Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

"Not to speak for other scientists, but I can't imagine one at this point."
Rand, surely your imagination is richer than that!
How about:
1) the precambrian bunny (i.e., a fossil of a putatively recent taxon, like mammals or birds, showing up in undisputedly precambrian strata)
2) the discovery of a modern species of vertebrate whose members didn't use the standard nucleotide base pairs in nucleic acids
3)ditto the above, except this species uses 20 completely different amino acids to make proteins
4) the sudden appearance of the Creator, trailing clouds of glory, and poof! creating a new species right now.

any one of those would be a serious challenge to modern evolutionary theory. As soon as creationists can demonstrate one of them, I'll eat my copy of "On the Origin of Species".

Posted by David Fleck at June 2, 2002 12:10 PM

I can't imagine that we're going to find any of those things. ;-)

Which is really what I meant.

Posted by Rand Simberg at June 2, 2002 12:29 PM

First, my heartfelt thanks to Rand Simberg, who was kind enough not only to post my argument but to respond to it point by point. I don't have the time to rebut right now, but I will as soon as I humanly can.

In response to David Fleck: you are not quite fair to Rand. I had asked whether he could imagine an *experiment* that falsified evolutionary theory, not whether he could think of a discovery that would do so. Obviously any number of possible discoveries might, in principle, destroy evolutionary theory. I was asking about falsifiability -- whether there is any test that could, if performed, definitely prove evolutionary theory false. I don't think there is. That doesn't make the theory untrue, but it does make the claims that ID isn't "science" because it's unfalsifiable a little less credible.

I should add that I am not a "creationist" and that I don't have any interest whatever in changing school curricula.

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 2, 2002 12:39 PM

Yes, Michelle, I assumed that was the case.

Posted by Rand Simberg at June 2, 2002 12:43 PM

Michelle-
actually, you asked two questions:
1) "*is* evolutionary theory falsifiable?"
2) "Can you imagine any experiment that would be capable of disproving it to any scientist's satisfaction?"

My original reply was directed at (1) in the sense that yes, there are certain pieces of evidence that, if found or observed, would refute basic predictions of modern evolutionary theory.

However, as far as (2) goes, I think you're being unfair to Rand also, by asking him to come up with a single experiment to 'disprove evolution', for two reasons.

First, studying evolution generally means attempting to study the past, and it's very hard to experiment on the past. The best we can do is to make predictions about patterns we would expect to see in the geologic record, and then see if these patterns do, indeed, exist. (That's where the precambrian bunny comes in.) Do you consider this method to be experimental? If not, then you're saying that no experimental science about the past, or anything else we can't directly manipulate, is possible; a terrible blow to legions of geologists and astronomers, as well as biologists, who discover that they are no longer doing science.

Second, experiments generally are conducted to confirm or reject hypotheses, those tiny little sub-components of theories. By their nature, they don't attempt to answer the Big Picture all at once. The only example I can think of at the moment that might fall into the category you mention is the Michelson-Morley experiment that failed to detect the existence of the ether (aether?) wind, which knocked out the underpinnings of much of 19th-century physics (or so I was told by my physics teachers).

A manipulation experiment whose results would disprove evolution? What particular portion of 'evolution' would you like the experiment to disprove?

Posted by David Fleck at June 2, 2002 02:12 PM

Hmmm . . . I'm procrastinating like mad here (there's other writing that I have to get done very soon, but I don't want to do it.) But in response to David Fleck:

When Rand wrote "not to speak for other scientists, but I can't imagine one at this point," it was clear (to me, at least) that he was responding to my question about actual experiments that might falsify evolutionary theory. His "one" = an experiment.

I am not looking to disprove or discredit evolutionary theory, just pointing out that the "falsifiability" criterion doesn't really get you very far when your subject is history. In that sense David and Rand are both agreeing with me.

The difference between ID and the old creationists is precisely that ID arguments *are* falsifiable. They make a claim -- "such-and-such could not have been made via natural selection, because it's irreducibly complex" -- that can be refuted by a single counterexample.

Rand is quite right that a "God could have done that"-type argument *is* unfalsifiable, because any conceivable evidence can be slotted smoothly into the theory.

But that's not what the ID folks are doing. They're claiming -- rightly or wrongly -- that natural selection can't explain, even in principle, a lot of organic systems that we can see operating now. The cautious ones say that we ought just to confess that we don't know how these systems came to be. The bolder paraphrase Sherlock Holmes; having eliminated all the other possibilities, they skip directly to divine agency.

