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Tristyn Bloom
Matthew Cantirino
Anthony Esolen
Gene Fant
Greg Forster
Matthew J. Franck
Collin Garbarino
Robert P. George
William J. Haun
Leroy Huizenga
Katherine Infantine
Joseph Knippenberg
David T. Koyzis
Robert T. Miller
Matthew Milliner
David Mills
Mark Movsesian
William Mumma
Nathaniel Peters
R.R. Reno
James R. Rogers
Russell E. Saltzman
Matthew Schmitz
Kevin Staley-Joyce
David Talcott
Anna Williams
Dr. Steven M. Barr sends us a link to this interactive feature, which attempts to convey some sense of the scale of the universe from the galactic to the quantum level.
Check it out for a dizzying reminder of both our own stature and the intricacies which surround us.
February 24th, 2012 | 3:15 pm
Very cool!
February 24th, 2012 | 3:40 pm
This feature was designed and created by two high schoolers. Just to make the rest of us feel inadequate…
February 24th, 2012 | 4:56 pm
remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return….
February 24th, 2012 | 5:26 pm
remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return….
Dust, yes, but not just any old dust. Star dust. All of the heavier elements in our bodies were created by fusion within stars that long ago exploded.
February 24th, 2012 | 5:53 pm
Dr. Barr,
This is a nice model, although it goes only to “10 to the power of 27″ — and it is still very impressive!
Now, considering that the probabilities for the naturalistic evolution (as it is accepted by the scientists today) are in the order of “10 to the power of 100 to 300″ (depending on whose numbers one takes), how reasonable or silly is the notion of such “random” naturalistic evolution?
February 24th, 2012 | 10:33 pm
Dear Monkeyville,
Nobody knows how to calculate the “probabilities
for naturalistic evolution”.
SMB
February 25th, 2012 | 1:53 am
SMB: “Nobody knows how to calculate the ‘probabilities for naturalistic evolution.’”
Yes they do and they have. See here for example. http://evoinfo.org/publications/lifes-conservation-law/
Monkeyville is right. The probabilities are vanishingly small.
And that’s just for evolution which posits a filtering mechanism (i.e., natural selection). The news for materialist origin of life (OLL) researchers, who must appeal to pure chance, is even more depressing. The islands of biologically functional arrangements of matter are so infinitesimally tiny compared to the vast ocean of non-functional arrangements, the probability of landing on such an island by means of the random walk the materialist is stuck with are pretty much zero. That is why OLL research, so flush with promise only a few years ago, is now all but moribund.
It is also why many materialist OLL researchers have become so enamored with the multiverse. They know that the probabilistic resources of a single universe are for too small to do the work they need done.
February 25th, 2012 | 7:34 am
I worked as a creator of software that used orbital dynamics to track satellites. I gained an appreciation for how badly the smallest random error would prevent one of my programs from operating.
The first viable human cell needed to possess both a complete functioning structure and a computer that contained a complete description of that structure. I have not seen any scientific hypothesis that even offers to explain the simultaneous birth of a functioning structure and an included computer program that describes how to not only build the structure but to also duplicate both structure and program. We might be able to create something like it by intellectual exercise, but the notion that it could come into being by random chance movement of nonliving materials is a description of a miracle, not a rational theory. None of the naturalistic speculations has enough substance to make it superior to the others, and none has any demonstration in reality to justify calling it even a real theory.
February 25th, 2012 | 7:48 am
The span of God’s hand! Isaiah 40:12.
The message is the same whether literal or metaphorical.
Psalm 19 says it all.
An awe inspiring presentation!
Thank you.
February 25th, 2012 | 2:46 pm
The first viable human cell . . .
Raymond Takashi Swenson,
In discussing evolution, it makes no sense to talk about “the first viable human cell.”
But what is the point of trying to turn attention away from the focus of the original post, which is a link to a really great web site that has nothing to do with the origin of life?
February 25th, 2012 | 2:46 pm
“The dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns,
Like fiercer flowers on stalk,
Earth lost and little like a pea
In high heaven’s towering forestry,
—These be the small weeds ye shall see
Crawl, covering the chalk….” GKC, Ballad of the White Horse.
Don’t be tempted to translate this into a kind of humility. Man’s stature is on a different scale. Physical differences, as we should know from our interpersonal relationships, are meaningless, except for the piddling tasks of reaching the top shelf for a glass, or sending an interplanetary space ship to Mars.
