Commentaries on the Royal Holloway debate
This section is about analysing what the two main speakers said.
The Krebs Cycle
There is little doubt that Professor Fuller has a strong point in arguing that the biological sciences have played lose with design language.
However, our view is that he was disingenuous in using the Krebs Cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle) in his presentation. He was not actually saying that the Krebs Cycle was evidence of Irreducible Complexity.
In quoting from an article on the Cycle which showed otherwise, he was, in fact, shooting the messenger, rather than the message.
The particular paper he read from was published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Volume 43, Number 3 / September 1996, 293-303 (see http://www.springerlink.com/content/j8ur17mp987434g4/ for an abstract). The authors of the paper state that there are several alternative cycles possible, but the Krebs Cycle is the most efficient and is an example of evolutionary opportunism. They also say that they have derived the rules under which metabolic pathways have developed.
Some other references that may be of interest:
Talk Origins has a substantial but somewhat turgid entry which debunks the ID position on the Krebs Cycle. It is at http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/dec99.html.
The Krebs Cycle is discussed in this paper, http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Apologetics/POS6-99ShenksJoplin.html by Niall Shanks (author of "God, the Devil, and Darwin," a critique of ID).
Professor Kenneth Miller also mentions the issue in this paper: http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design1/article.html.
In essence, the Krebs Cycle is simply one of many chemical oscillators out there - and therefore, instances of self-organisation. However, the simplest metabolism we had been able to propose in the past involved 30 steps. Now we are able to propose one with three steps - involving fairly simple reactants - something which could easily have arisen in a geochemical context.
For some informal material on it, please see:
Putting Life's Puzzle Together: Astrobiology Magazine
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1961
ScienceDaily: Methane-belching Bugs Inspire A New Theory Of The ... www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060512204140.htm
There is a discussion on the Krebs Cycle on the BCSE web site at http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=843. Please feel free to join the forum and contribute or debate.
Bill Dembski has a large paper on Irreducible Complexity at http://www.designinference.com/documents/2004.01.Irred_Compl_Revisited.pdf.
2. General Analysis by Tim Chase, BCSE
Steve Fuller spoke:
OK that sounds a bit clear to me. Alright, I didn't realise we had about 20 minutes a piece so in a sense I have got too much material for the time that I have been allotted. But if you are interested in seeing all of the slides that I have prepared for this and kind of looking at it in a bit more detail, I guess that we are not going to be able to look at all of this even in the course of the whole afternoon, you can contact me at my email address, s.w.fuller@warwick.ac.uk.
First off, I've taken a (not clear) for inviting me to participate as (not clear) a speaker because Intelligent Design, its seems to me as so much often presented as a kind of anti-evolution position as if it has no kind of hypothesis viewpoint of its own.
At this point he is claiming that intelligent design has its own "hypothesis viewpoint" - whatever this means. Of course science, and most especially empirical science isn't generally concerned with "viewpoints," and hypotheses are a dime a dozen unless they are tied to a specific theory. Perhaps what he means to say is "paradigm" or "metatheory." But no matter.
Steve Fuller spoke:
And, in a sense (Mr Speaker?), it's incumbent on me to actually say how this has a different position from evolution that has its own research agenda, its own way of looking at the biological sciences and so forth.
What is a "research agenda"? Well presumably all empirical science has a "research agenda" - which is to understand this world and the laws which operate within it, and evolutionary biology has done admirably well in this department - specifically in explaining the evolution of life, how different organisms are related, how they adapt to their environments and so forth. Does intelligent design have a "research agenda"? Is it something which differs from the research agenda of evolutionary biology, and if so, is it consistent with the "research agenda" of the empirical sciences? "Agenda" sounds almost political in nature. Some are of the view that the agenda of "intelligent design" is to inject a faith-based ideology into the reality-based enterprise of empirical science. Is this what he means by "agenda"?
Likewise, it is well-known that even Young Earth Creationism has an agenda of sorts - which is not to offer testable theories per se, but to rationalise the evidence by means of absurd stories to fit it into their literalistic interpretation of the Bible. Alternatively, creationism seeks to avoid testability as well - but is generally tied to a research agenda which consists of largely of quote-mining and seeking to find any means of casting aspirtions upon empirical science - typically by finding some out of date research supporting some long-since disproven hypothesis from twenty or forty years ago as a means of casting doubt upon all the research which has happened since then, or distorting some fairly minor disagreements into making them appear as if they undermine broad pieces of well-accepted science. Is this what he means by a "research agenda"?