I'm inclined myself to think that the agnostic approach is the best one, especially where the subject isn't evolution but the origin of life. We don't know how it happened, period. And the naturalistic explanations are lamer, if anything, than the supernatural ones. (The whole technology, if you will, of self-replication has to have set itself up essentially by accident in the naturalistic explanation. Natural selection can't operate before self-replication, so self-replication itself can only be some sort of colossal coincidence. Which, considering how danged complicated it is, seems pretty unlikely.)

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 2, 2002 04:08 PM

Yes, to me, explaining it with an "intelligent designer" is just "I don't know how it happened" in fancier clothes. It's not a useful conjecture scientifically, since the only way to test the theory is to come up with the explanation you were looking for in the first place (which is also the solution to "I don't know how it happened").

Its primary advantage (from the point of view of its proponents) is that it provides better rhetorical framework to construct more ill-founded arguments against evolution.

Posted by Rand Simberg at June 2, 2002 04:23 PM

The problem I have with the "if it isn't a naturalistic explanation, it isn't science" school of thought is that it's obviously useless should it happen to be true that there *is* no naturalistic explanation. It's as though a lot of rats in a maze were trying to account for the presence of a hunk of cheese down one corridor while expressly excluding any hypothesis involving creatures more powerful or more intelligent than rats.

What the ID people are doing, it seems to me, is just allowing for the possibility that someone put the cheese in the maze. That's not unscientific; it's *reasonable.* Especially, as I said, when it comes to origin-of-life theories, where the naturalistic explanations are hopelessly inadequate as they stand.

I have never seen a children's textbook that was content with a plain I-don't-know about the origin of life. Certainly the ones I went through school with issued the pro forma "I don't know" and then went on immediately to smoking piles of organic chemicals at the bases of volcanos, or whatever. (Behe has much fun with this theory in his book.) The point is that saying "we don't know how this happened," but immediately following up the statement with "but one theory is . . ." does rather give one the impression that there's only one theory.

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 2, 2002 06:51 PM

If the only other theory is that "someone did it, but we don't know who, and they didn't leave a calling card," then I'd say that from a scientific standpoint, there's only one (useful) theory.

At least with the hydrocarbons in the volcano, you can do some experiments, and try to replicate it. What do you do with the "someone did it" theory?

Posted by Rand Simberg at June 2, 2002 07:05 PM

See, this is exactly the sort of thing that drives me nuts. Given a question that we don't know the answer to ("Where did self-replicating molecules come from?"), we don't say, "We don't know," but instead say, "We don't know, but some people think that simple organic compounds were formed when such-and-such washed up at the base of a volcano," &c.

Can we test this assertion? We can try, as you say, to replicate the presumed conditions. But the most we can possibly do with that is to show that life might have originated that way. (And we are very, very far from showing even that -- despite endless tweaking of conditions, so far as I know no one has been able to produce anything beyond the simplest organic molecules.) The theory is obviously nonfalsifiable -- our inability to get the results we want can always be explained away as our failure to replicate the original conditions properly. But the mere fact that we might someday produce -- not a confirming result (there is no such thing), but some indication that something like this *might* have happened is apparently enough to make this speculation "science."

Back in the maze, two rats were arguing. One said that specks of dust could grow into hunks of cheese, given the right conditions. True, he had never been able to make a speck of dust grow into a hunk of cheese, nor even coax it into a vaguely cheesy direction, but the only alternative explanation -- that some greater-than-rat entity had placed the cheese there -- was obviously unscientific.

The other rat then pointed out that there were no grounds on which to choose between the explanations, apart from a blind prejudice in favor of the there-is-nothing-more-intelligent-than-a-rat theory, and retired to his hole to eat some more of the cheese.

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 2, 2002 08:32 PM

The diffence , Michelle, is that one approach seeks finality with no further questions while the other seeks a useful frame upon which to build a deeper investigation. The scientist knows that answers, even theoretical ones, lead to yet more questions. This doesn't bother the scientist. In fact, it is where much of the enjoyment springs.

Certain other types of minds just want an easy answer that makes all doubt go away. Some of them need a neat little answer that covers everything while explaining nothing to get through life.

