>Brian
>
>On Thu, 29 Feb 1996 22:06:02 -0500 you wrote:
>
>>SJ>I find it interesting that scientific research into a naturalistic
>>origin of life has been unsuccessful for 83 years and not 43 years as
>>I originally thought!...when does dogged persistence become
>>obsessive folly? 43 years? 83 years? 103 years? :-)
>
>>BH>Hmm... Inquiries into the supernaturalistic origins of life,
>>how long have they been going on and with what success? :-).
>
>SJ>What "inquiries"? The "supernaturalistic origins of life" is a
>>revealed truth of the Bible (Jn 5:26).
>
>BH>Sorry, I thought for some reason that we were talking about
>>scientific evidence.
>
SJ:===
>We were - "scientific research into a naturalistic origin of life
>has been unsuccessful for 83 years". There has been no
>scientific research into a naturalistic origin of life AFAIK.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
supernaturalistic
Why?
>SJ> But
>if the naturalistic program to find a plausible undirected
>materialistic spontaneous generation scenario for the origin of
>life consistently fails, does this not leave a supernaturalistic
>Intelligent Designer origin the only alternative?
>
No, this is the argument from the false alternative.
>BH>Are we in agreement that the supernaturalistic origins of life
>>cannot be verified by scientific methods?
>
SJ:====
>No. It may be that "the supernaturalistic origins of life" *can be*
>"verified by scientific methods". But it is just ruled out of court
>apriori by materialist-naturalistic science.
Or perhaps it is because there are no scientific methods for
detecting the supernatural?
SJ:=====
>My point was that
>"scientific research into a naturalistic origin of life has been
>unsuccessful for 83 years" and "when does dogged persistence become
>obsessive folly?" Johnson writes:
>
And my point is that you seem to want to play with a stacked deck,
Miller and his cohorts suffering from the extreme disadvantage
that their ideas can be tested. If they fail you want to claim
this as your success. But it isn't. Their failure is their failure,
that's all. If you want ID to be successful you need to come up
with a model and then put it to the test.
In the end notes of RitB, Johnson quotes Arthur Shapiro as
follows:
I can see Science in the year 2000 running a major feature
article on the spread of theistic science as a parallel
scientific culture. I can see interviews with the leading
figures in history and philosophy of science about how and
why this happened. For the moment, the authors of _The Creation
Hypothesis_ are realisticaUy defensive. They know their way
of looking at the world will not he generally accepted and
that they will be restricted for a while to their own journals.
They also know that they will he under intense pressure to
demonstrate respectability by weeding out crackpots, kooks
and purveyors of young-earth snake oil. If they are successful,
the day will come when the editorial board of Science will
convene in emergency session to decide what to do about a
paper which is of the highest quality and utterly unexceptionable,
of great and broad interest, and which proceeds from the prior
assumption of intelligent design. For a preview of that crisis,
you should read this hook. Of course, if you are smug enough
to think "theistic science" is an oxymoron, you won't.
-- Arthur Shapiro in _Creation/Evolution_, quoted by P.
Johnson, _Reason in the Balance_, p. 239.
This is a truly amazing prediction !! :-). For this to happen it
will necessary to quit the argument from the false alternative,
stop all this talk of cover-ups and conspiracies and get to work
on that "paper which is of the highest quality and utterly
unexceptionable, of great and broad interest, and which proceeds
from the prior assumption of intelligent design".
[...]
>
>>SJOnce it is admitted that the "origin of life" did not happen by
>>"chance", then there is no justification for believe that it was
>>"evolution" that "began after the origin of life". It could just as
>>easily have been progressive creation, ie. an Intelligent Designer
>>guiding and controlling an "evolutionary" process in furtherance of a
>>purpose.
>
>BH>Sorry, I don't understand this line of reasoning at all.
>
SJ:===
>If the intervantion of an Intelligent Designer was necessary for the
>origin of life, such intervention cannot be ruled out in the
>development of that same life.
>
The realization that the origin of life did not occur by chance
does not in any way suggest that the intervention of an Intelligent
Designer was necessary. Would we agree that the orbit of the earth
about the sun is not determined by chance? Does this require the
intervention of an Intelligent Designer?
[...]
SJ:====
>That's OK, but let's not lose the main point here. Why has not Loeb
>been given his rightful priority? Why is the Miller-Urey experiment
>still hailed in school textbooks as the beginning of OOL research? If
>this goes on much longer, then it is hard to avoid the charge of a
>"cover up" to avoid providing support for creationism, as Gould
>acknowledges does happen:
>
"Lie down before you hurt yourself"
-- Timone to Poombah, <The Lion King> :-)
Really, Steve, I find your response to this Loeb business most
surprising and very disturbing. First of all, who performed the
first prebiotic experiment and when it was performed has absolutely
nothing to do with "support for creationism".
