasRules: I just realized something that could explain why the ribcage is not solid.
Ribs long predate air-breathing land vertebrates. Mammals have suppressed thoracic ribs, unlike more primitive vertebrates, such as early tetrapods which have ribs for each vertebrae. (Development is controlled by Hox10.)
Bradford: Who is claiming arbitrary limits? If there are constraints to the process, as you claim, limits should be evidenced by constraints.
I already said who, in this case it's Mike but its common among ID supporters. The claim that a highly rational design cannot be achieved by evolution is a metaphysical claim that evolution is somehow limited against creating a highly rational solution. On the other hand, if you agree that evolution can create a highly rational design than the Rationality score of the DM is not useful for separating evolution from a designer.
You are asking the wrong person this question as I'm not the one placing metaphysical limits on what evolution might be able to accomplish. If you are trying to claim there are physical limits that only a designer could surpass and that life surpassed those limits then it's up to you to justify that claim. To me that claim seems utterly false. The limitations placed on evolution are more along the lines of requiring a contiguous line of small adaptations over long periods of time whereas a designer can jump directly to the final result.
kornbelt888: No reason to assume that the design is optimized for protection, unless you have a particular theological agenda. There may be other telic considerations.
An excellent example of how the telic perspective can justify anything, thanks.
Ribs long predate air-breathing land vertebrates. Mammals have suppressed thoracic ribs, unlike more primitive vertebrates, such as early tetrapods
Okay, instead of focussing on respiration, and using whatever term would be appropriate for fishes or birds to get oxygen into their bloodstream, don't their lungs expand and contract? If so, then the same reasoning for having an unsolid ribcage, to facilitate movement of the ribs to allow for expansion and contraction of the lungs, would be in place. Or another way to look at my original question is: is there a good reason why the ribcage is not solid? I'm assuming there is, and came up with respiration as a possible reason.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 1, 2008 @ 5:18 pm
AnaxagorasRules: Okay, instead of focussing on respiration, and using whatever term would be appropriate for fishes or birds to get oxygen into their bloodstream, don't their lungs expand and contract?
Respiration is the correct term for any method of transporting oxygen to the cells. In fish, it typically involves taking water through the mouth then forcing it through the gills which are located at the pharynx (basically, the back of the throat).
AnaxagorasRules: Or another way to look at my original question is: is there a good reason why the ribcage is not solid? I'm assuming there is, and came up with respiration as a possible reason.
Not a bad guess. Movement of the ribs to expand the thoracic cavity occurs in many land vertebrates, but ribs predate land vertebrates by millions of years. As I mentioned above, the loss of flexibility, agility, and higher energy requirements can be a far greater disadvantage than the minimal protection offered by a solid rib cage. It's rather hard for a fish to swim if it can't bend its body.
Todd B: An excellent example of how the telic perspective can justify anything, thanks.
Don't mention it. Although, I think the term "explain" is more appropriate than "justify." At any rate, MET and ID can both "explain anything", so both are equal as far as that goes. The "rationality score" is a troublesome part of Mike's approach for me, and I'm still pondering it.
It's rather hard for a fish to swim if it can't bend its body.
I wasn't getting your meaning before. I can buy this as the initial reason for not having an solid ribcage. Perhaps mamillian-type respiration, as it exists now, would not have been possible otherwise.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 2, 2008 @ 12:30 am
kornbelt888: Although, I think the term "explain" is more appropriate than "justify." At any rate, MET and ID can both "explain anything", so both are equal as far as that goes.
Actually, I'd say "rationalize" is the more correct term; "god did it" certainly explains nothing. And no, MET cannot "explain anything" because its not a magical supernatural force. Common examples of things MET cannot explain: mythological chimeras, Cambrian rabbits, the origin of life, the laws of physics (which Ben Stein seems dumb enough to expect it to explain), etc etc etc.
kornbelt888: Although, I think the term "explain" is more appropriate than "justify." At any rate, MET and ID can both "explain anything", so both are equal as far as that goes.
Todd B: Actually, I'd say "rationalize" is the more correct term; "god did it" certainly explains nothing. And no, MET cannot "explain anything" because its not a magical supernatural force.
I neither mentioned "god" or any "magical supernatural force."
Common examples of things MET cannot explain: mythological chimeras, Cambrian rabbits, the origin of life, the laws of physics (which Ben Stein seems dumb enough to expect it to explain), etc etc etc.
By "everything", I meant everything with regards to biological evolution. Apologies for not making that clear. So mythological chimeras, the origin of life, and the laws of physics, are irrelevant.
As for Cambrian rabbits (did you mean pre-cambrian?), that would cause some reconsideration of some lineages and understanding about the emergence of mammals, but would it necessitate a radical new theory to accommodate it?
kornbelt888: So mythological chimeras … are irrelevant.
The discovery of a griffin or centaur would represent a substantial violation of Common Descent. There is no plausible ancestor.
kornbelt888: As for Cambrian rabbits (did you mean pre-cambrian?), that would cause some reconsideration of some lineages and understanding about the emergence of mammals, but would it necessitate a radical new theory to accommodate it?
A Precambrian rabbit would precede its posited ancestor. It's extremely doubtful Common Descent could survive such a challenge. A single example would probably be considered anomalous, though.
Zachriel: The discovery of a griffin or centaur would represent a substantial violation of Common Descent. There is no plausible ancestor.
So isn't what you're really saying is that if something were found that didn't fit into the current phylogenic tree, the phylogenic tree would have to be modified? Haven't things been found that have caused that to occur to a lesser degree? If so, then aren't we talking about a matter of degree? How much of a "non fit" would have to occur before common descent was abandoned?
kornbelt888: As for Cambrian rabbits (did you mean pre-cambrian?), that would cause some reconsideration of some lineages and understanding about the emergence of mammals, but would it necessitate a radical new theory to accommodate it?
Zachriel: A Precambrian rabbit would precede its posited ancestor. It's extremely doubtful Common Descent could survive such a challenge.
Why? It would only necessarily indicate the current phylogenic tree does not exhaustively map to all the real world life-forms on earth. Why should anyone be surprised by that? If the rocks started to show that mammals emerge prior to the cambrian, and then apparently re-emerged during the cambrian, by some unknown mechanism, how would Common Descent necessarily be violated? Would that appease the doubters? I'm not sure I buy the griffin or rabbit argument that it would necessarily blast Common Descent of the map, esp in the eyes of hardened anti-telics. But I think it would sure add fire to those already skeptical of Common Descent.
Zachriel: The discovery of a griffin or centaur would represent a substantial violation of Common Descent. There is no plausible ancestor.
kornbelt888: So isn't what you're really saying is that if something were found that didn't fit into the current phylogenic tree, the phylogenic tree would have to be modified?
A centaur would simply not fit the phylogenetic tree. It is a cross of two separate lineages, a human and a horse. But let's assume it is not an exact cross, but something somewhat like a horse and a human. We still have a mammal with six limbs, and still no plausible ancestor.
kornbelt888: Haven't things been found that have caused that to occur to a lesser degree?
Of course. When dealing with historical reconstruction, especially of a history that stretches over millions of years and left little evidence, there are going to be gaps and missteps.
kornbelt888: If so, then aren't we talking about a matter of degree?
Scientists often use words like "plausible" and "reasonable". But ultimately it comes back to be able to make valid empirical predictions. Stories of centaurs have all the characteristics of human imagination (design). But you are welcome to propose an alternative hypothesis.
kornbelt888: How much of a "non fit" would have to occur before common descent was abandoned?
Consider Mercury's anomalous precession. One could have bombastically declared that the anomaly falsified Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation. But Newton's Theory remained successful at predicting a vast number of other phenomena, from moons to apples. So, Mercury's errant orbit remained shelved as an anomaly. Call it Newton's Theory of Almost Universal (except Mercury's anomalous precession) Gravitation.
Again, it comes back to being able to propose and test valid hypotheses.
Obviously that's exactly the claim I'm questioning, so simply restating the claim doesn't help.
If you read the part I was replying to, you seemed to be under the impression that the Rationality Score was intended to show that front-loading was required. So yes, I do think it helps to point out that this was not the case as the Rationality Score simply helps us tease apart the blind watchmaker from an intelligent watchmaker.
did not claim that, I claim it tells us nothing.
From your comments above, it seems clear that you argue a kludge counts against design. That’s more than nothing.
I would expect evolution to be more likely then a designer to result in a kludge but I would expect evolution to create some really cleaver solutions as well.
So the blind watchmaker explains everything – both kludges and rational design – allowing you to credit the blind watchmaker for everything. All bases are covered such that the Duck absorbs all data.
Likewise even a YEC could justify a kludge by rationalizing why their imaginary designer might have created it or what hidden benefit it actually has.