February 25th, 2012 | 5:46 pm
David Nickol writes in response to Raymond Swenson: “In discussing evolution, it makes no sense to talk about “the first viable human cell.”
Well, yes and no, depending on context. But in the context of Swenson’s comment you are undoubtedly correct. Good catch. When I read the comment I completely filtered the word “human” out, because, to me at least, it was obvious that he was talking about OOL issues, not origin of human life issues. Did you intend merely to point out that little slip of the keyboard or do you have a substantive response to his otherwise powerful points?
February 26th, 2012 | 2:32 pm
Barry Arrington,
I took Raymond Takashi Swenson to have said what he meant.
I am not sure it make any more sense to talk about the “first cell” as to talk about the first human cell, particularly if by “first cell” is meant “first living thing.” As I understand it, evolution was at work before there things that could even be considered living. There were, it is assumed, molecules capable of replicating that were not living. Wherever molecules (even though not alive) can replicate, evolution through natural selection can occur. Presumably the “first cell(s)” were living things, but that does not preclude living things that preceded the cell and evolved into cells. Evolution, as I understand it, does not make a sharp distinction between living and nonliving things. Life is presumed to have evolved from “non-life,” and somewhere between life and non-life there were molecules that it would be difficult or impossible to classify as either living or nonliving. People still argue about whether viruses are alive, and from what I have read, it’s pretty much a futile argument, since it all depends on what your definition of life is. Also, I am no expert here, but it seem to me quite probable that the cell itself evolved in such a way that there were entities that were definitely not cells that evolved into entities that were cells, but that there was a long period during that evolution where it would have been difficult or impossible to say whether the entity was a cell or not.
When discussing evolution, it seems to me it is almost always a mistake to talk of a “first” anything—a first man, a first bird, a first eye, a first cell, and so on.
February 26th, 2012 | 6:00 pm
David Nickol: “Evolution, as I understand it, does not make a sharp distinction between living and nonliving things.”
Then you don’t understand evolution.
Natural selection, by definition, needs a pre-existing means of self-replication, which in turn depends on already functional proteins and nucleic acids. That is why Theodosius Dobzhansky, perhaps the most prominent Darwinist of the 20th century, said “Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.” Similarly, Nobel Prize winning biochemist Christian de Duve said that prebiotic natural selection theories “need information which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place.”
David, these aren’t creationists or ID proponents. They are highly-credentialed evolutionists. Based on your prior comments here, I expected better of you. It seems to me you are just making stuff up to fit your worldview, but as someone has said, you are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.
February 26th, 2012 | 10:08 pm
I, like David Nickol, wonder what all this discussion of evolution has to do with the original post on distance scales of the universe.
Since Mr. Arrington refers me to an article, I would ask him whether the following critique of the work of one of the authors of that article has ever been answered:
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/eandsdembski.pdf.
I am only a physicist and not a mathematician, but it seems to me that this critique (if valid) is very damaging. Perhaps these arguments have been answered somewhere, but I haven’t seen it.
SMB
February 26th, 2012 | 10:48 pm
And what if everything in the universe is just contained in an apple seed in another universe, and the apple just fell off the tree and a bear is about to chomp down on it? (do high school kids still sit around in a group on the beach at night and say stuff like this?)
February 26th, 2012 | 11:09 pm
Then you don’t understand evolution.
Barry,
According to Douglas J. Futuyma, author of Evolution, Second Edition, probably the most widely used evolution textbook for the college market:
To further back up what I am saying, I refer you to “The Origin of Life” by Jeffrey L. Bada and Antonio Lazcano, in Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, Edited by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis (The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009, pp. 49-79).
Dobzhansky was a very great evolutionary biologist, but he died more than 35 years ago. A lot of work has been done on the origins of life since then. Of course, nobody knows for a fact how life evolved from nonliving matter, but any claim that it could not have is not a scientific claim.
David, these aren’t creationists or ID proponents. They are highly-credentialed evolutionists.
Dobzhansky is one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, but he has been dead for over 35 years and a great deal of work has been done on the origin of life during those years. Christian de Duve’s Nobel Prize had nothing to do with evolution, and I don’t consider him a “highly credentialed evolutionist.” I suspect you are quoting them both from an article or book about Intelligent Design.
Based on your prior comments here, I expected better of you. It seems to me you are just making stuff up to fit your worldview . . . .
This is unwarranted personal criticism. The topic here isn’t me; it’s evolution.