Until we have a technology like the WormCam (See 'The Light of Other Days by Clarke & Baxter) all undocumented past event are unknowable in the absolute sense but the same can be said for things happening even now. Even so, it is within our ability to construct enough evidence that a single interpretation of those events is acceptably more probable than any other. Especially if that explanation is then supplemented by info from another source, as molecular biology did for the interpretation of the fossil record.

The book I mentioned raises the question of how disturbing it might be if all history were knowable in first person detail. For certain historical figures there is no possible version of their lives that will not upset someone. For instance, if a scan of the past revealed the person we refer to as Jesus was a incredibly great guy but without a trace of divinity this would be shattering to tens of millions of believers regardless of how well the philosophy was supported.

Posted by Eric Pobirs at June 2, 2002 08:54 PM

To Eric Pobirs:

I think you're quite wrong in your dichotomy. The ID folks certainly aren't proposing to drop investigation in the biological sciences; they just want to add another hypothesis to those to be tested.

"One approach seeks finality with no further questions"? With respect -- horsepucky. Read Behe and see whether he's allergic to questions. The whole dang book is teeming with questions. And adding the possibility of ID to evolutionary history obviously means adding complications, not subtracting them.

I haven't read the book you speak of (though I'll try to track it down. Is that Arthur C. Clarke by any chance? I tend to be leery of co-authored books, especially if they're fiction, but I'll try.)

But to return to my main point: *how* is *adding* a potential explanation an avoidance of complexity, a short cut to an easy answer? To return to my rats in the maze, why is a scientific culture in which everyone believes the dust-speck-turns-into-cheese theory better than a scientific culture in which there are competing theories?

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 2, 2002 09:39 PM

"What the ID people are doing, it seems to me, is just allowing for the possibility that someone put the cheese in the maze. That's not unscientific; it's *reasonable.*"

No, as far as I can tell they are *insisting* that because *they* say something can't be explained by curren't science, it won't ever be explained by science.

There are two things wrong with this; first, the history of science is littered with things that 'science can't explain' which eventually were explained; second, the fact that Behe or some other ID proponent says that a process is 'irreduceably complex' doesn't mean that others agree with them. (See
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/br21.6/orr.html for a good general review.)

I also think your analogy is flawed, since your analogy specifically presupposes the creation of a world just for the rats, and the intervention of a 'supreme being' (a.k.a. the person putting cheese in the maze).

My preferred analogy would go like this:
"The intelligent design theorist was changing his oil one day. He got out all his tools, drained the oil,replaced the plug, and tried to remove the oil filter. Try as he might, he couldn't get the oil filter to budge. 'This is simply impossible!' he cried, and decided that his car was so fundamentally flawed that he needed to design a new car, and then build the factory to make the car, then build the car, and only then would he be able to change his oil. This thought made him happy, as he had secretly never really liked the color of his car to begin with."

Posted by David Fleck at June 2, 2002 10:04 PM

I think the important point that is missing is that science is used to predict.

The way a theory is tested isn't by trying to find a way to prove it false, but rather by testing the nooks and cranies. We do this by attempting to see if every bizarre thing this theory predicts can be shown to occur. Take Einstein's theory of Relativity w.r.t. gravitational lensing. Being good scientists we look for the appropriate celestial bodies, make the prediciton, and then take some measurements and (unfortunately) we find that it is very close to what we predicted. I say "unfortunately" because it seems we learn more when we find flaws in the existing theories.

Now if you can name one thing that Intelligent Design can predict, then I'll eat bugs. If you can't then as far as the pursuit of knowledge is concerned, it is useless.

And as far as adding ID because it is another potential explanation, I say sure, as long as we add "God created the Earth and then sneezed on it, (curse those dusty deserts!) and from that life evolved."

Posted by Tracy Smith at June 3, 2002 01:31 AM

Michelle, I've seen Behe's works and found him to be utterly full of crap. Just because he went a lot deeper than someone with no education doesn't change the fact that he got to a certain place, threw up his hands, and said, "I dunno, must be God or the staff of the Weekly World News. Beats the hell out of me." Behe can ask questions out the wazoo but none of that alters the fact his only evidence for ID is he can't figure it out. It's pure egotism, if he can't do it then it must be a fixed game and now he wants everyone else to believe in the fixer rather than he's hit a wall he can't get past.

