Posted: Jan 21, 2011 2:36 pm
by byofrcs
Царь Славян wrote:
That is engineering science (logistics etc). The references don't refer to biological studies that use the words evolutionary search. Everyone knows that genetic algorithms are very useful for solving real-world problems and engineers especially so but science in engineering is far different from science in biology when it comes to using the right words for activities that have no agency to those that have agency behind them.
What's the difference? What's the difference between an evolutionary computer search, and natural evolution? Here is a nice chart I made. Please point out where the difference in these 4 steps both processes have to take in order to produce the outcome.

Image



You missed the step before i.e. the step whereby the designer decides the fitness function and thus sets a goal or, with evolutionary model, where the environment has been formed without agency.

Using the example of the salinity of the sea then it is either a) the designer sets the salinity by causing salt content of the water or, b) the salt content of the water is not a goal but a result of what salts are available from rocks.



This has to be a language problem - a goal is a desired outcome. When someone has a goal then they have an outcome in mind for some activity e.g. a finish line in a race. With Evolutionary systems there is no desired outcome as there is no desire. The desire is only for things that have agency.

So immediately you use the word "goal" it is semantically overloaded to mean "agency". You are thus presuming a designer.
No, I'm not. You can use any word you wan't. Evolution has a goal set up by the fitness function of nature. And you don't have to call it a goal but it's an equivalent of a goal in computer search.



Goal in the English language very strongly implies agency, pre-planning, pre-definition and so on. What happens with natural selection is not equivalent to a computer search because of this pre-definition of goal by an agent.



To have a goal implies agency whilst outcome (or result etc ) is indifferent to agency. There is a lot of difference between the outcome if I close my eyes and kick a ball with no care for where it will end up and it crosses the boundary of playing field between the goals or if I have my eyes open and aim for the goal.
Goals can be set up by natural properties without agency. If you don't want to call tehm goals, you don't have to.



Then we are at an impasse because you call it a goal which implies agency. In your argument you thus hope to sway the view towards agency.


And we now come full circle - Abiogenesis.

Your understanding is just not right - we know with the Miller and Urey experiment and other experiments as well as studies of space that it is trivial to get the precursor chemicals for life - organic chemicals such as amino acids. Sure we haven't the
exact stepping stones for abiogenesis as it has probably occurred on Earth but then that took nature billions of years and humans have only be at this for 50 years or so we should expect some delays.
You can get the building blocks for anything in nature. But you can't get the information. There are natural building blocks for mountains, but not for Mount Rushmore.



Then you should be able to show me how easy this is given we have "Mount Rushmore". You should be able to explain exactly what the "information" is.

Equally your formula should be able to trivially show how to measure the information with napped flints. I think this would be very helpful to the people who study prehistory to allow them to quickly sort naturally occurring artefacts from man-made ones.


As I said "tooling marks that would suggest an assisted and un-natural weathering". The incongruence is the toolchain in use to form the object. If the designer managed to teach lichen to erode the rocks to set patterns then we would have problems. But we don't we have scree slopes and tooling marks.

This is interesting actually because with flint napped tools it is actually quite hard to work out man-made napped tools from just random rocks that are napped by natural events of rock movements. They highlighted this problem at the National Museum of Prehistory at Les Eyzies.
How do you know that chance could not have produced those marks? You call them tool marks. But how do you tell them apart from what chance could have produced?



Bingo - that is the problem that these archaeology people have. By cut marks in animal bones and by the presence of discarded napped flints its clear that sharp stone edges were used on animals and that these would crafted but you seem to have discovered some way of readily identifying design from random for these researchers. I imagine that they would be interested if your algorithms were trustworthy.


Science hasn't yet established that the flagellum are non-natural. Like SETI all the signals to date are naturally occurring (and I've had my PCs running on SETI@home since May 1999). If Science could establish that the flagellum are non-natural then this would be fantastic in the same way that if SETI found a signal that was un-natural.
Irrelevant. I have said that ID is doing the same thing as SETI. What is the difference in your opinion?


Very easy to answer this - SETI doesn't presume a designer for each anomalous signal but stringently re-checks and has so far discarded all to date. They err on the side of caution.

Intelligent Design supporters have a designer in mind and stick it onto selective biological features and then argue like crazy and refuse to accept the consensus view that they are doing it wrong. They presume agency and so do not err on the side of caution.



The result would be trusted through the sheer weight of support from the broad cross section of scientists. The current claims of design cannot simply be trusted because they do not have this weight of support.
Majortiy opinion is painfully irrelevant to science.Every idea is at first in the minority. It needs time to get to majority. And just because it's in teh minority now, doesn't mean it's wrong.