February 27th, 2012 | 12:06 am
“Yes they do and they have. See here for example. http://evoinfo.org/publications/lifes-conservation-law/”
First, William Dembski is not a credible authority.
Second, probabilities are meaningless without reference to a real-world sample frame.
For instance, the probability of dying in a plane crash is about 1 in 2 million if you are flying on a modern airplane flown by a respectable, developed-country airline. Yet it seems like every few months, we hear about a fatal plane crash somewhere in the world. Why? Because there are millions of commercial departures every year.
Likewise, there are at least 10^23 stars in the known universe. The number of planets is anyone’s guess. The probability of evolution arising on earth could well be vanishingly small but there is no reason to take such a geocentric view of the universe.
February 27th, 2012 | 12:21 am
David Nichol,
What does replication means anyway?. Suppose there is a molecule ‘A’ and it grows and becomes A+A but why should I not call it A’.
That is, what is the vital difference between replication and growth when we are talking about molecules?
” nonliving systems of replicating molecules”
Are any such system known to exist or are merely hypothetical?
February 27th, 2012 | 12:26 pm
“Are any such system known to exist or are merely hypothetical?”
Viruses fit the bill. Prions fit the bill.
But all this is quite off topic.
“I am only a physicist and not a mathematician,…”
Thanks for the chuckle…I’ll send that to my physicist son.
February 27th, 2012 | 2:15 pm
Getting back to the scale of the universe, over the weekend I saw a rerun of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon shows up to get a haircut, and his regular barber is not there. (The barber is in the hospital.) Sheldon refuses to let anyone else cut his hair, and he becomes increasingly distraught over the next two or three days over this departure from routine and his lengthening hair. At one point, he says with alarm that his hair is growing at the rate of 4.6 yoctometers per femtosecond. It was only because I had seen The Scale of the Universe web site that I knew what a yoctometer was.
February 27th, 2012 | 3:05 pm
Barry:
You can’t be serious. If any of “materialist enemies” invoke Dr. Barr in support of their worldview, kindly refer them to his Modern Physics & Ancient Faith.
Christianity has absolutely nothing to fear from evolution by natural selection, modern physics, or any other scientific theory or discipline. Rather than disputing the science, why not focus on the true weak spot of materialists: the theologically and philosophically uninformed conclusions materialists routinely draw from the science?
JGB
February 27th, 2012 | 7:28 pm
Barry Arrington writes:
“SMB: “Nobody knows how to calculate the ‘probabilities for naturalistic evolution.’”
Yes they do and they have. See here for example. http://evoinfo.org/publications/lifes-conservation-law/“.
Dembski and Marks do not provide a way to calculate the probabilities for naturalistic evolution in that paper, nor do they do attempt to calculate it.
February 27th, 2012 | 10:57 pm
Mark mentions that “probabilities are meaningless without reference to a real-world sample frame.” Those who want information on what Darwinian processes can (and can’t) do based on a real-world study of bacteria might look at the work of biologists Ann Gauger and Ralph Seelke here: http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2010.2.
February 28th, 2012 | 6:30 am
A little note as to the interactive scale of reality from Dr. Barr. If you will note in the interactive graph, the logarithmic ‘middle’ of the scale of sizes is at 10^-4, which is directly between 10^-35 and 10^27. Though this may go unnoticed to the casual observer, but right at the 10^-4 mark they have listed the little fact that this is where the limit of the visual observation of humans is. Well ‘conscious observation’ is a very peculiar thing to have at the middle of the logarithmic scale of reality because in quantum mechanics, as this following quote makes clear, conscious observation is found to be ‘central’ to collapsing the wave function:
“I’m going to talk about the Bell inequality, and more importantly a new inequality that you might not have heard of called the Leggett inequality, that was recently measured. It was actually formulated almost 30 years ago by Professor Leggett, who is a Nobel Prize winner, but it wasn’t tested until about a year and a half ago (in 2007), when an article appeared in Nature, that the measurement was made by this prominent quantum group in Vienna led by Anton Zeilinger, which they measured the Leggett inequality, which actually goes a step deeper than the Bell inequality and rules out any possible interpretation other than consciousness creates reality when the measurement is made.” – Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., Calphysics Institute, is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications.
Preceding quote is taken from this following video;
Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness – A New Measurement – Bernard Haisch, Ph.D (Shortened version of entire video with notes in description of video)
http://vimeo.com/37517080
Moreover, the argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this:
1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality.