This is reminiscent of the case of John Taylor and James Randi. (http://www.randi.org/jr/06-19-2000.html) In short, Taylor was a highly respected mathematician who was taken in by scam artists starting with Uri Geller. Because he was an indisputably highly intelligent individual and well versed in the scientific method he came to the conclusion that if he couldn't spot the scam and nor could he explain the wonders performed then surely it was genuine paranormal powers at work! Magic!

Then he came in contact with Randi who introduced some more rigorous conditions. Under such conditions the scammers always failed to perform. When a real stage magician was around the Magic failed.

Yes, the authors are Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter respectively. Clarke has long relied on younger collaborators due to growing infirmity and the fact that he couldn't write a believable human character if his life depended on it. Really it's a Baxter book after many conversations with Clarke. The plot revolves around a technology that can create tiny wormholes with almost any two desired endpoints. At first it serves to allow the observation of any place on the planet in real-time. Privacy becomes a memory. As the range of the endpoints is increased and one of the researchers realizes that times and space are functionally identical in the underlying math it becomes possible to use it to view the past.

Don't be too quick to dismiss collaborative works. Often it's a way for a big name to get a lesser name to do the prose scutwork so they can crank out a big multi-volume series and those are often schlock. But on the gripping hand, it can often create a synthesis that focuses their strengths and avoids their weaknesses. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven are an excellent example. They've achieved things collaboratively they could never do apart.

The including of ID in explanation sets has been very thoroughly discussed here the last few days. It isn't an explanation so much as the avoidance of one and as such contributes nothing useful. Unless you genuinely believe that line of inquiry will eventually reveal the designer it is a dead end. A placeholder for a missing answer. If Behe said he'd found something amounting to an artist's signature or some other trace of artifice it might be worth pursuing. It would be a huge discovery, to say the least. But he and other ID adherents have nothing of the sort.

Behe is welcome to pursue he search for that signature but he shouldn't be surprised if has difficulty with funding. The folks holding the purse strings tend to stick with pursuits that have a track record of useful results. Maybe he can get a grant from that Ahmanson guy who wants to replace the Constitution with Mosaic Law.

Perhaps it is a symptom of the age in which we live that the answers just aren't coming fast enough. We've long since passed the point where new scientific data can acquired much more quickly than it can be examined except where we've succeeded in handing the job over to software. Yet this has only been true for the tiniest fraction of our species existence. The technological and scientific progress of, say, the 18th Century, moved at a snail's pace compared to what any of use have witnessed in any decade of our lives. Even so, many difficult puzzles will continue to elude us for many more decades,even centuries. We're still inventing the tools in some cases to do the experiments so we can analyze the data.

The answers won't spring into our minds simply because we want them. We have to do the work. If that work needs to take place around another star a hell of a lot of waiting will be involved. some can't endure the waiting and convince themselves they have the answer now. But all they have is an IOU in their own hand attributed to a guy nobody knows where to find.

At least the rats in the maze might gnaw through the walls, spot the humans going about their business and make the connection. They won't though, because they're rats and such things don't concern them. Rational humans in that same situation would at least seek some means to find more info that might provide an answer. In their case things are reversed from reality so their best bet would be to break through the walls rather than endlessly observing dust motes. ("The Thirteenth Floor' makes good use of that metaphor.)

Out here in the real world there are no walls in evidence to swing a hammer at ala 'Dark City.' Examining the dust motes has been very rewarding thus far, even though certain individuals have gotten frustrated and decided to believe in Magic.

Posted by Eric Pobirs at June 3, 2002 06:15 AM

Golly, this is getting interesting. I wish I didn't have to turn out, oh, 6000 words on four separate topics by the end of the day, or I could spend more time here. Drat.

To David: The rats-in-the-maze analogy is just a "what-if." I'm not slyly trying to suggest that there *is* an Intelligent Designer, only pointing out that *if* there is one, and we insist on excluding all theories that allow for one, every theory we come up with is going to be fatally flawed.

To Tracy: Good points. You are right; I can't think of anything that ID "predicts." The closest thing that comes to mind is that "no irreducibly-complex system will come into existence via natural selection," but that's of course not a prediction, but rather the observation from which ID is an inference. So falsifying the observation would destroy ID, but the observation is prior to the "theory," not an outgrowth of it.

I fear, though, that there are a lot of theories -- especially in historical sciences like evolutionary biology -- that don't so much offer predictions as attempt to explain what we see but can't test. We seek plausible explanations at least as much as predictive power.