Steve Fuller spoke:
Now in terms of…..the first point that needs to be conceded, at least to be conceded for the purposes of argument, is that at a sociological level, it is quite clear that evolution is (not clear) with Intelligent design in terms of which the way evidence is mobilised in the scientific literature, it is certainly more often mobilised in support of evolution that Intelligent Design.
This would seem to be in line with the view that Intelligent Design is essentially a negative project of critiquing empirical science instead of offering any testable explanation of its own.
Steve Fuller spoke:
That leaves open the question, of course, about whether the same evidence could be equally used to support of Intelligent Design. And this, it seems to me, says something about the actual conceptual states of the two views that we are talking about here. OK
This would seem to be in line with the view that Intelligent Design is an attempt to use empirical evidence to rationalise religious beliefs.
Steve Fuller spoke:
And also I think it's true there are probably more biologists, practising biologists, believe that evolution has played life better than Intelligent Design does.
This is because the empirical theories in evolutionary biology may be used to generate testable hypoetheses which are then tested.
Steve Fuller spoke:
But again, it seems to me we actually don't have any reliable sense of what most scientists think, because particularly when these surveys were done, we're looking at a fairly (either a particularly a lead?) group of scientists or the questions are presented in a sort of question begging kind of way, and in terms of the range of sciences who are being considered, whose judgements are being considered, in the matter so that one presumes already that the kinds of scientists whose, whose, opinions are worth hearing ,right, that already begs the question vis a vis evolution and Intelligent Design.
The best way to get rid of question-begging is already in place: the empirical method which requires testability. And judging from the actual research being done evolutionary biology is thriving - and this is what scientists in the appropriate branches of science have concluded for quite some time.
Steve Fuller spoke:
So it is not clear to me, yes or no, on what scientists fear about this matter.
Now one of things that is interesting is the kind of a sort of benchmark here, that some of you may know that last year that 67 national academies of sciences signed a statement saying that evolution needed to be taught. But the interesting thing about this statement is that it didn't mention any specific mechanisms of evolution. It didn't mention natural selection in particular or rather what it did was it mentioned some general facts that we associate with evolutionary theory having to do with the age of the earth, the, the, when origins of life took place, the fact that all life is interconnected, though even though adoption of common descent wasn't mentioned in the statement.
As there are textbooks which already cover evolutionary biology, or at least its basics, including natural selection, genetic drift, common descent and so on, it seems that they had already concluded that educators knew what needed to be tested. They were responding to what is essentially an ideologically-motivated political attack upon education - which does not require them to get into the specifics of what actually needs to be taught in science classes. Their specific recommendations for education can be through other channels, if needed.
Steve Fuller spoke:
Now this is quite frightening, it seems to me, because if one thinks about - OK, we're talking about a consensus document here amongst the 67 national academies of science, pro-evolution - how superficial it is. OK in the sense the only thing that was seriously excluded from this statement was young earth creationism.
What is more frightening is an attack by dogmatic Young Earth Creationists and their subjectivist allies in the Intelligent Design movement upon the objectivity of empirical science and upon the education of future generations.
Steve Fuller spoke:
OK, and if what (not clear) a version of Intelligent Design if anything but young earth creationism (not clear) then in a sentence that's already, that it seems to be allowable by this statement of 67 national academies of science.
At the very outset, he suggested that Intelligent Design is something more than simply an anti-evolution position, although given the rest of what he states, it is entirely unclear what he regards as positive - that is - its "hypothesis viewpoint" - whatever that means. He offers nothing to suggest that it is anything more than an argument to the effect that evolutionary explanations must fail to account for some instance of irreducible complexity or specified complexity. He suggests at one point that it isn't necessarily Young Earth Creationism, but he does not specify in what way it is different from Young Earth Creationism. Does he mean that it is Old Earth Creationism? Some sort of Intelligent Evolution - which no one has been advocating as of yet? Or is it something which is entirely compatible with Young Earth Creationism?
Steve Fuller spoke:
So the very least what this shows is that in terms of the very fundamental levels of principal that separate evolution and Intelligent Design there certainly isn't a very robust consensus amongst the people who want to support evolution.
A political response to an ideological attack upon the objectivity of science does not require a laundry list of all of the well-established points in science. If it were to include such a list, no doubt an encyclopedia would be required, and something far larger than most libraries to document and explain all of the evidence and research which supports those points. Even in science classes, we can only begin with the fundamentals - and we have precious little time for them.