Secondly, you say "If this goes on much longer ..." when it hasn't
even gone on at all yet.
Finally, and most importantly, you are much too quick in concluding
a cover up. This is a very serious charge and needs to be rigorously
substantiated. I for one fail even to find a motive for a cover up.
[...]
>
>BH>Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. I think this is a recent
>>discovery on Yockey's part. I found no mention of it in his two
>>recent articles in <BioEssays> and <J Theor Biol.> On p. 231 of
>>his book he writes:
>>
>> That Gly can be synthesized by corona discharge in an atmosphere
>> of CO, NH3 and H2O had been reported by Loeb (1913),
>> as Miller (1955) pointed out.
>>
>>Note CO instead of CO2, so Yockey was apparently unaware of the
>>mis-translation at the time his book was written.
>
>OK. But it was known in October 1994, so why did Orgel write:
>
Why do you think Orgel should know about this?
[...]
>
>BH>A minor point, the term "meaningful information" has no meaning
>>in information theory :). The terminology I prefer is organized
>>complexity. In any event I would tend to agree that the generation
>>of organized complexity is most likely the biggest hurdle to overcome
>>in origin of life research. Interesting work is being done in this
>>area by Stuart Kauffman and others.
>
SJ:===
>Fine. But "meaningful information" is meaningful information to human
>beings, even if it can find no place in the materialist-naturalist
>paradigm.
>
Meaning is not an intrinsic property of a message, i.e. meaning is
not contained in the structure of the words themselves. Here's an
illustration from Yockey that I like:
Early in the history of information theory, philosophers
traded on the word information and thought they had a
mathematical means for dealing with semantics, in spite
of the Shannon's denial in the second paragraph of his
1948 paper. See Bar-Hillel (1955) Philosophy of Science vol.22
pp86-105 and Bar-Hillel and Carnap (1953) British Journal of the
Philosophy of Scince volume 22 pp147-157. The reason this
cannot be done is that there is no mathematical measure for
'value' or 'meaning'. The meaning of words depends on the
language and the context. 'Meaning' cannot be measured. As I
pointed out in my book if you send a package labeled Gift to
Professors Eigen or Haken, you will violate German postal
regulations. Gift means poison in German.
Now I know you are going to like this part :-). It is the
"materialist-naturalist"'s who Yockey accuses of violating the
rules of information theory [another conspiracy?]:Yockey continues
from the above:
My 'polemic against the seminal work of Manfred Eigen' exposes
his confusion of philosophical notions of semantics and
information measured in bits as well as a number of other
basic faults. Eigen feels free to introduce conjectures cooked
up ad hoc to suit each problem. One can solve (sic) any problem
with enough ad hoc conjectures. To remedy what he sees as an
inadequacy in "classical information theory" he calls for a purely
empirical "value parameter" that is characteristic of "valued
information". He states that this "valued information" is
reflected by increased "order". On the contrary, it is well
known in information theory that 'increased order' decreases
the information content of a message.
-- Yockey, in bionet.info-theory [part of Yockey#1 that I
posted earlier]
[...]
>BH>This is one of the things that I find most interesting about
>>Yockey. He concludes that there is a gap beteen nonliving and living
>>matter that is impossible to be filled in by a gradual process of
>>chemical evolution. If ever there were a place where one might
>>conclude that intelligent design is required surely this must be it
>>(assuming, of course that Yockey's conclusion is correct). Yet
>>Yockey does not conclude intelligent design. Why? An interesting
>>question.
>
>SJ:====================
>Agreed. Does he actually rule out intelligent design? Has it ever
>been put to him? If Yockey say that "chemical evolution" is
>"impossible" yet he fails to consider intelligent design, is this
>not a prime case of paradigm blindness? Why exactly *is*
>intelligent design not scientific in OOL, when it is scientific
>in archaeology and SETI:
>
Of all the people I know, Yockey seems to be the least likely person
to be guilty of "paradigm blindness". He wants to do something
which seems to me to be unheard of, i.e. to sweep the decks clean
and start over. I don't know if he's ever considered intelligent
design or not, but it seems like his suggestion is the best case
scenario imaginable for intelligent design. With the deck swept
clean intelligent design would be on equal footing with anything
else. The race is on. Can ID produce evidence that is not based
on the argument from the false alternative?
