In part one I made some general comments on
the above YouTube video by IDist Stephen Meyer. In this part I want to comment
more specifically on the content of the video. IDist detractors refer to people
like Meyer as “creationists”, which in fact they are, but the term is probably
deployed for its pejorative connotation, a connotation gained from its
association with the anti-science Young Earthists. But unlike the Young
Earthists not only are people like Meyer worthy thinkers they are also evangelical
moderates who are less inclined to ease their case through using moral
intimidation, impugning consciences and trying to get convictions for
heresy.
The italicized sections below
are not direct quotes from the video but are my digest of what I think Meyer is
trying to tell us.
In attendance were several members of the House of Lords, University
vice-chancellors and many journalists, politicians, philosophers and
scientists.
My Comment: The video starts with the
foregoing caption. The defacto-ID community have been generally cold shouldered
by the scientific establishment, an establishment who regard them as peddlers
of non-science (unjustifiably in my opinion). It’s not surprising then that
IDists need to make the most of their connections with the mainstream.
Does nature, particularly biological nature, owe its origins to
undirected processes or has mind played a role.
My Comment: In a nutshell that’s the North
American ID paradigm; that is, framing the debate using an “undirected natural
processes vs. intelligent design” dichotomy. I've commented critically plenty
enough on this subject (see part 1 for example).
Meyer accepts natural selection has played a role in a long Earth
history, The big question is whether natural selection explains all that we
see. Is an undirected process mimicking design? Is it Darwin or design?
My Comment: IDists like Meyer accept much about the established
view of natural history. It is this that makes them a difficult target for the
scientific establishment to shoot down: Unlike the Young Earthists they don’t bend over backwards to prop up bizarre
ideas based on a set-in-stone reading of scripture. Rather they focus on the intricacies
of the evolutionary engine of change. Like bugs they are attracted to the bits
they think are rotten! Notice once again Meyer mentions the paradigm through
which he sees the whole issue: Viz. The undirected process vs. design dichotomy.
He just can’t think round it.
Origin of Life: This is the question of whether chemical evolution produced
the first life; essentially it is about the origin of the cell. Darwin didn't explain this with an undirected materialistic process.
My Comment: Advantage Meyer: OOL is the
weak point of evolutionary theory.
Why did people think that with the advent of evolution the origin of apparent design had been explained?
The answer: Because they thought cells were simple enough for the
question of their origins to be consigned to a footnote. Cf. Ernst Haeckel “The
cell is a simple homogenous globule of plasm”.
My Comment: This is an interesting and
revealing historical point: Because cells, at one time, had a beguiling and
deceptive simplicity it was taken for granted that an explanation of their
origin could be left as an afterthought!
But Meyer’s whole neo-god-of-the-gaps paradigm hinges on the fact that
cells are far from “simple”! They are very complex pieces of replicating
molecular machinery.
There are two kinds of information: Shannon information ( = – log[probability]
) and complex specified information (CSI). CSI is not mere improbability but
includes the ability to perform a function. The origins questions becomes the
question of the origin of CSI.
My Comment: What Meyer really means here
is that without an interpretative context the information in a sequence is
meaningless; that is, for a configuration like DNA to be meaningful it needs an
accompanying machinery of interpretation. So called CSI is simply recognition
that for sequences of information to be meaningful they must be are part of a much
wider configurational context. The question of the origin of CSI, is then equivalent
to the question of the origin of certain classes of total configuration that
includes both “information” sequences and translating machinery. The question
can then be posed as to the Shannon information content of these wider
contextualizing configurations. This information content will arise not just as
a result of a single value of probability value p, because p is likely to
resolve into a product of probabilities like p1 x
p2 x p3 ..etc., where each pi refers to
the probability of a configurational element. It is considerations like this
that lead me to question the distinctive usefulness of the concept of CSI; if
anything it gives a misleading mystique to the concept of information by taking
biopolymers out of their configurational context.
In the face of a lack of explanation for the origin of the first
life we can ask whether this life is due to chance, necessity or intelligence.
The combinatorial explosion makes chance a very unlikely explanation. The work
of Doug Axe has shown that functional
protein sequences are very rare and hence a random search is swamped.