Steve Fuller spoke:
Now so far everything I have been talking about it has had to do with the sociological status of evolution versus Intelligent Design in terms of what people think about it, the way it appears in the scientific literature and so forth but if one looks at it at a sort of the deeper level it terms of the conceptual horizons of the two theories, what in principle can the two theories attempt to explain,...
When Fuller speaks of the "sociological status of evolution vs. intelligent design," he is speaking of its acceptance in society or within certain subsets of society and of how it is perceived. As such, it is almost as if he is complaining about mere popularity. The idea that a theory must have specific explanatory power - that it must be testable - seems to have entirely escaped him.
However, now he is attempting to shift the focus as it were to a "deeper level," to speak about things in terms of fundamentals - where for him (as we shall soon see) by fundamentals he means "metaphysical research programs."
Steve Fuller spoke:
...here I think we start to enter some difficult territory because typically the one talks about the strengths or weakness in either evolution or Intelligent Design theory one is usually focussing on a specific version of these theories, OK so for example, one might say Richard Dawkins is wrong that evolution isn't just about the selection of the level of the gene.
Or one might say Michael Behe is wrong that the bacterial flagellum isn't irreducibly complex.
But to make this slide, he treates the difference between different evolutionary theories (where selection is viewed as operating at the level of genes and where selection is viewed as operating at the level of organisms) as equivilent to whether there exists an instance of irreducible complexity whatsoever - or whether the concept even makes sense. For something truly equivilent, what one would actually require is for it to be entirely debatable whether there is such a thing as "natural selection" or "inheritance."
Steve Fuller spoke:
But (below?) those kind of specific empirical reputations actually undermine the conceptual basis of the wider theories of which they are one possible version. OK. So it seems to me that we are talking about evolution versus Intelligent Design, we actually talking about something of a conceptual level is at a higher level and at a broader level than the specific versions of the theory that one can say there is either empirical or not empirical support for.
Now this can in a way be interpreted as though there is a plus or a minus. OK. And I want to move on and look first at the minus.
Minus and what I mean by minus is that, in a sense, neither evolution nor Intelligent Design is falsifiable at a certain level because (not clear) pitched the (plane?) at such an abstract level, if we are just talking, about the general concepts, that they can't be falsifiable.
Now, why is this? Well first of all, one reason is that in principal nothing escapes the theory's scope. For example, one of the things that one sees sometimes in evolutionary explanations, is, you know, someone will say we look, this particular organ or this particular (thing?) isn't really adapted to the animal, why does this animal have it? Right? Well, one that creates this category, exaptation, to use this term that Stephen Jay Gould coined, whereby you end up having through some sort of random genetic drift/ capture (?) you have some kind of organ that doesn't seem to serve some kind of immediate function in the environment nevertheless being carried on through evolution. So no matter what happens, right, evolution can explain what is going on whether the organ is adapted or not adapted.
Actually, I have dealt with the question of falsifiability - and the fact that in the strictest sense, Karl Popper's principle of falsifiability isn't quite applicable to scientific theories before.
For more along these lines, I would recommend:
Post subject: Reference - The Refutation of Karl Popper, etc.
Posted: 08 Nov 2006 06:00 pm
http://bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=285
However, this isn't quite what Fuller is talking about. He realises of course that evolutionary biologists by and large agree upon the broad fundamentals. We pretty well know, for example, that man is a great ape, that apes descended from primates which descended from the last common ancestor of mammals which descended from reptiles and so on. He knows that we agree that natural selection exists - but may apply it at different levels - or may even choose the level at which we will view it as operating at - depending upon the problem we are dealing with. When evolutionary biologists disagree, it is about the details - perhaps the relative strength of "natural selection vs. genetic drift" or the extent to which a given domain is better understood in terms of a gradualism operating over tens of millions of years vs a punctuated equilibrium which happens in a geological "instant" of tens of thousands of years. This is what we are testing nowadays.
Why? Because Darwin's original theory was so successful.
Given the vast wealth of data which he had available simply in terms of the nested hierarchies of homology, the existence of evolution was more or less a given - even without fossils. Since that time, we have acquired a great many fossils - including hundreds of specimens of perhaps twenty or more different species in the "sequence" leading from our common ancestor with chimps to present-day man. And this still leaves out all of the material which we have discovered in terms of shared genes (for rhodopsin - throughout virtually all eukaryotes being organised into a single phylogenetic tree) and shared sequences of genes - with all of our genes being in virtually the same sequence with mice.