Yes, the approach you advocate is much like a mirror image of YEC – the YEC rationalizes kludges and you rationalize rational solutions.
The DM is different, employing much greater methodological constraint, where kludges count against design and rational solutions count for design. This approach will appeal only to the open-minded investigator and not the apologists from either side of the aisle who don’t want anything to count against their favorite origins story.
I'm surprised to hear you say that as it seems to show a fairly significant misunderstanding about MET. Even given the axiom that kludges would be selected against what leads you to claim there is no selective pressure against kludges just because some kludges exist?
It is your position that the blind watchmaker selects against kludges, thus your burden to demonstrate this.
Perhaps it would help to pause and define a kludge. Let me quote from Gary Marcus, who defines it as follows:
A kluge is a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem that gets the job done, but not necessarily in the best way possible.
Good definition. And note the vital ingredient as far as the blind watchmaker is concerned – “gets the job done.” That is all that is needed. As long as a solution gets the job done (and getting the job done is simply about reproductive success), it gets selected. That’s all. The blind watchmaker is blind because it cannot see if a solution is clumsy or inelegant; it only sees whether or the not the job is done. This is why we expect kludges from the blind watchmaker.
But let’s add more. Marcus is told, “But we tend to think of evolution as something that produces the best possible solution to a problem.” Note his reply:
And that's just not true. Darwin didn't actually say "survival of the fittest"; I think that was Huxley, but people take that as their crude approximation to evolution. They think that must mean that the fittest thing that could possibly be will survive, but really it means the fittest of the available options. Evolution can't take a step back and ask what the best option would be; it just works with what it has. And that's what leads to tinkering and ultimately the kluges.
The blind watchmaker is about tinkering and kludges. http://bio3520.nicerweb.com/" rel="nofollow">Peter Chen puts it this way:
Natural selection is the process by which less fit phenotypes are culled from the population (e.g., by predation events, competition, or failure to reproduce). Thus, only organisms possessing traits that aid in survival and reproductive success are able to contribute to future generations. Natural selection can operate only on existing variability, which may have arisen through any number of mutations, genetic recombination, or migration of new phenotypes (and their underlying genotypes) into the population. Just as a tinkerer is restricted to the parts he has in his workshop, so too is natural selection limited to the variability that exists in nature. Furthermore, just as a tinkerer’s creations seem jury-rigged, so too do the products of natural selection. This is because certain pieces that the tinkerer might like to use may only be available to him at certain times, and the same holds true for the process of natural selection. The tinkerer and natural selection alike produce a product that is well designed, but not necessarily aesthetically pleasing.
This is why Jacob accurately noted that natural selection works like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer and Massimo Pigliucci endorsed this view. This is why Ken Miller sees the blind watchmaker at work when he sees “ nothing so much as a hodgepodge of borrowed, copied, mutated, and discarded sequences and commands that has been cobbled together by millions of years of trial and error against the relentless test of survival."”
We don’t expect rational, elegant, aesthetically pleasing results from a non-rational process that behaves like a tinkering, jury-rigging, bricoleur.
I would say the blind watchmaker mimics a designer because the adaptations it crafts are often very rational solutions.
Unless you can demonstrate that these rational solutions were indeed generated by non-telic forces, you are begging the question. But I say that the blind watchmaker mimics a designer simply because it produces adaptations and a rational solution would simply be a subset of all possible adaptations. Kludges satisfy the needs of the blind watchmaker and because evolution is under historical constraint, cannot be erased simply because they are kludges.
This is a common theme among ID supporters though, they apply metaphysical limits on what they think the capabilities of the blind watcher might be and then they claim design because life exceeds their arbitrarily imagined limits. Although evolution is certainly constrained in ways a designer is not there is no arbitrary limit to the complexity or rationality of its final products.
You are over-reacting, as there are no proposed limits. This is not about finding something that the blind watchmaker cannot do (recall, that would be an expression of the traditional template discussed in chapter 2). This is about scoring and using criteria to determine what counts for and against design based upon what we would expect. I score kludges against design and rational solutions for design. You score kludges against design and rational solutions for non-telic processes. My approach is open-ended, your approach has only one output.
What leads us to call one thing more rational than another? We use various factors like how many steps are required, how directly it carries out its function, how many parts must interact, and how successfully the function is carried out. These are all related and could be generalized as 'efficiency'.
Yes, as I explain in the book, efficiency is one facet of rational design. But rationality is far more multi-dimensional that any single metric. For example, it was not efficiency which led me to propose the rational relationship between proteins and DNA.
Wouldn't you expect the most efficient adaptation to have the survival advantage?
If so, we should expect the planet to be covered only with bacteria, as this is the most efficient cell design for replication.
It seems intuitive that the most rational solution according to our perceptions would also be the most efficient solution and thus have a selective advantage. To be honest I can't fathom why anyone would expect 'rationality' and 'survival advantage' not to highly correlated.
And I can’t fathom why you think they are so closely linked. Rationality is a subjective quality and is something that is recognized by beings who possess the attribute. Why would you think such a subjective reality is seen by the blind watchmaker? Why do you think natural selection is called the blind watchmaker?
No, YOU don't expect a rational solution, I obviously do ;).
Sure, and you also expect kludges – you have all the bases covered.
I might expect to find mostly kludges, which seems to be confirmed by my casual observations, but I would also expect to find some absolutely brilliant solutions too.
Hold on here. If you expect to find mostly kludges, why would you expect a rational solution from a process that produces mostly kludges?
I would also predict that the "older" a system is the more likely it would be to contain highly rational solutions. This follows from my belief that 'rational' solutions do, in fact, have a survival advantage so the more deep time a system has endured the more rational I would expect the result to be from a statistical standpoint (in other words I would expect individual cases to violate this but to form a general pattern).
But you have yet to show that rational solutions have a survival advantage over kludges. Do you have evidence that rational solutions come with a higher reproductive success when competing against kludges?
Also note that these people you are quoting are claiming that life as we know it meets their definition of “complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty.” He says, "Exactly like living organisms, and precisely what you would expect from a natural phenomenon." Those quotes seem to completely agree with what I'm saying.
No they don’t – they are pointing out that the blind watchmaker works like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer. You are trying to argue the opposite.
I use the blind watchmaker as a metaphor for evolution, so they really are the same in my mind.
But they are not. The blind watchmaker is a metaphor for a mechanism of evolution. And as I have pointed out, there is no reason to treat evolution and design as mutually exclusive topics.
But the very essence of my claim is precisely that a non-telic process can exhibit certain behaviors identical to a telic process.
Yes, but have you not demonstrated this claim.
The element that I see as superfluous is purpose or intent. I've seen nothing to justify the claim of purpose or intent so my bias towards minimalism compels me to challenge the telic perspective.
What data would justify the claim of purpose or intent?
It's your scale so you are free to define it however you like, it just seems to me that the possibility space goes from "extremely bad" through "neutral" to "extremely good."
Yes, that’s -5 to 0 to +5.
An extremely bad design would be one that, say, ensured the eventual extinction of the species and that would be highly irrational (-5 score).
You can only score that which exists. If something is so irrational that it fails to work, selection removes it. But we clearly can have working, irrational solutions. In The Design Matrix, I give the PCP degradation pathway a Rationality Score of -4. It works, yes, but it has all sorts of kludging features.
Then again this points out another weakness of your scale. In nature if you found a -5 rationality design it would almost certainly be an indication of telic interference since, as you point out, nothing in nature would survive to be scored with such a bad design. Yet you add a telic agent and they can, for example, breed dogs with faces so flat they would die of sinus infections if left to survive on their own. Or breed fruit trees with fruit that is completely sterile such that it cannot reproduce in the absence of the telic agent. In these cases only though knowledge of the intelligent agent can any sort of rationality be inferred in the result (for example, the agent likes furry human-proportioned faces for aesthetic reasons and likes to eat bananas but only if they do not contain large hard seeds). So it seems both extremes of the Rationality scale might imply telic agency.
No one said the Matrix was perfect. So sure, if we found evidence of something that should not exist according to natural causes, yet exists and persists for millions of years, you might very well have evidence of a telic agent. Although, I would not score an irrational system as indicative of design unless we found the thing your analogies presume –independent evidence of the telic agent sustaining the irrational system. Yet the Matrix is about assessing design inferences without the luxury of such independent evidence.
