Re: [asa] Proof That Common Descent is NOT Begging the Question

It is my strong impression that the "special" part of "special creation" is
nothing other than discontinuity. Why else would anyone need to add "special"
to "creation" when talking of the works of God that are affirmed by all
Christians? There is, by the way, no simulation that would negate "progressive
creation in which God gradually creates new species using existing species as a
base," since that is evolution by definition.

I find the very nature of this discussion to be absurd. Musing about the
distinctions between common descent and "continuous creation" is like
discussing whether your lunch was provided by God if you bought the corn from a
farmer.

Steve Matheson

>>> "David Opderbeck" <dopderbeck@gmail.com> 08/10/08 3:21 PM >>>

Why does "special creation" have to be radically discontinuous? The big
question is mechanism, and the raw fact of a branching tree structure doesn't
address that. Mechanism is an inference, and it's at the level of inference
that the issue of question begging arises.

I think you're right if the argument is that this kind of algorithm shows that
a theory of special creation / design in which new species are created from
scratch in a short period of time is not viable. But I don't see how it
negates progressive creation in which God gradually creates new species using
existing species as a base. Whether or not God did that is another question,
but I don't see how this kind of simulation rules it out.

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Rich Blinne
<rich.blinne@gmail.com>

wrote:

Would it? Inheritedness in the same order as predicted by evolution? So why
would special creation have the supposedly disjoint set of features that are
connected was what would be expected through inherited traits?

On Aug 10, 2008, at 9:22 AM, David Opderbeck wrote:

Of course, a strong ID / progressive creationist would say that the algorithm
would predict the same structure under their model, so the ultimate conclusion
of which model finally is correct remains question begging.

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 7:50 PM, Rich Blinne
<rich.blinne@gmail.com>

wrote:

One of the complaints made by strong ID is that common descent is assumed and
then we find it and that continuous creation is just as plausible. A novel
computer algorithm is presented in this week's PNAS shows that an unbiased
search for structure shows otherwise.

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/31/10687.full

The discovery of structural form

Algorithms for finding structure in data have become increasingly important
both as tools for scientific data analysis and as models of human learning, yet
they suffer from a critical limitation. Scientists discover qualitatively new
forms of structure in observed data: For instance, Linnaeus recognized the
hierarchical organization of biological species, and Mendeleev recognized the
periodic structure of the chemical elements. Analogous insights play a pivotal
role in cognitive development: Children discover that object category labels
can be organized into hierarchies, friendship networks are organized into
cliques, and comparative relations (e.g., "bigger than" or "better than")
respect a transitive order. Standard algorithms, however, can only learn
structures of a single form that must be specified in advance: For instance,
algorithms for hierarchical clustering create tree structures, whereas
algorithms for dimensionality-reduction create low-dimensional spaces. Here, we
present a computational model that learns structures of many different forms
and that discovers which form is best for a given dataset. The model makes
probabilistic inferences over a space of graph grammars representing trees,
linear orders, multidimensional spaces, rings, dominance hierarchies, cliques,
and other forms and successfully discovers the underlying structure of a
variety of physical, biological, and social domains. Our approach brings
structure learning methods closer to human abilities and may lead to a deeper
computWith respect to biological relationships the paper notes:

For centuries, the natural representation for biological species was held to be
the "great chain of being," a linear structure in which every living thing
found a place according to its degree of perfection (16 (
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/31/10687.full#ref-16 )). In 1735, Linnaeus
famously proposed that relationships between plant and animal species are best
captured by a tree structure, setting the agenda for all biological
classification since.

In Figure 3 of the paper
(http://www.pnas.org/content/105/31/10687/F3.large.jpg) the computer program
looked at the following structures:

Structures learned from biological features (A), Supreme Court votes (B),
judgments of the similarity between pure color wavelengths (C), Euclidean
distances between faces represented as pixel vectors (D), and distances between
world cities (E). For A–C, the edge lengths represent maximum a posteriori edge
lengths under our generative model.

The Supreme Court decision produced the left to right linear structure one
would expect by doing a political analysis of the court. Did the computer
program produce the tree structure predicted by Darwin when looking at
biological features? Yes, it did! The caption to figure 5
(http://www.pnas.org/content/105/31/10687/F5.large.jpg) explains this in more
detail:

Developmental changes as more data are observed for a fixed set of objects.
After observing only five features of each animal species, the model chooses a
partition, or a set of clusters. As the number of observed features grows from
5 to 20, the model makes a qualitative shift between a partition and a tree. As
the number of features grows even further, the tree becomes increasingly
complex, with subtrees that correspond more closely to adult taxonomic
intuitions: For instance, the canines (dog, wolf) split off from the other
carnivorous land mammals; the songbirds (robin, finch), flying birds (robin,
finch, eagle), and walking birds (chicken, ostrich) form distinct
subcategories; and the flying insects (butterfly, bee) and walking insects
(ant, cockroach) form distinct subcategories. More information about these
simulations can be found in SI Appendix (
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/data/0802631105/DCSupplemental/Appendix_PDF ).

This is a computer program so it shows that the structure assumed by Darwin in
fact is the structure that comes naturally out of the data itself. Thus,
evolutionary biology is not begging the question after all but is just
following good old fashioned human pattern matching.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

--
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
--
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
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