At 01:50 PM 08/25/2000, you wrote:
>Brian:
> >No, the point is that the purpose, plan or design is not something that
> > science can say anything about. If it cannot, then people should keep
> >quiet about it, unless of course they are just giving their opinions.
> > Everyone's entitled to an opinion, even Darwinists :). (snip)
> >When it comes to purpose, meaning etc.
> >science doesn't know what it is talking about. So, when it comes to these
> >things it needs to keep its mouth shut.
>
>Bertvan:
>H Brian. I don't remember anyone objecting in the days when quite well known
>biologists were declaring purpose did not exist in nature, and Darwinism
>supported Atheism. (In these public discussions, many people still do.) Now
>that some scientists are arguing for purpose, why insist everyone remain
>silent on the subject? Personally, I see no reason why any scientist
>shouldn't include his belief in either the existence or non existence of
>purpose as implied by his explanation of phenomena. All theories include
>assumptions, and assumptions are often unprovable.
It's not quite true that science cannot study design or purpose. However,
it *is* true that it cannot study the purposes of an alleged *God,* whose
background and context are inherently unknown to us. It is precisely
*because* we cannot study such purposes that we cannot use the apparent
*lack* of design to prove that things like the human wrist came about
because of evolution. We can only point out that, functionally, for the
purposes of survival and human wellbeing, the wrist (and much else) is
either not designed or is *badly* designed (by a God with no knowledge of
mechanical engineering).
A theory may or may not include unprovable assumptions. If a theory
pertaining to evolution includes unprovable assumptions (or at least
assumptions with a good scientific basis), then it is not likely to be any
good. It is certainly not acceptable as good science. Supernaturalism would
be one of the worst possible assumptions because it disconnects theory from
observable facts, and turns it into a kind of game of bad philosophy posing
as science.
*If* there were evidence of design, rather than merely evidence that
non-functional genes have generally been weeded out by the physical
requirement that *functional* genes promote the survival/reproduction of
the genome, then it would be quite possible to study it scientifically. We
could ask, and pose hypotheses as to why the designers made certain choices
rather than others, and we could *then* say of a particular hypothesis,
"Given this hypothesis, what *other* empirically observable facts should in
fact be the case?" Thus, if we find the first ten million digits of pi
encoded in the human genome, we might suspect that it was an attempt on the
part of the designers to communicate with us. Then, we might ask: "If this
is true, what *other* communications should we find? Should we expect to
find e (the base of natural logarithms) also thusly encoded?" If we found a
large tome of clear English prose thus encoded, we could just read it and
possibly determine its purpose (or at least a plausible purpose for it). If
it said, "This message is encoded here in the human genome so as to provide
you with evidence that you are a designed species, and to communicate to
you the facts about your design and why we chose to design you as we did."
And, if the rest of the message did in fact provide empirically verifiable
facts about our genome and our morphology, etc., we could reasonably
suspect that the specified purpose of the design was in fact the *actual*
purpose of the design. And then we could, possibly, make predictions as to
what other facts should also be the case if the claimed purpose is real,
and then seek to determine if those suspected facts are the case.
>Brian:
> >A long time ago I suggested that you should not pay too much
> >attention to popular level books and articles. This is one reason.
> >You will find all sorts of Darwinian evangelists that claim Darwinism
> >proves there is no purpose etc. Remember the subtitle to Dawkins'
> >book? But you find the same message coming from all manner
> >of creationists, whether YE, OE or ID. Isn't it interesting that both
> >sides agree on this point?
>
>Bertvan:
>I am not a scientist, and don't pretend to be engaging in scientific
>discussions. I am discussing public perception of Darwinism. From what I've
>read of the "authorities", few of them agree , and an official definition
>might be difficult to achieve. Neo Darwinism as defined in the Modern
>Synthesis? If evolution is defined as "change in the gene pool over time",
>you would probably not find many YECs who denied that took place.
Chris
Since that is all that is necessary for macroevolution (because two
radically different species can be nearly identical in genetics, as long as
there is enough difference to determine that quite different sets out of
the bulk of the genes are allowed to be expressed), they would have at
least to be very stingy about how much or what kinds of such changes can
occur. I think that that definition, while accurate enough for species that
reproduce by sexual means (involving genetic recombination), is not
sufficient as a definition for naturalistic evolutionary theory, which,
minimally, holds that there is undesigned genetic change over time that
leads to new species. Incidentally, natural selection does not need to be
specified, except as the factor which explains why we see *just* the types
of genomes we do see and not literally trillions of others as well.
Selection weeds out all the genomes that would appear random, or that
produce morphological consequences that would appear random. Thus, while we
see occasional appearances of things that would appear random (such as a
cow with two heads), this is, at worst, one small bit of randomness
occurring in a context that is mostly non-random. If the whole cow genome
were to appear random (in genetic terms), there could not *be* a cow at
all. Survival requires functionality. Functionality requires *order*. The
(sufficiently) disorderly are excluded from the party.