2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality.
3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality.
4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kpDwWetu66fBRlPM7zjA5BpHzcu5wBY7AdB7gOz51OQ/edit
February 28th, 2012 | 12:21 pm
Elizabeth Liddle,
If you want to add your two constructive bits into the debate, how would you calculate or assess the realistic odds of naturalistic evolution? Do you have any calculated numbers, estimates or guesses? Or at least what order of magnitude would such a probability have to be for you to make it a truly rational choice for you?
February 28th, 2012 | 12:47 pm
Philip Cunningham,
You are correct about the psychological implications of anything that is outside of the direct human range of observation. This is nothing new and it does not pertain only the “quantum” physics — it is rather the scale of the observation, and the farther such experiments or observations are from our normal human range, the more dubious such observations and such science becomes. (A good example is the current controversy or debate whether the Large Hadron Collider experiments have indeed discovered the “God particle”.)
The same psychological effect applies to very large or very small numbers — to most people such quantities mean nothing, and thus they can be easily fooled by scientists who claim that it is perfectly rational to believe in something like naturalistic evolution even if the probability of such a thing is in the order of say 10 to the power of minus 200.
February 28th, 2012 | 1:37 pm
Monkeyville asks:
“If you want to add your two constructive bits into the debate, how would you calculate or assess the realistic odds of naturalistic evolution? Do you have any calculated numbers, estimates or guesses? Or at least what order of magnitude would such a probability have to be for you to make it a truly rational choice for you?”
No, I have no calculated numbers, estimates or guesses. There is no way of calculating such a thing, which is why ID arguments based in Incredibly Small Probabilities fall down.
What we can do is to compute the probability of observing our data, given some null hypothesis, and, if this is an Incredibly Small Probability (or even Pretty Small) then we “reject the null”.
But in order to do this we have to have specify our null, which is simply that our alternative/study hypothesis is false.
So, given that Dembski’s study hypothesis is “Design” what Dembski is doing when he computes his probabilities is computing the probability not of “naturalistic evolution” but of “non-design”, given the observed data.
And that requires a clear model of what the data might look like under any non-design hypothesis.
Dembski does not present such a model, and the Dembski/Marks paper cited by Barry doesn’t even attempt to present one. It merely introduces something called “active information” which it alleges (correctly, in a sense) is necessary for evolution to work, but makes no attempt to say why such “active information” is not abundant provided by the natural environment.
Which it is. Which is why evolution works.
February 28th, 2012 | 10:16 pm
In response to Barry Arrington’s citation of a 2009 paper by William Dembski and Robert Marks, Prof. Barr refers people to an outdated 2003 critique by Elsberry and Shallit of Dembski’s earlier work and asks whether
it has ever been answered. It has, and I encourage people to read the
response: http://www.discovery.org/a/14911.
Because of when it was written, of course, the critique mentioned by Barr does not deal with the recent paper referenced by Arrington (or with
the many other technical articles also available at
http://evoinfo.org/publications/).
February 28th, 2012 | 10:29 pm
Actually Monkeyville, the scale is fairly rigid, going from Planck length, which is the smallest length possible from known constants of physics, to the diameter of the universe, which is also fairly accurately known and which is the largest length possible since both space and time were created at the instant of the Big Bang (there is no space or time outside of that horizon to measure!). Therefore the surprise at the centrality of our conscious observation in the universe is fully justified!
February 29th, 2012 | 1:09 am
John West refers above to a piece by Casey Luskin. He is nothing if not prolific, but Luskin rarely backs up his prolixity with careful comprehension of the subject matter. For an example that may be simply explained in this format, consider section “III” of Luskin’s piece.
[Quote]
In the previous section, we saw that Elsberry and Shallit prematurely allowed their own preconceptions to dictate what ought to be designed. They claimed that ID is “unfalsifiable,” and then claimed an overall naturalistic paradigm of origins is treated as falsifiable, stating, “Contrary to Dembski’s assertions, design is not arbitrarily ruled out as an element of scientific investigation.”
This is an odd claim because there are many examples of ID critics trying to dismiss ID by defining it as outside of science. These critics arbitrarily refuse to even consider ID. In fact, Dr. Elsberry’s former employer, the NCSE, convinced Judge Jones to do just that in the Dover ruling. It’s difficult for me to accept Elsberry and Shallit’s claim given that evolutionists have said things like these:
[quotes used by Luskin deleted -- WRE]
It’s hard to take Elsberry and Shallit seriously when they claim that many evolutionary scientists don’t reject ID as unscientific by definition. [...]