To Eric: I think you're unfair to Behe. He doesn't say just "I can't see how this could have happened, so it must have been God"; he says, "I've looked over the entire literature in all the journals devoted to evolutionary biology, and not one plausible evolutionary route to the development of any irreducibly-complex structure has ever been suggested." (Actually, I think he searched several years' worth of the major journals; don't have the book in front of me, so I'm afraid I can't be more specific.) We aren't talking about a trivial little hole in the theory here; we're talking about an enormous gap. One that, again, could be plugged with a single counterexample. Which we haven't got.

I gather that Behe really does think that further work might bring some actual knowledge about the "designer." But even if not, "a placeholder for a missing answer" might not be such a bad thing. I've seen far too many textbooks &c. that don't admit that there are answers missing.

I would be happy to see a great big question mark in place of "Intelligent Design." But there ought to be something there to indicate that there are, well, questions -- not little, interstitial questions but large ones. *Especially* about origin-of-life theory, where non-naturalistic explanations are ritualistically excluded and the naturalistic ones are hopelessly inadequate, as they stand.

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 3, 2002 09:07 AM

Michelle -

I get the impression that you're taking Behe's word for it about the state of the science. This may be an incorrect assumption, but if not I strongly recommend that you read his critics - the URL David Fleck posted

http://bostonreview.mit.edu/br21.6/orr.html

is worth your while. I'd also add:

http://bostonreview.mit.edu/br22.1/doolittle.html

These are well-written articles written for a lay audience and give a nice intro to the issues. If you click on the "more articles on evolution" link at the top of either of these articles, you'll find some other links that might be of interest to you.

Posted by Moira at June 3, 2002 10:14 AM

Moira: Thanks for prodding me into looking at the Boston Review material (& David, my apologies for not getting to it sooner). All very interesting! I'll have to reread the first article more closely when I've got more time, but I think it slights one of Behe's points. That redundancy can lead to irreducibly-complex systems as functions formerly auxilliary become essential is a commonplace; certainly it's one of Gould's main themes. (The wonderful essay on swim bladders and lungs is the best of all.)

But Behe's point in going to the molecular level was that the smaller the scale and the more limited the options, the less likely such a scenario. If you've got a structure you can specify down to the individual atoms (like the flagellum he spends a chapter on -- I *wish* I had the book in front of me so that I did not need to be so danged vague), then you ought to be able to guess at previous configurations and how they might themselves have been adaptive. Behe says no one has. He may well be wrong, but I would like to see specific counter-evidence. (Though your other URL, the Doolittle article, was intensely interesting. I will have to come back to that one when I have more time. But thanks!)

For me I suppose the biggest problem is the origin-of-life thing. I can imagine natural selection doing very nearly anything (though, as I've said, a few detailed stories would be helpful), but I can't quite imagine the whole technology of molecular self-replication coming into being without this or some other equally powerful mechanism behind it.

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 3, 2002 11:10 AM

Michelle--

The fact that you "can't quite imagine" the origin of life is not surprising. There are countless questions which expert working scientists cannot imagine the answers to. Yet, because they are scientists, they are content to live with unanswered questions while they continue the endless enterprise of inquiry. They do not propose--as you have--to alter the fundamental principles of the scientific discipline because they cannot imagine how else to answer a nagging and difficult question.

Science is the most successful enterprise ever undertaken by the human race. Look around you. In a few hundred years it has transformed the world. No other human undertaking has ever approached its record of successes.

It is fundamental to science that supernatural assumptions are not admitted. Consequently, any hypothesis (such as ID) which assumes the existence of supernatural realms, supernatural forces, or supernatural beings or intelligences is not admissible. Science deals only with the natural world. Science does not deal with supernatural causes, EVER! Please understand and accept this elementary fact.

Posted by Scott at June 4, 2002 11:03 PM

Dear Scott,

Yes, but how are you defining "supernatural"? Does it mean "outside the system of natural laws as we now know them," or what? There is plenty that is now accepted science that once certainly would have been considered "supernatural" (action at a distance comes to mind, for example). But obviously that's not what you mean.

Put it this way: Suppose that Behe's hypothetical "designers" are stipulated to be, not God (or gods), but organic beings like ourselves, only vastly more intelligent and vastly more advanced technologically. Yes, of course this only pushes the problem back a level (i.e., "where did *they* come from, then?"), but my point is that there is now nothing "supernatural" in the hypothesis. It involves postulating entities that we haven't previously known to be part of the natural universe, but then scientists are always doing that.