Here is a long quote from Yockey's book which may better explain
his position on the Origin of Life [my comments in brackets]:
That path to "The broad goal [which] is to arrive at an
intellectually satisfying theory of how living forms could
have emerged step by step from inanimate matter on the
primitive Earth" (Dickerson 1978) _is not in sight_, contrary
to Dickerson's optimistic statement. The considerable work
on the origin of life in the last decades has resulted in
many facts, most of them inconvenient. What is needed is
creative skepticism, fettered hy facts, however inconvenient,
rather than endless unfettered speculation. There is no
justification today for believing that life is about to be
created _in flagrante delicto_ in the laboratory as was
proposed by Jacques Loeb (1912).
[my guess is that Yockey would consider intelligent design to be
"unfettered speculation" :)]
Although it was justified when the work started, chemical
evolution, a latter-day alchemism, is still-born and no
amount of work on that paradigm, however religiously it
may be carried out, will tell us how life originated.
However, this will not shake the faith of the true believers.
A true believer confronted with evidence contrary to his
doctrine regards this as merely a test of his faith. His
greatest fear is heresy and treason to his infallible
doctrines. He views the world behind a fact-proof screen
that protects his infallible doctrine from heretics and
unbelievers (Jukes, 1987a; Hoffer, 1951).
Science often finds itself attempting an explanation that is
far beyond its capability at the time. Many examples of this
are discussed by Kuhn (1957, 1970). We know that life originated
on Earth and we know the approximate timespan in which this
occurred. But we are frustrated in finding a means by which it
happened. It is worth reading Sir Arthur Eddington's (1926)
chapter entitled 'The source of stellar energy'. By the
application of the basic laws of thermodynamics and of quantum
theory as known at the time, he correctly put his finger on
the main source of stellar energy, namely the burning of hydrogen.
He was frustrated at finding a mechanism by which that might
occur but, to his great credit, he did not resort to unfounded
speculation and factoids (they only simulate facts). We are
in the same situation as Eddington with regard to the origin
of life. The currently accepted scenarios are untenable and
the solution to the problem will not be found by continuing to
flagellate these scenarios.
[...]
There are two approaches to the origin of life problem. We may
take the suggestion which Bohr made in 1933 that life is to be
accepted as an axiom and proceed from there, or we may continue
the search for the origin of life from non-living matter. Let
us first consider Bohr's suggestion. Chaitin (1988) has pointed
out that if we try very hard to solve a problem without success
the reason may not be that we are not smart enough or haven't
tried long enough; the reason may be that there is no solution.
There may be no pattern or law that leads inexorably to the
origin of life from non-living matter.
[...]
I have no scenario to explain the origin of life. My purpose
is to demonstrate that for a successful explanation to emerge
it is important to eliminate _factoids_ and clear away the
encumbrances of failed scenarios and paradigms. [...]
-- H.P. Yockey, _Information Theory and Molecular Biology_,
Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 289-291.
[and along similar lines in the epilogue:]
The history of science shows that a paradigm, once it has
achieved the status of acceptance (and is incorporated in
textbooks) and regardless of its failures, is declared invalid
only when a new paradigm is available to replace it.
Nevertheless, in order to make progress in science, it is
necessary to clear the decks, so to speak, of failed paradigms.
This must be done even if this leaves the decks entirely
clear and no paradigms survive. It is a characteristic of
the true believer in religion, philosophy and ideology that
he must have a set of beliefs, come what may (Hofer, 1951).
Belief in a primeval soup on the grounds that no other paradigm
is available is an example of the logical _fallacy of the false
alternative_. In science it is a virtue to acknowledge ignorance.
This has been universally the case in the history of science
as Kuhn (1970) has discussed in detail. There is no reason that
this should be different in the research on the origin of life.
The best advice that one could given to the alchemist would
have been to study nuclear physics and astrophysics, although
that would not have been helpful at the time. We do not see
the origin of life clearly, but through a glass darkly. Perhaps
the best advice to those who are interested in the origin of
life would be to study biology. After dispensing with failed
paradigms in Chapters 8, 9 and lO, I have shown that the
problem to be solved in the origin of life and in evolution
is the means by which complexity (as defined in this book) was
generated. Half the solution to the problem is to define the
question clearly.
-- Yockey, ibid, p. 336
[...]
========================
Brian Harper |
Associate Professor | "It is not certain that all is uncertain,
Applied Mechanics | to the glory of skepticism" -- Pascal
Ohio State University |
========================