[End Quote]
Unfortunately, Luskin’s entire argument here is simply equivocation, as may be confirmed by reference to just a bit more of what we actually wrote.
[Quote]
Dembski pleads for more consideration of design as a scientific explanation, but he seems to be of two minds concerning this. On the one hand, he claims “science has largely dispensed with design” and science “repudiates design” [19, p. 3]; on the other hand, just three pages later he cites archaeology [19, p. 6] as an example of a science that is based in part on inferring design. Contrary to Dembski’s assertions, design is not arbitrarily ruled out as an element of scientific explanation, even in biology.
Scientists, however, are reluctant to infer “rarefied” design, a design inference based on ignorance of both the nature of the designer and regularities that might explain the observed phenomenon. But this reluctance is well-grounded. Empirically gained knowledge of designers and the artifacts which they create permit us to recognize regularities of outcomes, leading us to make an “ordinary” design inference in such cases. With an “ordinary” design inference, a designer becomes just another causal regularity. This is not so with a “rarefied” design inference, which Dembski urges us to make in ignorance of the properties of any putative designer and also of other causal regularities which may be operative. For more details, see [94].
[End Quote]
We were at pains to distinguish the kind of design that is welcome in scientific inquiry from the invalid and unsupported sort that Luskin and his colleagues insist be treated as if it were the same thing. Luskin treats the rejection of invalid and unsupported rarefied design claims as a counter to our statement, when it is nothing of the sort.
None of the rest of Luskin’s piece rises above the poor showing he made in this part.
Contrary to West’s assertion, the 2003 essay is not outdated: Dembski has neither retracted nor even amended most of the concepts that we discuss and critique there. In fact, it stands without substantive (from Dembski) or competent (Luskin, for reasons outlined and exemplified above) response as of yet.
February 29th, 2012 | 2:26 am
On another note, much of the content of Dembski and Mark’s 2009 essay (and many others) is recycled material and has been commented upon and critiqued piecemeal over the years. Dembski, for instance, has been trotting out his “treasure map” analogy in talks since at least 2002. Dembski’s claims about algorithms and functions not producing information are taken straight from his 1996 essay on “Intelligent design as a theory of information”. Even his insistence that “The Law of Conservation of Information” exists dates at least back to his 1996 essay, though the actual concept associated with the grandiose phrasing has changed over the years, as successive versions get obliterated by critiques. Our essay did yeoman work in invalidating one of those versions floated by Dembski previously as “The Law of Conservation of Information”. (Since it has gone through multiple versions, “A Law of Conservation of Information” may be one step closer to truth in advertising.) The main concept of the Dembski and Mark’s paper is simply an elaboration of Dembski’s “probability amplifier” from a 1999 Metanexus posting. Dembski’s feud with Tom Schneider and his ev program likewise goes back to 2001. For myself, I’m happy that after twelve years, Dembski has finally taken the hint and stopped trying to claim that Dawkins’ “weasel” program “latches” results or is the same thing as “partitioned search”, though I suppose it is too much to ask that some measure of gratitude for pointing out that fact back on 2000/10/09 ever appear in a footnote of his.
February 29th, 2012 | 12:36 pm
Elizabeth Liddle writes:
“No, I have no calculated numbers, estimates or guesses. There is no way of calculating such a thing, which is why ID arguments…”
Your logic of accepting naturalistic evolution is outright ridiculous! This is not how any rational science-savvy person would or should accept any findings of science — just because you disagree with somebody who proposes a theory and happens to criticize your pet belief… you conclude that that ” is why evolution works” !?
Anyway, you are dead wrong and quite ignorant assuming that there are no such numbers and calculations. The whole history of the 20th century Darwinism was a search for such numbers and therefore for acceptance and rigorous justification, and there are plenty of failed models and research programs and numbers to choose from.
Starting with the numbers of the British eugenicist Ronald Fisher, who so wonderfully “designed” or tweaked the methods of acceptable statistics in favor of evolution, or so he hoped, that most modern science research is now simply “false” and unrepeatable. I guess you have never heard about the so called “decline effect” in science?
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all
Anyway, there is a plethora of evolutionary computing programs which tried to prove random evolution, from childish attempts of mathematical half-wits like Monod or Dawkins to some serious programs, like the famous Santa Fe Institute evolutionary programs, with big names like Gell-Mann and many other prestigious heavy-weights and computing gurus.