No go? Okay. But suppose that we were to find (on Mars, say) some object of staggering complexity that seemed to us to have all the earmarks of design by creatures vastly more intelligent and vastly more technologically advanced than we. Would it then be "unscientific" to postulate that said beings existed?

There are too many hypotheticals in there, I know. But I think it gets to the heart of the trouble. The contention of the ID folks is that life is an artifact, at least in part. If we are permitted to argue, just from the nature of my (hypothetical) item above, that it is an artifact, that we didn't make it, and that therefore someone else did, why is not the same style of inference OK wrt origin-of-life? (And please don't introduce me to Mr. Ockham [or Occam]; we've already met. Our alternatives seem to be (1) self-replicating organic systems spontaneously came into being, allowing natural selection to start its work; or (2) someone or something designed and built self-replicating organic systems and put them here. Not at all sure the Razor helps sort that one out.)

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 5, 2002 04:20 AM

It matters not a whit if the designer is God (Hairy Thunderer or cosmic Muffin) or Pak Protectors. As you admit, it's only dodging the question by adding a level of obfuscation.

This is another offense of ID that is sometimes forgotten. What comes quickly to mind is that ID'ers are oversimplifying by seeking a quite blanket answer that wraps up everything, stacks the chairs on the tables, sweeps up, turns off the lights, and goes home. Science favors the simplest (plausible) answer because experience shows they tend to be correct. Quantum Mechanics may appear complicated but once you get by the counterintuitive nature it isn't all that bad. Humans just aren't geared for that type of thinking without considerable effort.

Taken in full ID fails due to massive overcomplication. If it's aliens then how did their single-celled forebears come to exist? We're dragging in the evolution of a whole other biosphere or cube or dodecahedron. They're aliens and we can't be too presumptious, can we? Are they DNA based? This quick answer mole hill soon turns into a mountain whose peak extends well past the atmosphere.

And if it's Divine Beings, then what. Do they even fall into the category of biological life or are they something else entirely? And the question remains. Where did they come from? Did the rats die and leave the cheese mold to work its way up to Godhood?

It may seem like I'm skipping past some of your earlier contributions to the discussion but that lengthy piece had to be put aside for paying work. I'll get it done but I need to get in the mood again first.

Posted by Eric Pobirs at June 5, 2002 11:14 AM

The comment was made: "Find one irreducibly-complex system in your rapidly-mutating bacteria that wasn't there when you started, and Behe is toast." From what I admit was a cursory reading of Behe's book, I don't think he'd be refuted in this way. He doesn't deny the fact of evolution (i.e. the transformation of one irreducibly complex biological system into another); he just thinks, rightly or wrongly, that natural selection is inadequate to account for this process. If I'm correct here, the next question that arises is: does Behe in fact open himself up to refutation?

Posted by Aaron Baker at June 6, 2002 01:14 PM

Dear me, I'm procrastinating like mad here. Didin't think this thread was live any more.

Eric: pushing the problem one level back happens all the time in science. Michelson-Morley debunked the ether, but left the problem of how the heck a wave can be propagated through a vacuum. If there is ID, the "designers" might be anything; the only things we would have to assume (if we accepted ID as a hypothesis) are that they exist and are more intelligent (or more technologically advanced) than we. I assume your remark about their "single-celled forebears" was tongue-in-cheek. They might come in the basic equipment of the universe for all we know. Or, of course, they may not exist at all.

The question that really interests me here is whether science can address ID even to the extent of ruling it out. I understand that there are an infinite number of "stories of the universe" that might be true, in the sense that they can be made to fit all the data, and that the best we can do is exclude the ones we can't test even in principle, and do what we can to test the others.

Now I submit that the currently dominant "origin-of-life" theory is that fairly simple organic molecules were created in the Earth's oceans by strong extremes of heat and cold, electrical discharges, various sorts of catalysis, and other things that we don't know of; that these then combined (again, by mechanisms that we don't know enough about to describe) into much more complex molecules, including nucleic acids; and that finally, at some point, an entire complex spontaneously formed in which the nucleic acid coded for the very proteins which would catalyze its own replication.