Wrong - if one person does something and everyone can't reproduce this are you then saying that the majority view is irrelevant ? That's stupid.



...and vast anounts of gasses and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and sulphur and phosphorus and sodium and chlorine and.......

Actually there won't be much "Earth".

We know that in a very short period of time organic chemicals can form and the bacteria contain these very same organic chemicals. What we don't know is the pathway from the organic chemicals to the autocatalytic set of chemicals that is a bacteria i.e. how to get the chemicals to self-assemble.
Tables, the one I have here, consists of wood and metal. Wood is found in nature, and so is metal, therefore, there is a natural explanation for a table. Is there? No, obviously not, the table I have here, was desigend. It's the pattern that this table exhibits that makes it not able to come about by natural laws, the material it is made of is irrelevant.


Trees are found in nature - not "wood" and the difference is that wood is processed by an agent with a purpose. Ore is found in nature - very rarely free "metal". Metal is ore that is processed for a purpose.

Bacteria flagellum do not use "processed" materials but materials that are commonly found in nature.

If you could show us a table made up of fallen logs and rocks then you would have trouble identifying that it was a table, though it could be purposed as a table (I have done this in forests in Sweden - fallen trees and rocks make a useful improvised table if you are walking in the forests and just happen to not be near an IKEA).



Roughly speaking I would say the probability of the steps in the toolchain. My napped stone example is a good one because it is hard to compare naturally napped flints and human napped flints. There are subtle differences and from this the probability of the shape being a goal of an agent verses the outcome of rocks bashing each other without intent (without agency).

A rough diamond verses a cut diamond would be another example. A cliff face verses Mount Rushmore is an extreme case as the human faces automatically imply design an obscure a more generic answer. Zoom in so that the faces cannot be seen and look at the rock face differences. Tools have been used in one place but not the other. What is the probability that the "tool" was naturally formed and so on. If the answer is that it is improbable then the object is incongruous to the environment and so it is fine to presume agency.
So you are saying that the pattern exhibited by Mount Rushmore is too improbable to have come about by chance?

Because they don't contain chemicals or sequences that are out of the ordinary for the environment they are in plus there are not just one but a number of different types of flagellum that have evolved.
The part of Mount Rushmore with faces is chemicaly identical to the part without faces.



Graphite is chemical related to diamond - the physics of the presentation also matters. With Mount Rushmore then the issue is that the National Parks Service says that the "granite was very resistant, eroding one inch every 10,000 years." thus we look at how the surface has weathered and we see that the natural wearing deviates. Thus the probability is there is a design.

Why are you continually bringing up an example that everyone says is designed and has clear marks of design i.e. no one says that Mount Rushmore is natural ? If anyone said Mount Rushmore was naturally occurring then it is easy to show the abnormalities - scree that as been blasted off by explosive shocks, and a surface finish that is wrong for the time periods.

Quite the reverse from the bacteria flagellum where only a few (a couple) people say it was designed and the majority (thousands) show how these are naturally formed.



Well you don't - you just have to care about the overwhelming majority percentage of scientists that say that Intelligent Design is not science. That the law agrees with this is just icing on the cake.
I don't care about that either. Majority opinion is irrelevant to any advance.

Not really because chance can come up with more patterns than a designer could ever hope to examine.
Chance can come up with as many patterns as the amount of probabilistic resources there are.

What the Intelligent Design supporters have not done is verify all the other possible patterns to see if there is a "better" design. They assume the current design is the best.
Where does it say that?



So there are better designs such that if the Intelligent Designer spent a bit more time they could have done better ?



So how do you tell if Mount Rushmore is "design, chance, or natural law". What mathematics do you use if you are not going to care about how it was made ?
Is there a known natural law that accounts for Mount Rushmore? No.
Does the Mount Rushmore conforma to an independently given pattern? Yes it does: „Faces of United States Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln.“

Then we calculate how improbable it is to get a Mount Rushmore by chance, and if it number is lower than ½ then it's reasonable to infer design.


I think we've already had fun with that - when I throw a 6 sided die with my eyes closed then it comes up with a "1" and you thus say that was "design".

You're going to have to explain this further as the way you present it is nonsense.



It makes the probability of a designer much more remote, so remote that it just appears that the designer is an unnecessary entity.
Not is the slightest. Because the flagellum is can not reasonably be explained by chance. Thereofre, if it did evolve, a designer set up evolution so it would bring about the flagellum.


But it is explained by natural selection. Once again you have latched onto the word "chance" as tightly as you have the word "goal".