Nevertheless, after all this, I’m struck by the fact that you don’t seem to realize the Matrix already does a good job controlling for your basic complaint. Let’s say that we score a system with a Rationality Score of +5, but we don’t score the other three criteria. That would give as a DM score of 0, 0. 5, 0, thus 1.25. This is hardly a score that would reflect a deep conviction. You might see it as a false positive, but then again, you are a non-teleologist who assigns all features to the blind watchmaker. But let’s say the system was generated by evolution and there is good evidence for this. Then you have a score of 0, -5, 5, and 0 for a final DM score of 0 – completely ambiguous. Now while a score of complete ambiguity may be troubling for those who think they see clearly, I’m not too concerned about such complaints. So y’see, your concern has already been addressed by the logic of the scoring system when I wrote the book.
This topic gets even more interesting once we begin to couple IC with rationality. As I explain in the book, the non-telic explanations for IC ultimately reach for exaptation at the base of it all. How do we define that? According to one site, “The utilization of a structure or feature for a function other than that for which it was developed through natural selection.” You’ve lost whatever slim thread there was for explaining rationality. Unless foresight is involved, there is no reason to think a fortuitous process such as exaptation is going spawn rational solutions (of course, this was all addressed in the book).
I already said who, in this case it's Mike but its common among ID supporters. The claim that a highly rational design cannot be achieved by evolution is a metaphysical claim that evolution is somehow limited against creating a highly rational solution.
I do not claim that rational design cannot be achieved by evolution. If that was the case, there would be no need for a scoring system and one could develop this argument in accord with the traditional template. It’s a question of what counts for and against design. The metaphysical claim is the one that explains all possible data in these regards – the blind watchmaker supposedly crafts both kludges and rational designs.
On the other hand, if you agree that evolution can create a highly rational design than the Rationality score of the DM is not useful for separating evolution from a designer.
No, you would have to show that the blind watchmaker most commonly crafts things that would be subjectively recognized as rational by rational beings.
I think the primary difference in our viewpoints can be extrapolated by this single question you asked:
If you expect to find mostly kludges, why would you expect a rational solution from a process that produces mostly kludges?
I will attempt to use standard terminology from probability theory in my answer, please let me know if you want clarification on any of these terms. If you plotted the 'rationality' along the X axis and the number of designs along the Y axis then I would expect the curves for both a designer and evolution to follow some form of continuous probability distribution when you plot all the things they have designed. This curve has two parameters, location and scale. Just for illustrative purposes lets assume both follow a normal distribution curve, this means the location is also the mean and the median. The larger the scale the "wider" the normal distribution curve would be. I would expect:
Designer: high location, small scale
Evolution: zero location, large scale
To visualize this, the designer has a narrow bell curve tightly grouped at the upper end of the scale. Sure the designer doesn't always get things perfect, but he is consistently performing very well. In fact it would be extremely rare for the designer to score a negative score since the scale of his curve is so small.
Evolution, on the other hand, has a much wider curve. It's average score might be zero but its curve is very wide. This means it frequently stumbles across both absolute kludges and brilliant solutions. The shape of this curve explains why I expect mostly kludges but also some really good solutions. If there is a selective pressure against kludges that might push the location of the curve towards the rational end but the blind search mechanism should still generate a large scale curve with many examples across the whole range.
My point here is that individual examples don't tell us anything because they don't show the shape of the curve. Further even a whole book full of +5 rationality examples tells us nothing. You seem to claim that enough +5 examples will push you through the explanatory continuum towards plausibility but that's simply not good enough. Given your subjective scoring method a statistical analysis is required to reach any sort of reasonable conclusion. First this means you need to gather enough data points that the shape of the curve starts to present itself. Second you need a method of gathering data that avoids cherry picking just the +5 examples. Third, you are trying to separate individual cases into "likely designed" and "likely evolved" but you have a data collection method that can only make any sense of things by looking probabilistically at a large number of data points all at once; this creates a fundamental conflict.
Now lets consider an extreme case. Lets assume for a second that there is a strong selective pressure against kludges and lets also assume that the designer is really really dumb. This designer consulted his horoscope and it said, "Sugar, your lucky numbers today are 4 and 20," so he designed life with 4 nucleotides on a sugar backbone with 20 amino acids. This theoretical designer might only be smart enough that the location of his curve is 2 on the rationality scale. And since this theoretical world has a strong selective pressure against kludges the evolution curve might also have a location of 2 on the rationality scale. Both design and evolution in this scenario end up scoring the same average. I would still expect those curves to have different scales, though. I would still expect evolution to have a large scale and a designer to have a small scale. My point in this example is that "evolved" verse "designed" is not necessarily even determined by the average value. You seem to claim that you can simply average up all these values and conclude design if the average is high enough, I don't think the average tells us nearly as much as the shape of the curve would tell us.
Keep in mind nothing I am proposing here suggests the DM approach is flawed in terms of how you score things, I just think you perhaps have too simplistic a view of what you expect the resulting data to show and how would expect to be able to use that data. It seems silly to look at a bunch of examples from the right side of the evolution bell curve and try to claim, "these few examples are more likely to have been designed." Even adding in you additional correction factors simply adds one more dimension (all the other factors basically boil down to "analogy to human artifacts") which may or may not even correlate to designed verse evolved artifacts.
Keep in mind nothing I am proposing here suggests the DM approach is flawed in terms of how you score things, I just think you perhaps have too simplistic a view of what you expect the resulting data to show and how would expect to be able to use that data.
There is probably a kernel of truth to this, as the DM is not intended as a final word but more as a first step. If someone has a better approach, let’s see it.
It seems silly to look at a bunch of examples from the right side of the evolution bell curve and try to claim, "these few examples are more likely to have been designed."
This is a straw man representation.
Even adding in you additional correction factors simply adds one more dimension (all the other factors basically boil down to "analogy to human artifacts") which may or may not even correlate to designed verse evolved artifacts.
Yes, the DM does not deliver certainty and entails taking the risk of being wrong. But none of this is a serious problem. The significance of the four criteria is explained on pp. 269-271.
Now lets consider an extreme case. Lets assume for a second that there is a strong selective pressure against kludges and lets also assume that the designer is really really dumb.
We can assume this, but a moment’s consideration tells us it is not likely to be relevant. First, from a serious investigative perspective, it’s unlikely we are dealing with a really really dumb designer because we’d be dealing with a designer that was able to accomplish something we are still a long way from doing – designing life. So I don’t think we need to seriously worry about a designer that is dumber than we are. Secondly, I see no serious reason to think strong selective pressure against kludges exist, at least at a frequent enough level to skew the analysis to the extent that it is worthless. As I have explained above, kluges are the very hallmark of the blind watchmaker’s design output. You are effectively suggesting that the blind watchmaker selects against the signature output of the blind watchmaker.
My point here is that individual examples don't tell us anything because they don't show the shape of the curve.
Then you are missing the whole point of the analysis, as it is not about determining the shape of the curve. This score assumes the shape of the curve based upon what we know about the two different types of designers. So let’s skip to the main issue here.
To visualize this, the designer has a narrow bell curve tightly grouped at the upper end of the scale. Sure the designer doesn't always get things perfect, but he is consistently performing very well. In fact it would be extremely rare for the designer to score a negative score since the scale of his curve is so small.
We are in good agreement here. Of course it is possible a very rational design may appear irrational because we don’t understand it or have experience with this form of design, but the DM never promised to free us from false positives and false negatives. Thus, we can proceed with the working assumption that this curve is, on balance, reliable.
And what would it mean? First, we have a metric, independent on any concerns about the blind watchmaker, for assessing a design inference. Since we do not expect kluges from an intelligent watchmaker, we have a method of moving away from a design inference. This also opens the doors for research possibilities, as the kludginess of a design may only be apparent and a deeper analysis may extract a hitherto unrealized rationality embedded within the system. For example, at first glance, the incorporation of the mutable base cytosine may look kludgy, but as I show in my book, this need not be the case. In fact, I uncover a pattern that, as far as I have been able to tell, has not be appreciated by anyone before (see figure 7-2). Again, let me stress that all of this can be had without any consideration of the blind watchmaker.
Now, if we turn and bring the blind watchmaker into the picture, we add another dimension. And that gets to your point:
Evolution, on the other hand, has a much wider curve. It's average score might be zero but its curve is very wide. This means it frequently stumbles across both absolute kludges and brilliant solutions. The shape of this curve explains why I expect mostly kludges but also some really good solutions. If there is a selective pressure against kludges that might push the location of the curve towards the rational end but the blind search mechanism should still generate a large scale curve with many examples across the whole range.
Yet you are doing nothing more than restating what you believe rather than describing what is there. I would argue that the curve is more narrow than you think and situated further to the left than you think. I explain and document why in my previous comment. (I like the interview with Marcus, who when asked, “Why do you think that the mind is a kluge?”, explains, “There are two answers to that. The first is a general argument about evolution: that if you look at evolution it makes a lot of kluges. Evolution tends not to optimise things; it simply tinkers with what's already there. So it tends to make things better but there's no guarantee that it will make the best.”) ->It is the blind watchmaker which understandably leads him to expect the mind is a kludge.