It has gotten virtually impossible to offer a credible, genuinely risky prediction for any fundamental proposition in evolutionary biology - because for all intents and purposes, evolution, including common descent is a fact. It can no longer be rationally denied - although, philosophically speaking, one may still take an omphalosian approach in which one regards all evidence for evolution to have been created by some omnipotent and deceitful god.
However, the details of how evolution took place is still the object of considerable study and even debate - given the enormity of the subject matter. The process of evolution is studied by evolutionary biology which is a core aspect of empirical science. Different related branches of empirical science within evolutionary biology. Within these branches of empirical science, one will find many different theories of evolution, some of which are narrow in their scope, others of which are much broader. Some of these theories differ in terms of the details, but they all agree on the basic fact that evolution took place, as do the vast majority of scientists.
Steve Fuller wrote:
OK. But evolution is not alone in this capacity. Intelligent Design has the same proposition so that one can talk about for example, well, looks at some of the aspects of, lets says, you know, the way organisms were constructed. These things do not look like the sort of thing an Intelligent Designer would do, they are too jimmy-rigged, the're too arbitrary the way they are constructed. There are much better ways we could be doing this sort of things.
Well one thing an Intelligent Design person could say is, look, the unit at which the Intelligent Design is (carried?) isn't necessary at the unit you are looking at. It may be (carried?) at a larger level. So you may imagine that God, or whoever the Intelligent Designer is, is involved in some sort of grand optimisation problem which is trying to get a lot of things to fit together in one kind of universe and you can't necessarily make ever part the best possible part but in order to make the best possible whole, right, one has to make certain kinds of trade-offs.
OK and so at a particular level of a particular (function?), organ or organism, this is not a perfect creature, but if you look at it, fits in the larger picture
So a lot depends on where exactly the Intelligent Design is being fixed. At what level exactly, So you can get away with that as well.
At this point, he actually has a point - and that is that no matter how suboptimal a given system is at a given level, it is always possible for an advocate of Intelligent Design or any other creationist to rationalise it. Maybe, for example, the intelligent designer didn't want to do things in the most efficient way possible. Of course, why he would put a retina in backwards, etc. is beyond me.
However, this doesn't relieve Intelligent Design proponents of the necessity of offering any testable theory.
And as I have stated before...
I wrote:
Well, I think the first hurdle for them is simply the fact that they are afraid of having their "scientific theory of creationism" falsified -- as this would result in the falsification of their particular belief in God. So, even when a creationist gets past the song-and-dance of preaching their beliefs or attempting to argue against evolutionary biology in particular or empirical science in general (rather than putting forward a positive empirical case for their own views), while they may attempt to put forward a "theory" which sounds scientific, it won't actually be anything falsfiable. That is, the "theory" won't be used to generate empirical hypotheses which may then be tested by means of as of yet undiscovered evidence or through experiments.
Oftentimes, they will simply limit themselves to predicting only that which was discovered before they proposed their "theory" in the first place, so that they may tailor their "theory" to fit the evidence. This is entirely unlike the motivation which drives real scientists. Real scientists do everything the can to make their theories as testable and as falsifiable as possible. Real scientists make specific predictions about what has yet to be discovered, and try to make those predictions as risky as possible given the current state of our generally accepted knowledge, knowing that if they do so and win, then they win big.
... and as of yet Intelligent Design has had nothing testable to offer, no mechanism by which things are designed then created, no specificity as to whether life was created ten thousand years ago or five billion years ago, or by whom. No who, what, where, why, when or how. Nothing.
Now of course something like Young Earth Creationism is a bit more specific about the who and the when. Who? "Well, the christian God of course." When? "Less than 10,000 years ago." But the other questions remain fairly problematic. How? "Well, somehow! It was miraculous!" And how do you know? "The Bible tells me so!" Not terribly scientific. But of course, if you are an Old Earth Creationist, you can spread things out a bit, or even admit that the world is more than four billion years old. But beyond that you are going to start running into disagreements between Old Earth Creationists. Is there evolution within kinds. Some say yes, others may say no. Some may hold that each species was specially created - wherever they happen to appear in the fossil record. How convenient! Michael Behe admits that we descended from earlier great apes - but he is almost within a minority of one among proponents of Intelligent Design in this regard - despite the fact that the descent of man is an extremely well-documented fossil sequence. Almost all "proponents of Intelligent Design" in Great Britain have a great deal of difficulty with accepting the fact that the earth is older than 10,000 years - despite all the concordances of dating methods which have been cited elsewhere.