Since you don’t know any numbers, a quick illustration of what they were dealing with ought to suffice — just to spontaneously evolve a bacterium the odds suggested by experts were in the order of 1 in 10 to the power of 40,000! (Yes, that is the exponent of forty thousand!) And the same numerically mind-numbing mysteries are found everywhere in biology and genetics.
February 29th, 2012 | 1:24 pm
To John West,
the part of the paper of Shallit and Elsberry that I found particularly damaging was the long mathematical discussion of information and complexity, which seems to show that Dembski used these terms in inconsistent ways and made statements about them that are in some cases unsupported and in some other cases false. I see nothing in the article by Luskin that addresses these criticisms.
But why hasn’t Dembski himself issued a detailed point-by-point answer to Shallit and Elsberry, especially their criticisms about information and complexity? In the world of scientific research, if one’s technical papers are publicly criticized as being invalid, inconsistent, incoherent, etc., by competent people giving precise and detailed arguments, it is regarded as practically a duty to respond. It doesn’t do to say that the criticized papers are several years old and in the meantime you have advanced beyond those earlier papers. If the older papers have serious mistakes, those must be explicitly acknowledged in an erratum, or in subsequent papers. Have any of Dembski’s writings since the Shallit-Elsberry article appeared admitted that any of the technical criticisms therein are correct, or else rebutted them? Again, I am talking about the technical mathematical criticisms.
There are times that a scientist wouldn’t bother to issue a retraction or erratum — for example, if he makes a relatively minor mistake in some paper that no one has paid any attention to. I have never heard of a case in my field, however, where a scientist has been publicly accused by other experts of serious mistakes in work of importance and where he did not respond in detail. A physicist who did that would lose all credibility. What would happen is that experts would not even bother to read his papers any more. I assume that it is the same in all scholarly fields.
Anyway, why are you and Luskin defending this work, rather than the author of it? And why defend it here? What is required by scholarly standards is that Dembski respond (a) himself, (b) to Shallit and Elsberry, (c) in detail. Issuing what amount to press releases in blogs and comment boxes may be good politics, but it does not serious scholarship make.
If Shallit and Elsberry are wrong, then it would be an excellent opportunity for Dembski to gain scholarly credibility by showing this publicly and in detail. He could use it as a “teaching moment”.
This is between Dembski and Shallit & Elsberry. I would love to sit back with my popcorn and watch them argue this out. But it looks like Shallit and Elsberry by default.
February 29th, 2012 | 1:31 pm
Monkeyville:
You say:
“Your logic of accepting naturalistic evolution is outright ridiculous! This is not how any rational science-savvy person would or should accept any findings of science — just because you disagree with somebody who proposes a theory and happens to criticize your pet belief… you conclude that that ” is why evolution works” !?”
But that’s not how I accept the findings of science! You seem to have read into my post something that was not there. I accept the findings of science as all scientists do: provisionally, and only to the extent that they fit the data.
“Since you don’t know any numbers, a quick illustration of what they were dealing with ought to suffice — just to spontaneously evolve a bacterium the odds suggested by experts were in the order of 1 in 10 to the power of 40,000! (Yes, that is the exponent of forty thousand!) And the same numerically mind-numbing mysteries are found everywhere in biology and genetics.”
I didn’t say that I didn’t know any numbers. I know quite a lot of numbers that have been calculated.
My point is that I do not think those numbers represent the quantities that those who calculated them seem to think they represent.
February 29th, 2012 | 5:26 pm
Elizabeth Liddle,
What you are doing is precisely the typical runaround and self-contradictory double-speak the opponents of naturalistic evolution have been getting from the evolutionists for the last 100 years. I asked you some pretty direct questions and you gave some pretty clear answers — it’s all there for others to re-read.
The topic of this thread is the universal scale and how the magnitude of numbers used in evolutionary computing reflects on the rationality of those who believe in such numbers. I am arguing that these numbers or probabilities are precisely how a rational person ought to determine the rationality of his/her belief — we do it in everything else from economics, politics, medicine, legal system, other sciences, etc. — it is the numbers that prove a new drug, that convict a tax cheat, a speeding or a drunk driver, or an election fraudster.