And let’s not overlook that this problem becomes more acute if exaptation is invoked at the base of the explanation, because this effectively attempts to credit chance for rationality.
So what we have here are two different assumptions about that non-telic curve and that’s as far as we can get. So what, thus far, has the DM helped us to see?
1. The approach you advocate is much like a mirror image of YEC – the YEC rationalizes kludges and you rationalize rational solutions. Your approach safely protects the blind watchmaker from the data.
The DM is different, employing much greater methodological constraint, where kludges count against design and rational solutions count for design. This approach will appeal only to the open-minded investigator and not the apologists from either side of the aisle who don’t want anything to count against their favorite origins story.
2. Since blind watchmaker works like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer, I see no justification for your non-telic curve. What you need is some independent evidence to support the contention that the blind watchmaker, which blindly jury rigs and cobbles from what is immediately available, is likely to produce rational designs. This may be difficult, as it won’t help to identify a rational system and simply assume that only the blind watchmaker was behind it just because it evolved.
3. At the most, what you have is a concern about false positives, which, in your mind, is likely to be so common that it invalidates a highly positive Rationality Score as a further clue that points toward design. Yet even if somehow a massive body of evidence were to pour in to support your perspective, as I explained above, the DM already effective controls for that and we end up back where we started - ambiguity.
June 25th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Cool! And I don't even smoke. (Anymore.)
Comment by Rock — June 25, 2008 @ 10:35 am
June 25th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Excellent animation. Someone should do a version that explains what is happening…
Comment by The Pixie — June 25, 2008 @ 1:04 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
That would be pages 55 - 57 of the Design matrix, more or less.
Comment by Guts — June 25, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Ah, right so that bit is where RNA is being sequenced from DNA, is that right? I do not have the book to hand…
Comment by The Pixie — June 25, 2008 @ 3:59 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
It ranges, from DNA replication to ATP synthesis, etc.
Comment by Guts — June 25, 2008 @ 4:39 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
"I put the Pink Floyd song at the beginning here… okay, now you see this supercool zoom-in clip I inserted…"
That'd kill the whole mood, man. It's like that guy lying on the sofa who always wants to giggle a little too loudly while I'm trying to line up Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz.
Comment by angryoldfatman — June 25, 2008 @ 6:41 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
hahaha
Comment by Guts — June 25, 2008 @ 6:45 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Very nice! Floyd and molecular machines - it doesn't get better than that.
Comment by MikeGene — June 25, 2008 @ 7:17 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
I'd like to know which sections of the video are "real time" and which are not. From what little I know I would guess the mRNA creation section is about real-time, but I'm not sure. In any case the cell sure is an amazing thing and the more you know about it the more wondrous it gets.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — June 25, 2008 @ 8:13 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I absolutly must agree with you Todd, pretty incredible to say the least.
Comment by Kuma — June 25, 2008 @ 9:04 pm
June 25th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
DNA replication
300-500 bases per second
Transcription
30-50 bases per second
Translation
20-40 amino acids per second
Comment by MikeGene — June 25, 2008 @ 11:32 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 1:01 am
For a longer clip of the DNA replication sequence you can look at the source video here. In the longer clip you can really see the kludgy mechanism that works "backwards" to replicate the lagging strand. It doesn't show the polymerase I or ligase I repairing the lagging strand so you don't get the full effect of how kludgy DNA replication really is. Also, shouldn't the lagging strand have RNA primers when it leaves the helicase?
I'm sure this particular kludge must just be front-loading to make various favorable replication mistakes more likely and not simply evidence of evolution in the form of bad design.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — June 26, 2008 @ 1:01 am
June 26th, 2008 at 1:13 am
I never cared for Floyd much, I'm a Led Zeppelin nut, but the video was nice. I just had to turn by speakers down.
Nevertheless, thanks.
Rock 'n Roll !
By the way, I play the guitar just like Jimmy Page in his prime. But who here would know what that means?
Make it a great day!
Comment by kornbelt888 — June 26, 2008 @ 1:13 am
June 26th, 2008 at 2:08 am
Todd,
For that discussion from a telic perspective, you can go here and page 80 of the The Design Matrix.
Comment by Guts — June 26, 2008 @ 2:08 am
June 26th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Todd,
Did you know that lagging strand synthesis replicates with greater fidelity than the leading strand?
Comment by Doug — June 26, 2008 @ 8:59 am
June 26th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Fine, then the bad design is the fact that the leading strand replicates from the 3' to 5' direction. The oddity is having two extremely different mechanisms to perform exactly the same operation. We certainly avoid this sort of thing in human designs and human designs are used as the justification for ID analogies.
Guts,
I read the linked page and find it particularly weak. For example:
If the lagging strand process seems "more designed" why isn't it used for both halves of the DNA? The designer was obviously smart enough to design both mechanisms, an ID perspective would have to explain why it is useful to have two different systems instead of simply two copies of whichever system is "best".
This argument seems to assume that both 3' to 5' and 5' to 3' mechanisms were available from the beginning to compete against one another, which seems like an unjustified assumption. Both the leading and lagging strands use Polymerase III to which the lagging strand adds the need for Primase to add primers and Polymerase I to replace the primers and Ligase I to join the ozaki fragments. From an evolutionary perspective this suggest the leading strand mechanism likely existed before the lagging strand mechanism. Despite being kludgy the lagging strand mechanism could have a selective advantage in complex organisms due to higher fidelity copies, but it first required a lot more error correcting proteins to evolve.
If ID tries to justify the existence of two different copying mechanisms by claiming that one method is meant to inject variation while the other method is meant to maintain fidelity then this argument against ID becomes valid. If the lagging strand mechanism had perfect fidelity you would still have variation in the leading strand. Why risk the viability of the entire cell line by allowing mutations on both strands?
Comment by Todd Berkebile — June 26, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
So Todd's argument seems to boil down to: it's not perfect, therefore it's not designed.
You really need to read the Design Matrix (I forgot, you said you did).
But even aside from that, have you ever read Mike's position before on evolution and ID? Because it doesn't seem as if you had.
Why would a designer want perfect fidelity? How would that allow the design to propagate into the future? Perfect fidelity in repliciation + insult in environment arises = no variability to allow the organism the ability to escape the insult. Todd, THAT would be a bad design.
We know that environments change and obstacles in those environments come up…. if the organism has no way (if the designer had no foresight) to overcome the 'hurdle' it would be effectively done.
No speciation, no propagation of a design signal, no life.
Comment by Doug — June 26, 2008 @ 3:30 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Todd writes:
Thats answered within the essay:
Todd writes:
I think you misunderstood. The leading-lagging strand mechanism do not "compete with one another", they are simply a consequence of the fact that the DNA polyermases can only read 5->3 (probably because DNA pol can only elongate strands using 5'dNTP AFAIK). Replication requires this functionality. So it doesn't even matter whether you're right about the evolutionary belief about which came first, leading or lagging, it's irrelevant. Mike Gene is postulating the evolution of a polymerase that can read 3->5 and then these would do away with the need for a 5->3 polymerase on the lagging strand and thus replication would be faster.
Todd writes:
Probably because of the changing need for low/high mutation rates in evolution. In this section, Gene is simply talking about proofreading in general. Why should any design need any proofreading at all, why not have it always be perfect? The answer is "any error-free mode of replication would hinder one's attempt to front-load evolution".
Comment by Guts — June 26, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Its not perfect fidelity for the DNA copy, its only perfect fidelity for the lagging strand. Variation would still exist on the leading strand. He might want that to ensure the information he front-loaded into our genes would survive long enough until external factors create the correct environment for his design to work its mojo.
The better question is how could the design be guaranteed to propagate into the future without that. If god was simply rolling a big crap shoot then it would seem ID is more about random chance than evolution.
Here you are attacking a straw man based on the incorrect assumption that I claimed there would be no variation. In fact I specifically said, "If the lagging strand mechanism had perfect fidelity you would still have variation in the leading strand."
I fail to see how the quoted section answers the question. Great, the lagging method has a built in brake. What does that have to do with having two different methods? None of these pro-ID arguments have justified the need for two separate copying mechanisms.
I guess I still don't understand then. No one has ever claimed that evolution optimally removes unnecessary components or optimally creates new components. Instead helicase happens to perform the useful function of splitting a DNA in the 5' to 3' direction so evolution takes advantage of that. How could it possibly speak against evolution that a 3'->5' replication hasn't evolved? Perhaps if there was a designer then perhaps he could make a 3'->5' polymerase that might be able to both replicate faster and also avoid errors that would require there to be an additional braking mechanism. While a designer might be expected to find such a solution (if its even possible) evolution is lacking in purpose and cannot deliberately find any particular solution.