These aren't disagreements over mere details, at least not from the perspective of the rest of empirical science - although from the perspective of a political ideology I suppose well-established scientific facts may be regarded as mere details.
Steve Fuller spoke:
The other issue that has do with (unfalsifiability?), has to do as to how the key concepts are defined. OK and there is a tendency, sometimes to define these concepts in purely negative or residual terms. That is to say, in terms of what they are not.
Now, in the case of Intelligent Design, we have this attempt, that some of you know about by William Dembski, to define in probabilistic terms using information theory, what a design is and it turns out to basically going through a sort of sequence whereby so that something is not necessary, it is not done by chance therefore it is done by design, it is the design (that is?), it is the residual category that gets left after you can't explain something that is either the product of necessity or chance.
... and there are numerous problems with it, not the least of which is that it treates necessity and chance as mutually-exclusive when evolution requires chance in the form of mutation and necessity in the form of natural selection. But even assuming this were not a problem, what about having four categories? Necessity, chance, design, and the unknown? What about changing the order?
Steve Fuller wrote:
But evolution, but what exactly is evolution? Now I mention here before I may talk about the (Hardy-Weinberg?) version of equilibrium which is a formula that has been contributed by population geneticists which gives a kind of an equation for gene frequency and population generation after generation and assuming that there no disturbances to the population.
When there are disturbances, that's evolution. OK. So if there is mutation, when there is natural selection, when there is not now, when there is not random mating. All of these kinds of conditions.
So what I've got listed here and I'm not gonna to go through this whole thing, comes for a web site that's been endorsed by the US National Science Teachers Association, basically explaining evolution from the standpoint of population genetics. And what we see here is that basically evolution is always happening. Because it is always, because the (not clear) conditions that gives kinda stable gene frequencies in populations are always being violated.
And evolution can happen in just about any kind of way that shifts the equilibrium.
So there is no actual positive account of evolution being given here. It's just whatever shifts the gene frequency equilibrium.
One is not trying to define what evolution is by means of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium formula. What one is doing is identifying that there is something which is in need of explanation - when there are deviations from the formula. Such deviations imply that either there is some form of selection (due to one or the other allele being adaptive or maladaptive), the population is not self-contained, or the mutation rate is high - the last of which is highly unlikely. Evolution is by definition a change in allele frequencies. However, this is simply a definition of the term, not a theory of evolution, nor in any way equivilent to the vast body of evidence for the process of evolution or the history of the evolution of life on earth.
Steve Fuller spoke:
Now there is an interesting (ethical?) historical back story to why this is the kind of definition of evolution that population geneticists use but I won't go into that view.
Well there is clearly something of interest to ethics going on here, but I won't go into that either!
Steve Fuller spoke:
Now on the positive side and this is in a sense kinda the biggest, you might say, take home point that I want to raise to you, is I think that the best way to look at the difference between evolution and Intelligent Design is really (not clear) what Karl Popper called metaphysical research progress.
I hope that Fuller said "metaphysical research program." In any case, Karl Popper (who was no biologist to begin with) changed his mind...
Please see:
Claim CA211.1:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html
Steve Fuller wrote:
Now this is a very unpopular phrase now in the philosophy of science for reasons that I could go into for reasons that you might be interested in.
Empirical science has a problem with the untestable, including untestable metaphysical propositions such as materialism, idealism, and solipsism. It also has a problem with untestable theories - such as the Omphalosian theory that God created the world with the appearance of extreme age.
Does Fuller have something else to offer?
Steve Fuller wrote:
But basically I think basically it is correct mainly what these two concepts do from a positive standpoint is they provide what I think are fairly clearly of kind of ways of organising and orienting research in what broadly speaking in what we might call the biological sciences.
OK so there is sort of at level of the blueprint how do we design the science. Because, as we know, whether one is an adherent of evolution or Intelligent Design, biology is a very heterogeneous subject. There are a lot of things going on in the name of biology and in fact the range of methods and approaches and so forth are, in fact, just as varied as one would find in social sciences.
Despite whatever differences there may exist within the subdisciplines of the biological sciences, they still all agree that scientific theories have to be testable - falsifiable when possible, but always testable - being subject to at least disconfirmation by reference to evidence. There has to be an element of risk involved - particularly in the case of theories which wish to claim the accolade of either "new" or "revolutionary" and displace another more well-established theory.
However, all of this seems lost on the proponents of intelligent design.