My Comment: IDists tend to labour fairly
obvious lessons about how the combinatorial explosion makes spontaneous
formation of life’s configurations extremely unlikely and Meyer goes with the
flow here. However, Doug Axe’s work sounds very interesting and it is clearly
very relevant to the question of evolution/OOL. But rarity of functionality is
not completely decisive; also highly relevant is the arrangement of functionality
in configuration space (See my series on configuration space).
Unfortunately, however, the polarization of this debate means that Axe’s work is
unlikely to get justice from the scientific establishment.
Does natural selection solve the problem of life? But natural selection presupposes a replicating
form of life – that is Natural Selection
requires life to exist in the first
place!
My Comment: Fair comment. As Meyer says,
this takes us back to the question of OOL and “chemical evolution” from
elementary matter.
Self-organization ( =“necessity”): Is bio-information the result of some
kind of “crystallization” process? Is there a biological predestination? Do the amino acid and DNA sequences have a
tendency to crystallize? But experiments
show that there is no bias - all sequences are equally likely. Therefore physics
and chemistry (i.e. “necessity”) does not explain biopolymers.
My Comment: This is where I find the
IDist analysis wanting; their concept of self-organization is too specialized:
Studies of self-organization must also seriously engage the question of the
layout of self-perpetuating configurations in configuration space. Granted,
intuitively it seems unlikely that objects as combinatorially rare as
self-perpetuating structures can populate configuration space in a way that
facilitates evolutionary diffusion. But the fact is this case has not yet been
rigorously eliminated and this gives room for world-view bias to influence beliefs
here. At this point in the talk Meyer thinks that he has satisfactorily
eliminated “chance and necessity” (sic) as explanations and consequently the God
intelligence did it vs. naturalism did it dichotomy now rears its ugly head
once again, as Meyer concludes:
What then is the “Best” explanation? Following Lyle’s uniformitarianism
we look at which present day causes now in operation could explain the origin
of life. We see intelligence generating
information today – therefore we hypothesise this cause as the best explanation. Using inference to the best explanation
(abduction) we are left with intelligent causes as the best explanation.
My Comment: Nice one! Meyer is using the scientific establishment’s acceptance
of uniformitarianism to justify his case! I like it! Under any other
circumstances I would call this nifty reasoning! But the trouble is that because
we know that Meyer’s model of ID is that of an ancillary intelligence, (but
theologically he believes in the totalizing and immanent intelligence of God)
Meyer’s neo-God-of-the gaps paradigm holds an obvious weakness: If well motivated
atheists manage to show that there is a developmental pathway by which self-perpetuating
structures have emerged from elemental matter then Meyer’s brand of ID starts
to look problematical. The North American ID paradigm which habitually
contrasts “chance and necessity” (sic) against intelligence is OK for ancillary intelligence but falls over in Christian theology where the teaching is
that God is both eminent and immanent. North American ID is playing a dangerous game,
and consequently we can see why North American IDists are so adamant that “chance and necessity”
(sic) did not and perhaps cannot in principle generate life; they refer to belief that it did as “naturalism”, a term probably deployed for its spiritually pejorative
connotation, a connotation gained from its association with atheism. As I have
said so many times before, if our physical regime has generated life, then we
have a very rare system on our hands. North America ID is doing us a disfavour in
not making this clear to us.
Some Thoughts
The rules of chess considerably
constrain the possible games that can played, but not sufficiently to ensure
that moving chess pieces at random within the rules will generate a coherent
game. Likewise, my own gut feeling – and at this stage I have to admit it is only a gut feeling – is that current physics isn't sufficient to explain
the generation of life; I submit that other physical factors not yet
appreciated need comprehension. If we take Divine Immanence seriously and
eschew the North American dualistic categories of naturalism vs. Intelligence,
then the way is cleared for understanding the processes of our physical regime as intelligence in operation; at least in
so far as it represents an ability to solve computational problems. If Intelligent
Design is an aspect of a precisely selected law and disorder system capable of generating life
then there is perhaps more chance of reviving the science of origins. For it is
clear that North American ID, with its dualistic paradigm, is not likely to be very
fruitful or productive as a science: This paradigm conceives intelligence in
the manner of an ancillary intelligence that generates artefacts within a physical regime. It is
therefore more akin to the soft science of archaeology where the inscrutable
purposes of distant ancestors compromises both comprehension and prediction. (See
here : http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/does-intelligent-design-make-testable.html
)
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