In a blog post here evangelical atheist Larry Moran criticizes
a web article by Intelligent Design guru Kirk Durston. I know that Larry Moran is apt to call people
like Durston “IDiots”, but looking at Moran’s post I’m not surprised. Below I
quote both Durston and Moran as they appear on Moran’s post. As is my usual
practice I add my own comments.
***
Durston: In the neo-Darwinian scenario for the origin
and diversity of life, the digital functional information for life would have
had to begin at zero, (Wrong!)
increase over time to eventually encode the first simple life form, and
continue to increase via natural processes to encode the digital information for
the full diversity of life. An essential, falsifiable prediction of Darwinian
theory, therefore, is that functional information must, on average, increase
over time.(Wrong again!)
My Comment: This statement tells me that Durston is unfamiliar with the kind of the issues I
raised in my series on Joe Felsenstein’s and Tom English’s post on Panda’s Thumb
(see links below). If evolution is to work as currently understood, it must
start out with a full complement of information. This burden of information is
found in the abstract “sponge” structure that occupies configuration space: It
is this structure that acts as the “rails” which guide the evolutionary/OOL diffusion
processes. The "sponge" is conjectured to be an implication of physics. As such evolution is not a process that creates
information as Durston claims: Rather evolution is a process which transforms information from an abstract structure in configuration space to reified
organisms. Of course, I must qualify all this by registering my reservations
about the existence of this spongey structure: How I see evolution/OOL is
another story which I tell in my Melencolia I series. (I’ve got no
illusions that my own attempt to handle the OOL/evolution question would be
laughed off by pure secularists, but at least I won’t get censorious insults
about courting divine displeasure from them!)
Bellow I quote a
section of Moran’s post and add my comments
at the end (My emphases).
Moran: Contrast this [i.e. real evolutionary
theory] with the Intelligent Design
version of creationism. Apparently its
followers understand the mind of the "intelligent designer" because
they are prepared to make predictions about what he/she/it/them intended.
Here's how Kirk Durston describes it…..
Durston: Interestingly, a
prediction of intelligent design science is quite the opposite. Since
information always degrades over time for any storage media and replication
system, intelligent design science
postulates that the digital information of life was initially downloaded into the genomes of life. It predicts that, on average, genetic information is steadily
being corrupted by natural processes. The beauty of these two mutually
incompatible predictions in science is that the falsification of one entails
verification of the other. So which prediction does science falsify, and which
does science verify?
Moran: If I understand this correctly, the
Intelligent Design Creationists all
agree that all the information required to make complex organisms was written
into the genome at some time in the past (3.5 billion years ago according
to many ID proponents). Since that
time, the intelligent designer has allowed that information to steadily degrade
so that eventually all species will become extinct. (I don't know how Durston came to understand the mind of the gods.)
Durston: This is the first problem for neo-Darwinian
theory. Mutations produce random changes in the digital information of life. It
is generally agreed that the rate of deleterious mutations is much greater than
the rate of beneficial mutations. My own work with 35 protein families suggests
that the rate of destruction is, at minimum, 8 times the rate of neutral or
beneficial mutations.
Simply put, the digital information of life is being
destroyed much faster than it can be repaired or improved. New functions may
evolve, but the overall loss of functional information in other areas of the
genome will, on average, be significantly greater. The net result is that the
digital information of life is running down.
Moran: Isn't that interesting?
Intelligent Design Creationists believe that over the past 3.5 billion years
the genetic information in simple bacteria has been steadily degrading at a
rate 8 times the rate of beneficial mutations.
Aside from the fact that Durston's statement is
ridiculous, it says something very weird about the intelligent designer that
these creationists believe in. Those gods
intelligent designers don't resemble any human engineers or computer
programmers that I've ever met. Humans would have done a better job of
designing in the first place and they would make sure that crucial systems get
frequent updates and repairs to keep them working. (My emphasis)
My Comment: Moran is
right: Durston is making implicit assumptions about the way his purported
intelligent agent works. This has lead the de-facto ID community into an
inconsistency: On the one hand IDists will claim that the function of ID science is only detect
the presence of intelligence and make little or no assertion as to character of
that intelligence. And yet whenever the IDists attempt to make predictions we
find they are working from an implicit raft of assumptions about the way that
intelligence works (as does Durston above). In fact I would submit that even to make sense of the works of an intelligent agent requires a background knowledge of just what intelligence is and the kind things it does. I made a similar point to Moran’s “Apparently its followers understand the mind
of the "intelligent designer” in this post. Viz:
And yet the ID community claims to be able to make
predictions such as economy of design and absence of Junk DNA. I suggest that
they cannot make these predictions unless they are actually making implicit
assumptions about the nature of the intelligence they are dealing with; there
is therefore an inconsistency in Torley’s thought: He can’t make claim to
knowing so little about the nature of the intelligent agent and yet at the same
time try and pass on predictions that contain implicit assumptions about that
intelligence. After all, motive, that is emotions, are a huge part of any
practical intelligence and we need some inkling of those motives to make
predictions. But when we do hazard postulating something about the nature of
the intelligence involved the resultant science is far from exact, in fact it
is a science that is a lot softer than archaeology (see also: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/does-intelligent-design-make-testable.html).
Durston, as other
IDists, is very naturally interpreted as a dualist God-of-the-Gaps thinker. This is what comes over to Larry Moran and it certainly also comes over
to me. As Moran says Durston conjures up a picture of a God who, on occasion, downloads
a piece of his mind into molecular matter and then steps back and allows it to
degrade. This is a classical deist conception of God. No doubt the ID
community will try to deny this, but the fact is whenever they attempt to
explain ID to themselves they appear to fall into the dualist and desitical trap of god-of-the-gaps style thinking. Part of the problem seems to be down to their explanatory filter
epistemic (See here) but a lot of it may be down
to a default Western dualist philosophy of God.
***
As is the way
with communities who have become the target of general disdain, marginalisation and insult, the
de-facto IDists have reacted with an insular embattled mentality. We therefore find
Durston simply repeating the fallacies of his IDist peer group. As I’ve recently expressed in this blog post
the de-facto ID community have been a huge disappointment to me: They have
screwed up in several issues and don’t seem to have the self-critical back bone
to dig themselves out of the hole they are in. There is one advantage of the
secular community (and “secular” does not necessarily equate to “atheist”) that
some insular Christian sub-cultures are unlikely to benefit from: Viz: the secular
scientific community is less a community than it is a disorderly free for all.
Although the dangers of nihilism and postmodernism are ever present among pure
secularists, disagreement at the price of unity is not something they lose
sleep over. On the other hand closeted and sectarian Christian communities do
lose sleep over it and end up forming a tight-knit penguin cluster who are very
easy targets for the machine gun fire of criticism. That the ID community have
so badly failed in the area of apologetics is, for a Christian like myself, disquieting;
on the whole they are some of the most intelligent and reasonable evangelical believers
around*. But if the de-facto IDists are performing so badly on the apologetics
front that doesn't bode well for the anti-science Christian fundamentalists.
.
Safety in
numbers? Not when there are Maxims about!
Relevant links:
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/algorithms-searches-dualism-and_13.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/configuration-space-via-mathematical.html
Footnote:
* But beware; because of their personal certainty about their moral convictions and pilgrimage they can turn "nasty".
Footnote:
* But beware; because of their personal certainty about their moral convictions and pilgrimage they can turn "nasty".
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