As I pointed out there would still be variation even if the lagging method was perfect in its fidelity so front-loading would not seem to be hindered. Instead the perfect copy would ensure that the original "front-loaded" data would stick around longer to ensure insure the critical information god hid in our DNA would not be lost to the random noise of variation. From an information theory perspective this would seem to counter the signal loss that otherwise seems to severely hinder the front-loaders ability to accomplish specific goals down the road. Otherwise you're left with a front-loader who's only feasible goal is mere propagation with variation (in other words, his only goal is apparently to study the blind watchmaker).
Comment by Todd Berkebile — June 26, 2008 @ 4:38 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
You are right, Todd. Sorry about that.
I stand corrected. I was arguing against a point you weren't making.
Comment by Doug — June 26, 2008 @ 4:43 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Todd writes:
If you're just asking for a need for two different methods, it's because the DNA polymerase can only read 5->3.
Todd:
I can see Mike's point about that, billions of years of evolution, I don't see anything impossible about it. It would be selected for if evolution has no foresight. Why not? A front-loading designer would not want to avoid errors.
Todd:
There is also the problem of being able to respond to the need for alternatating high/low mutation rates. That is one explanation as to why one strand is more accurate than the other.
Comment by Guts — June 26, 2008 @ 4:48 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Polymerase reading in only one direction does not intrinsically require two separate copy methods, a Polymerase III based leading strand mechanism would seem to geometrically fit just fine on both sides of the helicase. As mentioned an evolutionary perspective would predict that at some point only one of these methods existed, likely the leading strand method. Try again.
If it happened to get created in the first place then maybe evolution would favor it. But because it lacks foresight evolution can not simply choose to create it just to see if it might work better. You can speculate about the exact error rate your front loader might want but evolution doesn't "want" anything. Actually your front loader is a lot like Goldilocks, she obviously wants to avoid too many errors what with the whole proof reading argument, but not all errors what with the utilizing evolution argument. This conviniently allows you to claim that whatever you observe supports front loading.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — June 26, 2008 @ 5:26 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
His goal is a biological entity capable of sustaining itself and replicating while maintaining genomic integrity. A neat unexplained trick for a blind watchmaker but I get the impression this blind watchmaker was handed the watch and all he had to do was observe the winding mechanism in action.
Comment by Bradford — June 26, 2008 @ 5:30 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Todd:
The opposite side of the replication fork runs 3->5, DNA polymerases can't read 3->5, it has to use a different method. If you disagree, show me a reference that shows successful DNA replication that doesn't have the two different methods.
Todd:
It's just a consequence of both the data and the logic that flows naturally from the Front-Loading hypothesis.
Comment by Guts — June 26, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
June 26th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Hi Todd,
Very good "“ you're inching toward the Matrix. The next step would be to file this argument under one of the four criteria of the Matrix. I'd place this bad/good design argument in the Rationality category.
The next step is to then score it. So considering what you know about DNA replication, including the lagging strand concern, on a scale of -5 to +5 (-5 being most irrational and +5 being most rational), how would you score it, Todd?
Comment by MikeGene — June 26, 2008 @ 6:15 pm
June 27th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Oh yeah, guh, I see where my confusion was. I forgot that the lagging strand is flipped so its running 5->3. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing ;).
My problem with the Rationality Score is that I would expect both a Designer and Evolution to score high in this category. I guess I might expect a designer to always score a perfect 5 whereas evolution might only be expected to score a 4. Of course in this case it only scores a 3 since it loses a point for extreme kludginess.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — June 27, 2008 @ 11:09 am
June 27th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Hi Todd,
So a low Rationality Score not only reflects evidence against intelligent design, but also evidence against evolution? I doubt many would argue that the backward-wired retina is evidence against evolution.
Here's your problem. The Design Matrix clearly and explicitly explains there is no reason that a designer cannot shape or work through evolution. Thus there is no reason to insist on the false dichotomy of a Designer vs. Evolution. The Rationality Score does not get close to that choice(the Discontinuity Score is better for that).
As I also explain in the book, the Rationality Score helps us tease apart the blind watchmaker from an intelligent watchmaker.
From the DM:
The blind watchmaker works like a "like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer," and cobbles things together willy-nilly such that those things that just happen to work better than the competitors' systems get passed on. That's it; that's all. Why would you expect this type of design process to spit out high Rationality Scores?
Of course, maybe the blind watchmaker explains it all "good design, bad design, no design, and every thing in between, such that nothing counts against it. Like I also write, "The Duck absorbs all data."
The Rabbit comes with more methodological constraint.
Comment by MikeGene — June 27, 2008 @ 3:36 pm
June 27th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Interesting design-theoretic question: What are the advantages of doing the same thing in two different ways, concurrently and coordinately?
The most obvious advantage is an immediate comparison of the relative effectiveness of the two different processes.
It's as if DNA were performing a controlled experiment upon itself!
Comment by Rock — June 27, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
June 27th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
The result of the DM's synthesis of both designer and evolution is that you end up with no way of telling which is responsible for what. We all know that a Designer can do absolutely anything and on this forum we mostly all agree that evolution can turn simple life into all of the varieties we observe. The front-loader simply claims that the reason evolution can do all the things we all agree it can do is because of front loading where MET says evolution is able to do all these things without that initial push-start. The rationality or lack of rationality of the final result hardly seems to tell us anything about whether that initial push-start was required.
Because in order to survive the solution that is stumbled upon will still have to function extremely well even if it is obviously kludged together like DNA replication or the backwards retina. And whenever a rational solution is placed in competition with an less rational solution you would expect the more rational solution to have the survival advantage. In other words evolution is like a collector gathering up and propagating all of the most rational solutions that are stumbled upon. As I've stated before, the process of evolution seems like it could be described as intelligent in many of the same ways a human is described as intelligent, it has memory and problem solving. I can't justify giving anything that functions so well a negative rationality score, I'd say anything with a score less than zero couldn't even be expected to work. This is a problem with highly subjective scales though, my 0 score is "barely even works at performing any sort of function" whereas that might be your -5 score.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — June 27, 2008 @ 5:22 pm
June 28th, 2008 at 10:31 am
What I suggested (above) was that one process provides a check, a comparative test, upon the other. It's a way of obtaining independent verification. Which sounds "rational" to me.
To describe what he observes, TB borrows the term "kludge" from software engineering. Drawing upon the same source I'll describe it differently: Bisimulation.
Comment by Rock — June 28, 2008 @ 10:31 am
June 30th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Hi Todd,
Unless someone can prove that design and evolution are mutually exclusive, such that design could not possibly involve evolution and evolution would necessarily exclude design, this is an option we cannot ignore.
The Rationality Score helps us tease apart the blind watchmaker from an intelligent watchmaker.
So as long as it is functioning well, the existence or non-existence of kludge both point to the blind watchmaker?
This would mean there is a selective pressure against kludges and hodgepodges. But there is not. Otherwise, the existence of kludge would argue against the blind watchmaker.
The blind watchmakers mimics a designer because it crafts adaptations, not rational solutions. While a rational solution would be an adaptation, not all adaptations are rational solutions (a rational solution is a subset of adaptations). An adaptation is simply about coming up with a solution that works better than the immediate competition. And the metric for what works is whether the solution helps the organism produce more offspring than the next fella, not if the solution is perceived by intelligent beings to be rational.
Again:
You don’t expect rational solutions from the blind, meandering, cobbling watchmaker; you expect something that is “complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty.”
Again, don’t confuse the blind watchmaker with the process of the evolution. While the latter includes the former, the two are not equivalent. So if the process of evolution seems like it could be described as intelligent in many of the same ways a human is described as intelligent, you may want to pause and rethink any insistence that evolution is a non-telic process.
If it didn’t work, it is unlikely there would be anything to score. The Rationality Score is not really about whether or not something works; it’s about how things work.
Which is why score should come with justifications. That way, people can assess the score to see if it resonates.
Comment by MikeGene — June 30, 2008 @ 6:59 pm
June 30th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Duck/Rabbit.
Anyway, this is why the DM gives engineers a prominant place at the table.
Comment by MikeGene — June 30, 2008 @ 7:04 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 12:34 am
Obviously that's exactly the claim I'm questioning, so simply restating the claim doesn't help.
I did not claim that, I claim it tells us nothing. I would expect evolution to be more likely then a designer to result in a kludge but I would expect evolution to create some really cleaver solutions as well. Likewise even a YEC could justify a kludge by rationalizing why their imaginary designer might have created it or what hidden benefit it actually has.