Steve Fuller spoke:
OK, and in fact from that standpoint of view Darwinian synthesis in biology is a very striking accomplishment which basically has a whole bunch of people doing radically different things at a methodological level, nevertheless thinking of singing to the same hymn. OK.
If by evolutionary biologists (or just biologists, period) "singing the to the same hymn" you mean that they agree upon well-established scientific facts and disagree merely upon the details, then yes, they are singing to the same hymn, reading from the evidence, and the sound of their voices when heard together is one of objectivity.
Steve Fuller spoke:
But I think it's clear to say that evolution and Intelligent Design would organise the biological scientists (sciences?) differently.
... as would Winston Churchill vs Joseph Stalin.
Steve Fuller spoke:
Now, as I mention here in the slide it seems to me that (not clear) evolution, fundamental intuition goes back to Darwin and it has to do with the survival of self-reproducing carbon-based entities, in terrestrial environments.
Alright, so, life on earth.
And the idea that all of this life descended from a common ancestor, who exactly this ultimate origin of life is, (mysterious?). Darwinists do not want to commit themselves to this. Darwin himself didn't commit himself to this.
A theory of abiogenesis is about how life originated. Evolutionary biology is about what happened after that. What has happened in the past few billion years is, I think, a little clearer than what happened over a relatively brief period of time four billion years ago - regardless of how much creationists might wish to conflate the two issues.
Steve Fuller wrote:
So basically the upshot is in biology from a fundament historical science and is about the history of life on earth, OK, it is a field based science in the first instance, but increasingly, especially once we move into the incorporation of genetics and molecular biology in the 20th century, right, it gets increasingly supplemented and, some would say, I think, dominated by lab and computer based research.
So we are really are moving far way from Darwin's own kind of entomological horizons. But basically evolution insofar as (it is?) or sort of recognisable kind way of doing biology, is a kind of historical science based on life on earth.
"Epistemological" horizons? I suppose you could say that. We have more data. We know what genes are. We know what genetic sequences are. And we have much more rigorous mathematical methods - one of the most recent of which are two different methods each subject to opposite types of error (an inability to detect deletions versus an inability to detect insertions, I believe) but when brought together are able to detect microinversions - and will have the ability to construct more accurate phylogenetic trees with less data - or far more accurate phylogenetic trees with the same amount of data - when the amount of data is in fact exploding!
Steve Fuller spoke:
But this is being challenged a lot know in the sense that evolution is becoming a kind of grand metaphysical idea, evolution of the universe, cosmic selectionism, that kind of thing but if it is (not clear) it seems to me is about history of life on earth.
Irrelevant. This is not evolutionary biology - although such highly speculative ideas in cosmology may derive some inspiration from it.
Steve Fuller wrote:
Now Intelligent Design theorists, and here I'm not gonna, I don't see any reason to hide this point, I think there is, the background, there is a difficult conception of God and that God is a kind of super engineer. OK.
... one of his more honest moments...
Steve Fuller spoke:
And an interesting thing about this is that the way in which life is designed, right, so whether we are talking about cells or organisms or species or whatever, right, is a much more improved but nevertheless relatable version of what human beings are doing.
His first allusion to the argument from design.
Steve Fuller spoke:
So that things like mechanistic analogies and so forth are appropriate to use to understand the way in which life works.
OK so, God is the big mechanic, God is the big engineer, very much in the kind of way that Isaac Newton thought about this, for example, and most of the way people in the scientific revolution thought about these matters. And this has a lot to do with the privileged relationship that human beings have with God as a creature, of all the creatures in nature. OK.
... appeal to an authority which died well before Darwin proposed his theory a hundred and fifty years ago...
Steve Fuller spoke:
Now here then, biology isn't this kind of distinct, unique historical science that is about life on earth so much but rather it is a kind of gradual technology, OK, whereas one branch of technology human beings do, engineering, and the other branch of technology is the technology God uses, which is biology.
... more of the watchmaker.
Steve Fuller spoke:
So it then becomes this kind of relationship that is implicitly set up between biology and technology where in some sense nature is providing prototypes for the way in which we, as humans, can redesign our environment, redesign our world, to improve human dominion over nature, which is again the biblical (not clear).
Darwin learned how evolution could take place by breeding pidgeons.
Oh, and appeal to authority.