>By the
>way, your insistence that supporters of ID are "creationists" might be
>counter productive, as the public gradually discovers that most are not. But
>why should I complain.
Chris
Actually, they *are* creationists. They may not be as uneducated as
conventional creationists, but they believe (with extremely few exceptions)
that God created the Universe and life. They just aren't quite as lame as
those who try to take Genesis absolutely literally. Creationists are also
ID-theorists. They believe that God created the Universe according to a
*design*, not either randomly or *merely* by specifying a Universe with
laws of physics and such that merely accidentally *happened* to yield life.
The differences are fairly superficial; the core beliefs in common are
fundamental and the beliefs not in common are secondary.
>Brian:
> >But you will not find this sort of talk, by and large, in the scientific
> >literature. Random mutation
> >means random with respect to the benefits of the organism.
>
>Bertvan:
>A mutation with a Lamarckian component would not be random with respect to
>the benefits of the organism. Since no one understands the nature of the
>"natural order", " biological pathways", "design", etc., that produce
>beneficial mutations, a Lamarckian influence can not be ruled out.
Chris
The problem is that Lamarckianism implies empirically observable facts that
do not occur. It *can* be ruled out precisely for this reason. Besides,
Lamarckianism, though it turns out to *contradict* the facts, was at least
a *scientific* theory (which is precisely why it *could* contradict the
facts; ID cannot contradict the facts because it makes no empirically
observable factual claims against which it can be tested, and that is why
it is *not* scientific.
>Brian:
> >I don't think of myself as a Darwinist in any usual sense of the word.
>
>Bertvan:
>Darwinism is specifically what I -- and others -- question. I know of no ID
>supporter who is skeptical of the more vague definitions of "evolution". No
>one questions that chance exists as a part of nature. We doubt that chance
>is an important mechanism in the creation of life's diversity and complexity.
Chris
A designer would be hard put to deliberately try to outdo chance in this
respect. Chance can "try" things that no designer would ever think of.
Further, though I do not consider myself to be a Darwinist, except in a
very broad sense, certainly *my* views have been received with skepticism
by some on this list. You seem to regard Darwinism as the only form of
purely naturalistic evolutionary theory there is. Evolution as ongoing
naturalistic variation coupled with ongoing natural selection might be
broadly considered to be Darwinism, I suppose, but Darwin certainly had no
currently acceptable idea as to the genetic mechanisms involved because
genetics was still "dormant" (and did not get permanently established until
1900).
>Fifteen years ago evolution meant Darwinism -- gradualism, random mutation
>and natural selection, with the usual meaning of "random" - without, plan,
>purpose, meaning or design. Many well-known scientists did not hesitate
>equate it with atheism. Johnson was the first I discovered who questioned
>Darwinism publicly. (There had been others, but I hadn't yet come across
>them.) Some scientists have since questioned gradualism, have expanded the
>meaning of "random" to include the possibility of teleology, have added
>concepts such as "natural order" and "genetic pathways", etc. If Johnson,
>Denton, Behe, Dembski, etc., played any part in that change, I am grateful to
>them. Obviously those Darwinists who witnessed this adoption of a less
>dogmatic definition of "evolution" feel only resentment. If someone were
>able to show me the flaws in my thinking, and produce an explanation of life
>I could accept, I would feel jubilation, not resentment. (I warn everone
>ahead of time. Telling me how stupid or dishonest I am won't do it.)
I doubt that you would find *any* naturalistic explanation of life
acceptable, regardless of its scientific backing, because you wouldn't
bother to learn the *thinking* skills necessary to properly evaluate it.
Science is highly conceptual, and bad concepts tend to get weeded out in
science just as they do within mathematics, etc. You do not bother to
rigorously define concepts like those of spontaneity, creativity, free
will, etc., in a way that would make them capable of *any* meaningful
explanation, and yet you insist on believing in them as basic facts of
existence and as somehow distinct from the implications of physics,
chemistry, thermodynamics, and so on. You have allowed yourself to become
trapped in an inherently anti-scientific world-view determined by
fundamental flaws in how you establish and manage such concepts, so we
should not expect even a *perfect* (and perfectly true) description of life
in naturalistic terms to make headway in your mind until you realize that
this kind of basic conceptual fog needs correction. Would you be willing to
learn computer programming so you could try out various critical ideas
about evolutionary processes? This would not be a necessity, but my point
is that, if it *were* a necessity, you would probably not do it. Defining
ideas specifically and rigorously enough to build them into a computer
program would not be something you'd be willing to do. Nor, I believe,
would you be willing to learn enough computer programming to unambiguously
examine a computer program written by someone else and published with the
claim that it represents a crucial model of how real-world evolution might
work.
I'm not saying you are dishonest, or even stupid, but you *are* blinded to
the enormously rich possibilities of naturalistic explanations by your
mind-set and your foggy concepts.
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