I'm surprised to hear you say that as it seems to show a fairly significant misunderstanding about MET. Even given the axiom that kludges would be selected against what leads you to claim there is no selective pressure against kludges just because some kludges exist? That's like saying there's no selective pressure against death because things die, it just doesn't follow from the axiom. First a kludge is not a boolean choice between kludge and utterly optimal, and second a selective pressure against something doesn't simply wipe that thing from existence. I'm claiming there is absolutely a selective pressure against kludges which is why we often see highly rational solutions.
I would say the blind watchmaker mimics a designer because the adaptations it crafts are often very rational solutions. This is a common theme among ID supporters though, they apply metaphysical limits on what they think the capabilities of the blind watcher might be and then they claim design because life exceeds their arbitrarily imagined limits. Although evolution is certainly constrained in ways a designer is not there is no arbitrary limit to the complexity or rationality of its final products.
What leads us to call one thing more rational than another? We use various factors like how many steps are required, how directly it carries out its function, how many parts must interact, and how successfully the function is carried out. These are all related and could be generalized as 'efficiency'. Wouldn't you expect the most efficient adaptation to have the survival advantage? It seems intuitive that the most rational solution according to our perceptions would also be the most efficient solution and thus have a selective advantage. To be honest I can't fathom why anyone would expect 'rationality' and 'survival advantage' not to highly correlated.
No, YOU don't expect a rational solution, I obviously do ;). I might expect to find mostly kludges, which seems to be confirmed by my casual observations, but I would also expect to find some absolutely brilliant solutions too. I would also predict that the "older" a system is the more likely it would be to contain highly rational solutions. This follows from my belief that 'rational' solutions do, in fact, have a survival advantage so the more deep time a system has endured the more rational I would expect the result to be from a statistical standpoint (in other words I would expect individual cases to violate this but to form a general pattern). Also note that these people you are quoting are claiming that life as we know it meets their definition of “complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty.” He says, "Exactly like living organisms, and precisely what you would expect from a natural phenomenon." Those quotes seem to completely agree with what I'm saying.
I use the blind watchmaker as a metaphor for evolution, so they really are the same in my mind. But the very essence of my claim is precisely that a non-telic process can exhibit certain behaviors identical to a telic process. The element that I see as superfluous is purpose or intent. I've seen nothing to justify the claim of purpose or intent so my bias towards minimalism compels me to challenge the telic perspective.
It's your scale so you are free to define it however you like, it just seems to me that the possibility space goes from "extremely bad" through "neutral" to "extremely good." An extremely bad design would be one that, say, ensured the eventual extinction of the species and that would be highly irrational (-5 score).
Then again this points out another weakness of your scale. In nature if you found a -5 rationality design it would almost certainly be an indication of telic interference since, as you point out, nothing in nature would survive to be scored with such a bad design. Yet you add a telic agent and they can, for example, breed dogs with faces so flat they would die of sinus infections if left to survive on their own. Or breed fruit trees with fruit that is completely sterile such that it cannot reproduce in the absence of the telic agent. In these cases only though knowledge of the intelligent agent can any sort of rationality be inferred in the result (for example, the agent likes furry human-proportioned faces for aesthetic reasons and likes to eat bananas but only if they do not contain large hard seeds). So it seems both extremes of the Rationality scale might imply telic agency.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — July 1, 2008 @ 12:34 am
July 1st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Those are awful statements attributed to Jacob and Miller. They are FOS. I think I highlighted before the profound difference between the “blind watchmaker” and Darwin’s conception of evolution via natural selection. For Darwin evolution tended to progress to perfection and he even spoke of the “absolute perfection” of life’s adaptations, and wrote that life forms bear the stamp of higher workmanship, “immeasurably superior” to man’s artifice. He also wisely advised against trusting our intuitions, impressions, or expectations for life in that regard.
I've read many reprots published by engineers investigating biological adaptations (e.g., the human eye, the Heat Shock Response system, the bacterial flagellum, the wiring of the human brain, etc.) using design theories, their methods of analysis ,and applying their standards, and they come to quite different conclusions then Jacob and Miller.
And, as an aside, in many fields (computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, and economics) scientists assume the position that to be “rational” is to think -> act in a way that s consistent with the biological imperative : adapt. (What Joy calls the “Prime Directive.”) Rationality is not assumed to be some form of a priori prescriptive logic. To be rational is to adapt.
Comment by Rock — July 1, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Todd:
Why metaphysical limits when physical processes themselves indicate physical limits? A very practical limit is imposed by scientific methodology. Limits are delineated by our capacity to make accurate predictions. What predictions are we accurately able to make about the conditions that would give rise to life in our universe?
Who is claiming arbitrary limits? If there are constraints to the process, as you claim, limits should be evidenced by constraints.
Comment by Bradford — July 1, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 1:37 pm
This is off topic, but it does have something to do with design, though not at the cellular level. Since the ribcage's main function is to protect the body's vital organs, why didn't it evolve, be created, be designed, however you want to call it, to be solid, which would have resulted in better protection? The spinal cord is much better protected, for example. What would the extra weight be, ten pounds or so? Twenty? I'm lugged that much and more just in extra fat alone and still been able to get around the track at a decent clip.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 1, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
If it was "blindly" generated, there is no "why."
If it was designed by an intelligent agent, perhaps the designer wanted to make it easier for the internal organs to get stabbed or run thru with a spear. No reason to assume that the design is optimized for protection, unless you have a particular theological agenda. There may be other telic considerations.
Comment by kornbelt888 — July 1, 2008 @ 2:31 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Whether evolved, created, or designed, there is a balance of factors. The loss of flexibility, agility, and higher energy requirements can be a far greater disadvantage than the minimal protection offered by a solid rib cage. Keep in mind that in nature a crippling leg wound can be deadly, while a bite to the ribs will often not pierce a major organ or might be deadly anyway. If you are going to have body armor, it might be best to have it on the outside, e.g. turtles, ankylosauria.
Comment by Zachriel — July 1, 2008 @ 3:14 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Hi, kornbelt888,
I just realized something that could explain why the ribcage is not solid. It might have to do with respiration. If I remember correctly (not swearing that I am), the ribs move up and out on inhales, creating a larger rib cavity, and the ribs move down and inward on exhales, creating a smaller rib cavity as the lungs compress. Perhaps this expansion and contraction of the ribcage would not work well if it were solid, and since breathing is of paramount importance, it makes sense that the ribs, besides offering protection to the organs, must also accomodate respiration.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 1, 2008 @ 3:20 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Ribs long predate air-breathing land vertebrates. Mammals have suppressed thoracic ribs, unlike more primitive vertebrates, such as early tetrapods which have ribs for each vertebrae. (Development is controlled by Hox10.)
Comment by Zachriel — July 1, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I already said who, in this case it's Mike but its common among ID supporters. The claim that a highly rational design cannot be achieved by evolution is a metaphysical claim that evolution is somehow limited against creating a highly rational solution. On the other hand, if you agree that evolution can create a highly rational design than the Rationality score of the DM is not useful for separating evolution from a designer.
You are asking the wrong person this question as I'm not the one placing metaphysical limits on what evolution might be able to accomplish. If you are trying to claim there are physical limits that only a designer could surpass and that life surpassed those limits then it's up to you to justify that claim. To me that claim seems utterly false. The limitations placed on evolution are more along the lines of requiring a contiguous line of small adaptations over long periods of time whereas a designer can jump directly to the final result.
An excellent example of how the telic perspective can justify anything, thanks.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — July 1, 2008 @ 4:53 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Hi, Zachriel,
Okay, instead of focussing on respiration, and using whatever term would be appropriate for fishes or birds to get oxygen into their bloodstream, don't their lungs expand and contract? If so, then the same reasoning for having an unsolid ribcage, to facilitate movement of the ribs to allow for expansion and contraction of the lungs, would be in place. Or another way to look at my original question is: is there a good reason why the ribcage is not solid? I'm assuming there is, and came up with respiration as a possible reason.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 1, 2008 @ 5:18 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Respiration is the correct term for any method of transporting oxygen to the cells. In fish, it typically involves taking water through the mouth then forcing it through the gills which are located at the pharynx (basically, the back of the throat).
Not a bad guess. Movement of the ribs to expand the thoracic cavity occurs in many land vertebrates, but ribs predate land vertebrates by millions of years. As I mentioned above, the loss of flexibility, agility, and higher energy requirements can be a far greater disadvantage than the minimal protection offered by a solid rib cage. It's rather hard for a fish to swim if it can't bend its body.
Comment by Zachriel — July 1, 2008 @ 6:36 pm
July 1st, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Don't mention it. Although, I think the term "explain" is more appropriate than "justify." At any rate, MET and ID can both "explain anything", so both are equal as far as that goes. The "rationality score" is a troublesome part of Mike's approach for me, and I'm still pondering it.