Steve Fuller spoke:
This I think is very much in the background here. So if you look at the person who is probably, from the scientific standpoint, is the most prominent defender of Intelligent Design in this country, Andrew McIntosh, who is even a young earth creationist I believe, a professor of thermodynamics and Leeds University, what is, the key thing is to look at, what's the science he does? And he is part of a big project in the Engineering and Research Council having to do with biominetics. OK
Our ability to learn from how things work in nature and apply this to our own technology does not imply that nature is a form of technology.
However, this is an interesting idea if one follows it all the way through...
Thoughts On The Intelligent Design Inference
http://bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/ThoughtsOnTheIntelligentDesignInference
Steve Fuller spoke:
Biominetics which is the idea if you look at organisms right and you look at other aspects of the ecology and you use them as the basis of technology. Right, the basis for improving the human condition, OK so organisms are not seen as, you know, entities in their own right on an equal footing with human beings which was basically Darwin's picture. I mean for Darwin, Darwin in terms the way he gives you the world, its species are egalitarian. We are subject to the same laws as all the other organisms are; we're just a slightly upright ape.
Recognising the similarities between us and the rest of life on earth in no way eliminates the genuine differences any more than that we can fly by flapping our arms.
Steve Fuller spoke:
No, this is a different kind of view. With the best of nature is basically (not clear) available inspiration for us to transform and rationalise nature so, you know, as the part of the ennoblement of human beings as privileged beings in the eyes of God.
This is irrelevant to science - but may be relevant to a Sunday sermon.
Steve Fuller spoke:
So not surprisingly, the kinds of science that people who are attracted to Intelligent Design do, will be engineering styles of science and ones that look as nature as prototypes, as inspiration for ideas for transforming the environment.
Does being a thermodynamics engineer make one a good biologist? Would you want a biologist pretending to know how to design a jet engine?
Steve Fuller spoke:
And I think that this is kind of a very important point to make because this is one way in which I think that Intelligent Design (not clear) (and very strongly reorientate?) biological scientists and make things like bioengineering and biotechnology and things like that a much more central concern.
Applied sciences are the application of theoretical sciences. Proponents of Intelligent Design (such as Andy McIntosh) seek to deny some of the most well-established science in existence - for the sake of an literalistic interpretation of the Bible which was out of date more than two thousand years ago - or something not much better when they deign to step beyond this.
Steve Fuller wrote:
Now I say of this, part of what is in the back of my mind here is, I think there are some very serious theological problems up the road for Intelligent Design on this trip. OK, because Intelligent Design, I think that this is, you known and for people who support this is a very important point, mainly, just how close to God do we get? Right. To what extent to...do we usurp the role of God, here.
He wishes us to buy into a literalistic interpretation of Genesis in order to think ourselves closer to God, then curses us when we refuse to take such an interpretation and instead try to understand the world.
Is this the sort of science he advocates?
Steve Fuller wrote:
Because it seems to me the logic of this argument, and this in essence what is very attractive about it and very enticing about it, is basically, it postulates such a strong analogy between what human beings can do and what God supposedly did, right, that it does sort of suggests a kind of merger in a way evolution doesn't do,
I mean one of the things that is very, very striking about reading Darwinists because natural selection is based on the metaphor of artificial selection, right, is that Darwin over and over again stresses just how radically different and how much better natural selection is that artificial selection.
If natural selection is better, it is largely because it has more time and involves many more "experiments" than we are typically capable of within a human lifetime.
Steve Fuller spoke:
And now, human beings couldn't possible be able get to what nature could do; that nature is always superior and if humans beings would just be fooling themselves if they think that in some sense that they, in some sense, as it where, can evolve out of their ape-like condition to any significant extent. OK
And I think that this kind of generally pessimistic view that Darwin has about what science can accomplish, right, is very much a product of its having lost the belief in design. OK
In otherwords it is pessimistic to try and understand reality, but by embracing a literalistic interpretation of Genesis which is entirely at odds with modern science, science will progress far beyond where it is now - by Steve Fuller's standards.
Tim chase has gone onto discussing design and patterns:
Of Designs and Patterns
I am not going to go into this in a great deal of depth, largely because it would be a waste of time and electrons. However, I think the following quotes are more than enough to begin to get the gist of their arguments.
Steve Fuller spoke:
Really, if Intelligent Design has nothing to say about science and biology, why does design language continue to proliferate in evolution theory. I mean, we talk, hear about the design without the designer, we hear about natural selection, we use, evolution gets used as an age as a subject of birds, in scientific articles and in evolution was doing stuff.
We have evolution being portrayed as a sort opportunistic (not clear?) or sometimes and an optimising engineer, I mean evolution is completely, drives on design language in order to make its point and even in the technical scientific literature this is case. Why doesn’t it just completely abandon that language?