As you undoubtedly must know, the null hypothesis was another “design” of eugenicist Fisher, and your beef with Dembski is about another such statistics trick of your pet science author Fisher, namely, I presume, with Dembski’s statement, such as in his Design Inference, (section 6.4) where Dembski is critical of Fisher — “This is the conceptual difficulty that to this day remains unresolved in Ronald Fisher’s theory of statistical significance testing.” This keeps looking more and more like another serious flaw or bad purposeful design in Fisher’s crumbling statistics methodology. I am sure future will tell.
Anyway, as important as it may be to argue the correct philosophy of science and statistics methodology, (especially if there is a suspicion that there may have been a deliberate foul design built into it), such arguments get pretty arcane to the point of boring and unimportant for all the non-specialists and for the host of average Joes and Janes out there. (I am sure most people, even scientists, cannot even follow Dembski’s criticism of Fisher in his Design Inference.)
But, luckily, we do have also the numbers, and yes they have been calculated and recalculated and accepted, and they seem to fit that data more or less, and we know today that no single realistic self-organizing or self-adaptive evolutionary algorithm has been found despite serious effort and some heavy-duty computing of the last century and decades. The massive failure of all these evolutionary programs, in conjunction with the estimated mind-numbing probabilities in biology and genetics is what should be able to convince even the Joes and Janes, especially when they have a nice universal scale model which will put everything into the right “perspective” of what such numbers with huge exponents really represent!
So reflecting on your last sentence:
“My point is that I do not think those numbers represent the quantities that those who calculated them seem to think they represent.”
Assuming that you have now admitted that you know about these numbers, and since you seem to know better what these numbers do or do not represent than the very experts who have suggested them, let me ask the same questions again:
How would you calculate or assess the realistic odds of naturalistic evolution? Do you have any of your own calculated numbers, estimates or guesses? Or at least what order of magnitude would such a probability have to be for you to make it a truly rational choice for you?
February 29th, 2012 | 8:23 pm
Take a deck of 52 cards, shuffle them well, and deal yourself 5 cards face down. Set aside the deck, and turn the 5 cards face up. The odds against getting whatever hand you see before you were 2,598,960 to 1.
And yet, it happened!
March 1st, 2012 | 6:18 am
David Nickol:
To be fair, Dembski’s point about “specification” is that to have “CSI”, a pattern has not only to have low frequency (“high complexity”) but it also has to have “compressibility”, and you then compute the number of equally or more compressible patterns out of the total possible number of patterns to compute the probability of one of those patterns turning up.
That is fatally flawed too, but not simply because each one of a large number of possible patterns is highly improbable.
March 1st, 2012 | 11:42 am
Mr Barr, thanks for posting the link, very nice.
Regarding the OoL discussion that ensued: To a great degree, probability arguments miss the mark on OoL issues for the intractible reason that such calculations can only (by their very nature) deal with the physicist’s reformulation of the term “information”, often referred to as “physical information”. But life (very observationally) does not gain its biofunction from physical information, it comes instead from recorded information – which in turn creates physcial entailments that must be satisfied in order for such information to even exist.
The search for purely material answers to the OoL therefore must take into account what is repeatedly and coherently observed to the true, and begin to propose mechanisms which can satisfy those physcial entailments.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/upright-biped-replies-to-dr-moran-on-information/
March 2nd, 2012 | 2:44 am
Monkeyville writes:
“As you undoubtedly must know, the null hypothesis was another “design” of eugenicist Fisher, and your beef with Dembski is about another such statistics trick of your pet science author Fisher, namely, I presume, with Dembski’s statement, such as in his Design Inference, (section 6.4) where Dembski is critical of Fisher — “This is the conceptual difficulty that to this day remains unresolved in Ronald Fisher’s theory of statistical significance testing.” This keeps looking more and more like another serious flaw or bad purposeful design in Fisher’s crumbling statistics methodology. I am sure future will tell.”
I’m no enthusiast for Fisherian statistics, but Dembski is. So is Stephen Meyer, who cites Dembski’s enthusiasm enthusiastically in his “The Signature in the Cell” (pp 179 and following). Dembski’s whole CSI notion is based on Fisherian statistics:
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf
That’s one of the many things wrong with it.
I agree with you that the Fisherian approach has had its day in the sun, and while it is still the workhorse of everyday statistical testing, is conceptually flawed, well beyond the single flaw Dembski identifies, namely the arbitrariness of deciding on an appropriate alpha value (typically 2 sigma for biological sciences, 5 sigma for physics).