Comment by kornbelt888 — July 1, 2008 @ 6:41 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:30 am
Hi, Zachriel,
I wasn't getting your meaning before. I can buy this as the initial reason for not having an solid ribcage. Perhaps mamillian-type respiration, as it exists now, would not have been possible otherwise.
Comment by AnaxagorasRules — July 2, 2008 @ 12:30 am
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:03 am
Actually, I'd say "rationalize" is the more correct term; "god did it" certainly explains nothing. And no, MET cannot "explain anything" because its not a magical supernatural force. Common examples of things MET cannot explain: mythological chimeras, Cambrian rabbits, the origin of life, the laws of physics (which Ben Stein seems dumb enough to expect it to explain), etc etc etc.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — July 2, 2008 @ 11:03 am
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:34 pm
I neither mentioned "god" or any "magical supernatural force."
By "everything", I meant everything with regards to biological evolution. Apologies for not making that clear. So mythological chimeras, the origin of life, and the laws of physics, are irrelevant.
As for Cambrian rabbits (did you mean pre-cambrian?), that would cause some reconsideration of some lineages and understanding about the emergence of mammals, but would it necessitate a radical new theory to accommodate it?
Comment by kornbelt888 — July 2, 2008 @ 12:34 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
The discovery of a griffin or centaur would represent a substantial violation of Common Descent. There is no plausible ancestor.
A Precambrian rabbit would precede its posited ancestor. It's extremely doubtful Common Descent could survive such a challenge. A single example would probably be considered anomalous, though.
Comment by Zachriel — July 2, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:43 pm
So isn't what you're really saying is that if something were found that didn't fit into the current phylogenic tree, the phylogenic tree would have to be modified? Haven't things been found that have caused that to occur to a lesser degree? If so, then aren't we talking about a matter of degree? How much of a "non fit" would have to occur before common descent was abandoned?
Why? It would only necessarily indicate the current phylogenic tree does not exhaustively map to all the real world life-forms on earth. Why should anyone be surprised by that? If the rocks started to show that mammals emerge prior to the cambrian, and then apparently re-emerged during the cambrian, by some unknown mechanism, how would Common Descent necessarily be violated? Would that appease the doubters? I'm not sure I buy the griffin or rabbit argument that it would necessarily blast Common Descent of the map, esp in the eyes of hardened anti-telics. But I think it would sure add fire to those already skeptical of Common Descent.
Comment by kornbelt888 — July 2, 2008 @ 2:43 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
A centaur would simply not fit the phylogenetic tree. It is a cross of two separate lineages, a human and a horse. But let's assume it is not an exact cross, but something somewhat like a horse and a human. We still have a mammal with six limbs, and still no plausible ancestor.
Of course. When dealing with historical reconstruction, especially of a history that stretches over millions of years and left little evidence, there are going to be gaps and missteps.
Scientists often use words like "plausible" and "reasonable". But ultimately it comes back to be able to make valid empirical predictions. Stories of centaurs have all the characteristics of human imagination (design). But you are welcome to propose an alternative hypothesis.
Consider Mercury's anomalous precession. One could have bombastically declared that the anomaly falsified Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation. But Newton's Theory remained successful at predicting a vast number of other phenomena, from moons to apples. So, Mercury's errant orbit remained shelved as an anomaly. Call it Newton's Theory of Almost Universal (except Mercury's anomalous precession) Gravitation.
Again, it comes back to being able to propose and test valid hypotheses.
Comment by Zachriel — July 2, 2008 @ 3:09 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Hi Todd,
If you read the part I was replying to, you seemed to be under the impression that the Rationality Score was intended to show that front-loading was required. So yes, I do think it helps to point out that this was not the case as the Rationality Score simply helps us tease apart the blind watchmaker from an intelligent watchmaker.
From your comments above, it seems clear that you argue a kludge counts against design. That’s more than nothing.
So the blind watchmaker explains everything – both kludges and rational design – allowing you to credit the blind watchmaker for everything. All bases are covered such that the Duck absorbs all data.
Yes, the approach you advocate is much like a mirror image of YEC – the YEC rationalizes kludges and you rationalize rational solutions.
The DM is different, employing much greater methodological constraint, where kludges count against design and rational solutions count for design. This approach will appeal only to the open-minded investigator and not the apologists from either side of the aisle who don’t want anything to count against their favorite origins story.
It is your position that the blind watchmaker selects against kludges, thus your burden to demonstrate this.
Perhaps it would help to pause and define a kludge. Let me quote from Gary Marcus, who defines it as follows:
Good definition. And note the vital ingredient as far as the blind watchmaker is concerned – “gets the job done.” That is all that is needed. As long as a solution gets the job done (and getting the job done is simply about reproductive success), it gets selected. That’s all. The blind watchmaker is blind because it cannot see if a solution is clumsy or inelegant; it only sees whether or the not the job is done. This is why we expect kludges from the blind watchmaker.
But let’s add more. Marcus is told, “But we tend to think of evolution as something that produces the best possible solution to a problem.” Note his reply:
The blind watchmaker is about tinkering and kludges. http://bio3520.nicerweb.com/" rel="nofollow">Peter Chen puts it this way:
This is why Jacob accurately noted that natural selection works like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer and Massimo Pigliucci endorsed this view. This is why Ken Miller sees the blind watchmaker at work when he sees “ nothing so much as a hodgepodge of borrowed, copied, mutated, and discarded sequences and commands that has been cobbled together by millions of years of trial and error against the relentless test of survival."”
We don’t expect rational, elegant, aesthetically pleasing results from a non-rational process that behaves like a tinkering, jury-rigging, bricoleur.
Unless you can demonstrate that these rational solutions were indeed generated by non-telic forces, you are begging the question. But I say that the blind watchmaker mimics a designer simply because it produces adaptations and a rational solution would simply be a subset of all possible adaptations. Kludges satisfy the needs of the blind watchmaker and because evolution is under historical constraint, cannot be erased simply because they are kludges.
You are over-reacting, as there are no proposed limits. This is not about finding something that the blind watchmaker cannot do (recall, that would be an expression of the traditional template discussed in chapter 2). This is about scoring and using criteria to determine what counts for and against design based upon what we would expect. I score kludges against design and rational solutions for design. You score kludges against design and rational solutions for non-telic processes. My approach is open-ended, your approach has only one output.
Yes, as I explain in the book, efficiency is one facet of rational design. But rationality is far more multi-dimensional that any single metric. For example, it was not efficiency which led me to propose the rational relationship between proteins and DNA.
If so, we should expect the planet to be covered only with bacteria, as this is the most efficient cell design for replication.
And I can’t fathom why you think they are so closely linked. Rationality is a subjective quality and is something that is recognized by beings who possess the attribute. Why would you think such a subjective reality is seen by the blind watchmaker? Why do you think natural selection is called the blind watchmaker?
Sure, and you also expect kludges – you have all the bases covered.
Hold on here. If you expect to find mostly kludges, why would you expect a rational solution from a process that produces mostly kludges?
But you have yet to show that rational solutions have a survival advantage over kludges. Do you have evidence that rational solutions come with a higher reproductive success when competing against kludges?
No they don’t – they are pointing out that the blind watchmaker works like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer. You are trying to argue the opposite.
But they are not. The blind watchmaker is a metaphor for a mechanism of evolution. And as I have pointed out, there is no reason to treat evolution and design as mutually exclusive topics.
Yes, but have you not demonstrated this claim.
What data would justify the claim of purpose or intent?
Yes, that’s -5 to 0 to +5.
You can only score that which exists. If something is so irrational that it fails to work, selection removes it. But we clearly can have working, irrational solutions. In The Design Matrix, I give the PCP degradation pathway a Rationality Score of -4. It works, yes, but it has all sorts of kludging features.
No one said the Matrix was perfect. So sure, if we found evidence of something that should not exist according to natural causes, yet exists and persists for millions of years, you might very well have evidence of a telic agent. Although, I would not score an irrational system as indicative of design unless we found the thing your analogies presume –independent evidence of the telic agent sustaining the irrational system. Yet the Matrix is about assessing design inferences without the luxury of such independent evidence.
Nevertheless, after all this, I’m struck by the fact that you don’t seem to realize the Matrix already does a good job controlling for your basic complaint. Let’s say that we score a system with a Rationality Score of +5, but we don’t score the other three criteria. That would give as a DM score of 0, 0. 5, 0, thus 1.25. This is hardly a score that would reflect a deep conviction. You might see it as a false positive, but then again, you are a non-teleologist who assigns all features to the blind watchmaker. But let’s say the system was generated by evolution and there is good evidence for this. Then you have a score of 0, -5, 5, and 0 for a final DM score of 0 – completely ambiguous. Now while a score of complete ambiguity may be troubling for those who think they see clearly, I’m not too concerned about such complaints. So y’see, your concern has already been addressed by the logic of the scoring system when I wrote the book.