Lewis Wolpert spoke:
Well I can answer that, of course because Evolution is based on how and the change in the development of the organism and one of the things I work on is pattern formation which I’m very sorry is one of the key concepts in the development an organisation, is a spatial organisation of pattern, you know, why there are five fingers there and why, and so on so I am terribly sorry you can’t understand development unless you have a concept….
Steve Fuller replied:
Pattern and design are not the same thing, OK…..
Steve Fuller is misleadingly calling attention to the use of the language involving elements of final causation in biology by refering to it as "design language." Now what exactly do I mean by "final causation"? Well, namely that some things are goal-directed, that in a sense the goal can be the cause of an action, that there exists a form of intentionality in which something is for something else.
Here are some examples:
1. I write *so as to communicate* an *idea*.
2. A *predator* *chases after* *its prey.*
3. An animal *sees* its environment by means of its eyes.
4. The *function* of the heart is to pump blood.
5. The *purpose* of leaves is to convert light to chemical energy.
6. Roots *seek* water.
7. Wings *served to* insulate small animals from the wind. Feathers *served* to repel water. Later, they were *coopted* then *optimised* *for* flight.
8. Certain features of living organisms have *survival value.*
In each case there is some degree of optimisation. We could look at things strictly in terms of efficient causation, in which A causes B causes C and so on, and in which the effect of any given cause is always later in the sequence. However, if we were to do this, we would be missing something fairly essential: namely, a relationship between a given something earlier in the sequence and something much later such that what is the efficient cause exists for the sake of its effect.
One runs into a problem if one denies that such causation exists, namely, that the very idea of communication becomes meaningless.
If I may quote from a response I made to someone who make just such a denial at one point, I believe it will help to illustrate the nature of the problem.
At one point, he wrote: "… evidently you aren't too bright! Causality contradicts teleology. Causality is sequential , teleology say the effect comes before the cause."
In response, I wrote: I assume you are talking about final causation. So for example, when you write a sentence, we are not simply "supposed" to interpret this as the result of so many electrical signals in your brain, but instead, that you strung characters, then words, then sentences with a certain goal in mind: that of communicating what you meant to say. Communicating that meaning was the purpose of your actions, and it is at least at one level a fairly significant explanation as to why I see one set of characters than another. I realize that you strung those characters with a goal in mind: communication. And this goal as the object of your action preceded the action itself, the action which is the efficient cause of its realization. Is this what you are talking about? Or did I entirely misconstrue what you had to say? Or did you in fact intend to communicate at all? Should I simply interpret the characters as the product of efficient causation – as if there were no goal to their existence?
Gee, I do hope I'm not being too obtuse here. Then again, I think if I were to entirely jettison final causation I would become incredibly obtuse. Don't you think?
Clearly there exists some form of final causation in the world. The purpose of a saw, for example, is to cut wood. But here we notice something different: the saw gains nothing from being able to cut wood, and it gains nothing from cutting wood. In fact, when it is used for this purpose, it becomes dull. Saws are tools which serve the purpose of something else. The purpose of a saw is extrinsic to the saw itself And as tools, they are something which we create. When a plant turns its leaves to capture the sunlight, this serves to promote the survival of the plant, and thus it serves to promote the survival of the roots which belong to the plant. The goal of the plant's actions and its parts are internal to the plant itself. But the tool is something which we create to serve our purposes. Nevertheless, we are probably first self-consciously aware of such intentionality in terms of tools and understand the intentionality we find in the world at first by analogy to tools.
As I understand it, while Steve Fuller is calling attention to the intentionality of so much of our language in describing biological phenomena, he is deliberately blurring the distinction between things which have goals internal to them and things which serve the goal of something external to themselves. Likewise, he is deliberately blurring the distinction between things which grow and things which are manufactured by something else. In this respect, he is able to imply that living organisms were designed by a designer and created by a creator - where the creators is something which exists separately from his creation and prior to its creation. This is of course where we get "creationism" and more recently "intelligent design."
However, evolution explains how final causation arises within the context of life - as the result of efficient causation. There is a sense in which it completes a circle of reciprocal causation and requires no designer or creator.
Please see:
Dawkins - The Reasonableness of Faith
Posted: 23 Oct 2006 11:28 pm
http://bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1011#1011
In that post I go into this issue in greater depth, and furthermore explain what is gained from thinking in terms of "final causation" rather than strictly in terms of efficient caus