You ask: “How would you calculate or assess the realistic odds of naturalistic evolution? Do you have any of your own calculated numbers, estimates or guesses? Or at least what order of magnitude would such a probability have to be for you to make it a truly rational choice for you?”
And I have answered: I wouldn’t. I have told you that I do not consider that such a calculation is an appropriate approach to hypothesis testing, even if it were possible, which it is not.
March 2nd, 2012 | 12:39 pm
Elizabeth Liddle writes:
“You ask: “How would you calculate or assess the realistic odds of naturalistic evolution? …” And I have answered: I wouldn’t. I have told you that I do not consider that such a calculation is an appropriate approach to hypothesis testing, even if it were possible, which it is not.”
Hypothesis? What hypothesis?
So, that seems to be end of this debate, at least for now. And the conclusion is quite simple — the naturalist atheistic evolutionists are determined to ignore any practical results of modern science, namely of evolutionary computing science of the last 100 years or so, especially as ALL the results clearly go against their expectations and wishful thinking — practically proving that their pet theory of Epicurean or Lucretian random unguided processes is utter irrational nonsense!
It is only too sad that many good Christians still get duped by such blatantly primitive theories and empty hypotheses.
Atoms swerving by mere chance, Kolmogorov complexity, algorithmic probability, or randomly assembled genes? No, mere pipe dreams. Enough said.
“Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1099b22)
March 4th, 2012 | 7:26 am
Monkeyville:
You accused me, earlier, of being a fan of Fisher, and claimed that Dembski rejected Fisher.
This is false. Dembski does not reject Fisher, and indeed, as I pointed out, his entire CSI concept depends on Fisher, as commented on by Meyer. If you read (or re-read) this paper by Dembski:
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf
you will find that Dembski considers an alternative to Fisherian hypothesis testing – Bayesian testing – and rejects it. His rejection of “non-design” as a null hypothesis, and therefore of his “design inference” is entirely Fisherian.
You ask, rhetorically: “Hypothesis? What hypothesis?” I answer: the hypothesis that ID is true, or alternatively, that the Theory of Evolution is true. However, I will modify my statement – I do in fact think that trying to estimate the probability that a hypothesis is true is quite fruitful in many circumstances, but not in the case of the hypotheses above. Here is why:
In Fisherian hypothesis testing we do not, and Dembski does not, compute the probability of a hypothesis being true. Using Fisherian statistics, we compute the probability of our data being observed, if our hypothesis is false. This is what Dembski does. And he concludes that the probability of observing what we do, if design if false (non-design is true), given “the probabilistic resources of the universe”, is negligible. Therefore he infers “design”.
Note that he does not compute the probability that non-design is true, not does he compute the probability that design is true.
Those are not what Fisherian statistics allow us to compute, and Fisherian hypothesis testing is what Dembski does.
As you rightly point out, Fisherian hypothesis testing is severely flawed. One simple flaw Dembski rectifies – that of deciding on an appropriate alpha value. Far greater (tbh, I think the issue of an appropriate alpha is the least of the problems with classical null hypothesis testing) is the problem that it doesn’t give us the probabilities we actually want.
Like you, I would like to be able to compute the probability that my hypothesis is true, not the probability that I will observe the data I do observe if my hypothesis is false. And we can actually do this provided we can supply a prior probability. We can ask: “what is the probability of our hypothesis being true, given data D”? But the answer, using Bayes’ theorem, requires us to provide a prior – our prior belief (i.e. before examining the data) that our hypothesis is true.
It is therefore a useless approach for estimating the probability that either evolution or design is true, because we have no frequency data on which to estimate our degree of belief, although it is an extremely useful approach, for example, for computing the probability that the hypothesis “this person has cancer” is true.
That is why I reject it as an approach, not for any hypothesis but for the hypotheses that Design, or The Theory of Evolution are true.
As a way of testing hypotheses derived from the theory of evolution, however, it’s pretty good.
But Fisher won’t serve either. Using Fisher, all Dembski has done is to show that the patterns we observe in biology are prohibitively unlikely under the null hypothesis of “Chance”, where “Chance” appears to mean “spontaneously assembled itself into one of a small subset of an astronomically large number of possible patterns under circumstances in which every other pattern was equally likely”.
I agree, and every biologist agrees, that Chance, so modeled, does not account for biology.
That does not allow us to reject every other hypothesis except design. It certainly does not allow us to reject Darwinian evolution. That is Dembski’s mistake.
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