This topic gets even more interesting once we begin to couple IC with rationality. As I explain in the book, the non-telic explanations for IC ultimately reach for exaptation at the base of it all. How do we define that? According to one site, “The utilization of a structure or feature for a function other than that for which it was developed through natural selection.” You’ve lost whatever slim thread there was for explaining rationality. Unless foresight is involved, there is no reason to think a fortuitous process such as exaptation is going spawn rational solutions (of course, this was all addressed in the book).
Comment by MikeGene — July 2, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Hi Todd,
I do not claim that rational design cannot be achieved by evolution. If that was the case, there would be no need for a scoring system and one could develop this argument in accord with the traditional template. It’s a question of what counts for and against design. The metaphysical claim is the one that explains all possible data in these regards – the blind watchmaker supposedly crafts both kludges and rational designs.
No, you would have to show that the blind watchmaker most commonly crafts things that would be subjectively recognized as rational by rational beings.
Comment by MikeGene — July 2, 2008 @ 4:25 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Mike,
I think the primary difference in our viewpoints can be extrapolated by this single question you asked:
I will attempt to use standard terminology from probability theory in my answer, please let me know if you want clarification on any of these terms. If you plotted the 'rationality' along the X axis and the number of designs along the Y axis then I would expect the curves for both a designer and evolution to follow some form of continuous probability distribution when you plot all the things they have designed. This curve has two parameters, location and scale. Just for illustrative purposes lets assume both follow a normal distribution curve, this means the location is also the mean and the median. The larger the scale the "wider" the normal distribution curve would be. I would expect:
Designer: high location, small scale
Evolution: zero location, large scale
To visualize this, the designer has a narrow bell curve tightly grouped at the upper end of the scale. Sure the designer doesn't always get things perfect, but he is consistently performing very well. In fact it would be extremely rare for the designer to score a negative score since the scale of his curve is so small.
Evolution, on the other hand, has a much wider curve. It's average score might be zero but its curve is very wide. This means it frequently stumbles across both absolute kludges and brilliant solutions. The shape of this curve explains why I expect mostly kludges but also some really good solutions. If there is a selective pressure against kludges that might push the location of the curve towards the rational end but the blind search mechanism should still generate a large scale curve with many examples across the whole range.
My point here is that individual examples don't tell us anything because they don't show the shape of the curve. Further even a whole book full of +5 rationality examples tells us nothing. You seem to claim that enough +5 examples will push you through the explanatory continuum towards plausibility but that's simply not good enough. Given your subjective scoring method a statistical analysis is required to reach any sort of reasonable conclusion. First this means you need to gather enough data points that the shape of the curve starts to present itself. Second you need a method of gathering data that avoids cherry picking just the +5 examples. Third, you are trying to separate individual cases into "likely designed" and "likely evolved" but you have a data collection method that can only make any sense of things by looking probabilistically at a large number of data points all at once; this creates a fundamental conflict.
Now lets consider an extreme case. Lets assume for a second that there is a strong selective pressure against kludges and lets also assume that the designer is really really dumb. This designer consulted his horoscope and it said, "Sugar, your lucky numbers today are 4 and 20," so he designed life with 4 nucleotides on a sugar backbone with 20 amino acids. This theoretical designer might only be smart enough that the location of his curve is 2 on the rationality scale. And since this theoretical world has a strong selective pressure against kludges the evolution curve might also have a location of 2 on the rationality scale. Both design and evolution in this scenario end up scoring the same average. I would still expect those curves to have different scales, though. I would still expect evolution to have a large scale and a designer to have a small scale. My point in this example is that "evolved" verse "designed" is not necessarily even determined by the average value. You seem to claim that you can simply average up all these values and conclude design if the average is high enough, I don't think the average tells us nearly as much as the shape of the curve would tell us.
Keep in mind nothing I am proposing here suggests the DM approach is flawed in terms of how you score things, I just think you perhaps have too simplistic a view of what you expect the resulting data to show and how would expect to be able to use that data. It seems silly to look at a bunch of examples from the right side of the evolution bell curve and try to claim, "these few examples are more likely to have been designed." Even adding in you additional correction factors simply adds one more dimension (all the other factors basically boil down to "analogy to human artifacts") which may or may not even correlate to designed verse evolved artifacts.
Comment by Todd Berkebile — July 2, 2008 @ 7:09 pm
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Good stuff, Todd. I'll see if I can get my reply up tomorrow.
Comment by MikeGene — July 2, 2008 @ 10:50 pm
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Hi Todd,
There is probably a kernel of truth to this, as the DM is not intended as a final word but more as a first step. If someone has a better approach, let’s see it.
This is a straw man representation.
Yes, the DM does not deliver certainty and entails taking the risk of being wrong. But none of this is a serious problem. The significance of the four criteria is explained on pp. 269-271.
We can assume this, but a moment’s consideration tells us it is not likely to be relevant. First, from a serious investigative perspective, it’s unlikely we are dealing with a really really dumb designer because we’d be dealing with a designer that was able to accomplish something we are still a long way from doing – designing life. So I don’t think we need to seriously worry about a designer that is dumber than we are. Secondly, I see no serious reason to think strong selective pressure against kludges exist, at least at a frequent enough level to skew the analysis to the extent that it is worthless. As I have explained above, kluges are the very hallmark of the blind watchmaker’s design output. You are effectively suggesting that the blind watchmaker selects against the signature output of the blind watchmaker.
Then you are missing the whole point of the analysis, as it is not about determining the shape of the curve. This score assumes the shape of the curve based upon what we know about the two different types of designers. So let’s skip to the main issue here.
We are in good agreement here. Of course it is possible a very rational design may appear irrational because we don’t understand it or have experience with this form of design, but the DM never promised to free us from false positives and false negatives. Thus, we can proceed with the working assumption that this curve is, on balance, reliable.
And what would it mean? First, we have a metric, independent on any concerns about the blind watchmaker, for assessing a design inference. Since we do not expect kluges from an intelligent watchmaker, we have a method of moving away from a design inference. This also opens the doors for research possibilities, as the kludginess of a design may only be apparent and a deeper analysis may extract a hitherto unrealized rationality embedded within the system. For example, at first glance, the incorporation of the mutable base cytosine may look kludgy, but as I show in my book, this need not be the case. In fact, I uncover a pattern that, as far as I have been able to tell, has not be appreciated by anyone before (see figure 7-2). Again, let me stress that all of this can be had without any consideration of the blind watchmaker.
Now, if we turn and bring the blind watchmaker into the picture, we add another dimension. And that gets to your point:
Yet you are doing nothing more than restating what you believe rather than describing what is there. I would argue that the curve is more narrow than you think and situated further to the left than you think. I explain and document why in my previous comment. (I like the interview with Marcus, who when asked, “Why do you think that the mind is a kluge?”, explains, “There are two answers to that. The first is a general argument about evolution: that if you look at evolution it makes a lot of kluges. Evolution tends not to optimise things; it simply tinkers with what's already there. So it tends to make things better but there's no guarantee that it will make the best.”) ->It is the blind watchmaker which understandably leads him to expect the mind is a kludge.
And let’s not overlook that this problem becomes more acute if exaptation is invoked at the base of the explanation, because this effectively attempts to credit chance for rationality.
So what we have here are two different assumptions about that non-telic curve and that’s as far as we can get. So what, thus far, has the DM helped us to see?
1. The approach you advocate is much like a mirror image of YEC – the YEC rationalizes kludges and you rationalize rational solutions. Your approach safely protects the blind watchmaker from the data.
The DM is different, employing much greater methodological constraint, where kludges count against design and rational solutions count for design. This approach will appeal only to the open-minded investigator and not the apologists from either side of the aisle who don’t want anything to count against their favorite origins story.
2. Since blind watchmaker works like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer, I see no justification for your non-telic curve. What you need is some independent evidence to support the contention that the blind watchmaker, which blindly jury rigs and cobbles from what is immediately available, is likely to produce rational designs. This may be difficult, as it won’t help to identify a rational system and simply assume that only the blind watchmaker was behind it just because it evolved.
3. At the most, what you have is a concern about false positives, which, in your mind, is likely to be so common that it invalidates a highly positive Rationality Score as a further clue that points toward design. Yet even if somehow a massive body of evidence were to pour in to support your perspective, as I explained above, the DM already effective controls for that and we end up back where we started - ambiguity.
Your main criticism is weak
Comment by MikeGene — July 3, 2008 @ 5:58 pm