All this, without natural selection of the Darwinian kind, since there is no self-replication til we've got it.

Well, OK, maybe. But, again, how the *hell* would you falsify it?

As to complexity of explanation: if you did happen to find (say) an exact replica of (I was going to say the Parthenon, but let's stay away from religious examples of any kind) the Chrysler Building on Mars, which would be the parsimonious explanation:

(1) a secret Earth society that has perfected space travel;

(2) purely natural erosion processes; or

(3) construction by another, extraterrestrial species (one with a sense of humor, at that)?

(Or, of course (4) fraud by the astronauts that claimed to have seen & documented it. The most likely, really, but suppose we rule it out somehow.)

Now is (3) a "supernatural" explanation, or isn't it?

Whew. I had better stop here before I blow the whole afternoon. But *very* quickly, to Aaron: Behe's examples (almost all of them) are on the molecular level, so he's dealing with irreducibly-complex (IC) systems where you can pretty much see all the working parts (in some cases, I think, down to the atomic level, but then I haven't got the book in front of me either). At that micro-mechanical level the options for mutation aren't so many, and the principles that make for the possibility of different IC systems in organisms in the same line of descent (redundancy &c.) aren't there.

That, anyway, is the argument, and the point of the title; as long as we didn't know (says Behe) what was happening at the molecular level, we could see some "initial" developments as easy (I think the "light-sensitive cell" is his first example); now that we know exactly how it works, we can (a) see that it's not a simple step, but enormously complicated in its own right; *and* (b) since we have the structure in hand, down to the last atom, set about trying to find plausible precursor structures that would somehow be adaptive even though they didn't (in this example) detect light.

His contention is that no one has ever explained how an IC structure *on that scale* could evolve. Well, OK, like I said, find one that did -- especially if you can specify the steps -- and the argument's over, at least with Behe.

Aaargh. *Must* get back to overdue writing now.

Posted by Michelle Dulak at June 6, 2002 02:50 PM

Well, I did say it was a cursory reading! A very stimulating discussion. If I can ever find the time, I want to have something more than a superficial look at the ID folks and their critics. The issue is certainly more important than most of what I do at work.

Posted by Aaron Baker at June 6, 2002 05:44 PM

Michelle Dulak writes, "Suppose that Behe's hypothetical "designers" are stipulated to be, not God (or gods), but organic beings like ourselves, only vastly more intelligent and vastly more advanced technologically. Yes, of course this only pushes the problem back a level (i.e., "where did *they* come from, then?"), but my point is that there is now nothing "supernatural" in the hypothesis."

This is *precisely* where problems with a 'designer' come from. You can't just hand-wave and put the origin of the designer(s) in the 'too hard' pile. If you are attempting to explain the existence of complexity by appealing to a 'designer' then you are simply stuck in an infinite regress. Sure, if we were created by beings vastly more intelligent than ourselves, then that removes the element of the supernatural from *our* creation. But shunting the problem one level higher simply will not do. This is begging the question, that there ever was a 'designer' in the first place.

ID falls down because it posits, a priori, some entity that cannot itself be adequately explained in terms of ID, unless one is content to accept an infinite regress. Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, coupled with abiogenesis, does not suffer from this flaw. Naturally, theories of abiogenesis are not testable in the sense that we can run them through an experiment and say, 'this is the way it happened'. But we can potentially observe, through the laws of physics, that with certain reasonable assumptions a given theory of abiogenesis results in a situation whereby life as we know it could have arisen. One day I believe we will have a theory, with an experimental corpus, that will allow us to say, 'this is how it *could* have happened." If and when we do that, it's over for ID. ID is attempting, au fond, to show that there is *no* physically realisable set of events that could have given rise to life as we know it without the intervention of some supernatural force (at some point, maybe not at our creation, but previously to make our 'designers'). Occam's razor leads us the reject ID in the presence of a plausible, naturalistic explanation.

Needless to say, nothing science has done or ever will do can disprove the existence of God (or whatever). ID falls between two stools. It is neither placing itself as a quasi-religious theory of origins (altrhough that is the ulterior motive of many of its advocates), nor is it placing itself firmly within the camp of the empiricists. It is pseudo-scientific, in the most accurate sense of the phrase. It is an exemplar of Feynman's cargo cult science - it has the superficial gloss of science, but underneath the structure is rotten.

Posted by David Gillies at June 9, 2002 11:42 AM

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