What a very strange comment from someone who has touted ‘irreducible complexity’ in the guise of ‘holistic systems’.

1) You could use a counter-argument that wasn’t vacuous. If you had one.

2) You could stop making false and misleading arguments, such as attempting to portray evolution as purely random, i.e. “chance”. That sort of thing will hurt your credibility.

3) You could form a hypothesis (a testable prediction) involving this intelligence: what test could you run whose result would support the existence and involvement of this intelligence that wouldn’t be there otherwise?

a) Note that this would have to be a positive result, not a lack of something (i.e. a negative argument) that might be missing for other reasons (e.g. experimental difficulty, sparsity of the fossil record, etc).

b) This would have to be a prediction of something new. Explaining how something that everybody already knows about, such as the information content of DNA, is useless. You need to show that your theory has predictive power. Otherwise it is no more useful than a just-so story.

c) Note that the result should actually differ from what the alternative explanation (evolution) would produce.

d) For extra points, you could actually run the experiment you proposed.

This would be more productive and convincing than yet more rhetorical redundancy explaining how negative is positive, and begging for the standards of science to be lowered because you can’t meet them.

Now, Discovery actually funds a great deal of primary research — go ahead, snicker — but those receiving the support and their specific projects have become a very quiet business indeed, and that need for secrecy may continue for a long time. So I’m not griping about DI’s failure to support scientific research. I know what’s happening safely away from the relentless gaze of the Panda’s Thumb.

Nor does argument from personal incredulity. The fact is that there is more than a negative argument there. It matches the observation (intricate interactions of many well-matched parts to perform a function, which have a necessary core to continue to function) to what we know produces such observations (designers). If you know of systems like this which are developed entirely through non-telic means, let me know. Just turning on your computer will give you examples of such systems which are designed.

I fail to see how this argument is anything more than a rhetorical twist. Repetition does not improve the situation. You have no positive evidence of the workings of any “Intelligent Designer”. You have a “Lack of Poof”. You need to predict something positive with ID that is not predicted by mainstream biology, then carry out an experiment to verify the prediction. Since repetition is boring, I will stop repeating this for now.

Since MacNeiil’s students are all so durned bright, I’ll leave it to them to assess the quality of those papers.

and that science needs to develop new methods and paradigms in order to investigate the situation (hmmm… isn’t that what ID is doing?)

I don’t think so. At risk of violating the rules of engagement, ID seems to me to be writing non-peer-review books and lobbying school boards. As reported in the NYTimes, December 4, 2005, by Laurie Goodsetein, Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker:

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.

The argument I was using (DNA being symbolic and self-referential) already is in the peer-review literature. Also see this paper, which, while it doesn’t conclude ID, it does conclude that it has a cause which is neither chance nor necessity, and that science needs to develop new methods and paradigms in order to investigate the situation (hmmm… isn’t that what ID is doing?)

“This appears to me to be a substitute phrase for “irreducible complexity” which has faired very poorly in the labs and in the courts, and which is an argument from ignorance.”

Yes. Irreducible complexity is an attempted empirical definition of holism. Please name the lab experiment which shows Behe’s examples to be false. And no, it is not an argument from ignorance, at least any more than _any_ scientific argument for _anything_ is an argument from ignorance (you could always appeal to unknown forces supporting your argument, no matter what the question is — saying that ID is wrong because it doesn’t take into account forces which are unknown is quite silly). But IC is based not only on a negative, but also on a positive — it is similar to how a designer would act. You can’t take any arbitrary X for which we do not know its origin and claim it is IC. It has to also have well-matched parts and accomplish a purpose, both of which are attributes of design.

“The ability to determine functionality based on design principles: I’m not sure what this is about.”

What we’ve been talking about with Well’s centriole hypothesis.

DNA: unsupported assertion. Please explain how you would go about finding evidence that DNA is in fact designed. Do it without falling into the “argument from ignorance” trap.

Symbolic, self-referential codes: I have no idea what you are talking about.

CSI: much discussed elsewhere. No actual results anywhere.

Holistic systems: This appears to me to be a substitute phrase for “irreducible complexity” which has faired very poorly in the labs and in the courts, and which is an argument from ignorance.

The ability to determine functionality based on design principles: I’m not sure what this is about. The laws of nature and mechanical principles would apply to a system no matter whether it arose through design or evolution.

You might say there’s a lot of positive evidence, but you can’t actually produce any. This seems to be more a rhetorical flourish than a statement of substance. If you have some “positive evidence” you think is convincing and rigorous, by all means publish it in the peer-review literature.

I apologize for my delay in responding.

1) Lifespan refers to the design

2) On the topic of “extinction”, my point was that the unit of design matters when making distinctions of whether a design was better-equipped or not. The statement has little relevance except if you assume that species (or individuals) were the level of design, at least as far as I understood it.

3) As far as good design/bad design, while I would love to agree with you that my own and Wells arguments actually advocated Creationism instead of intelligent design, the fact is that “bad design” occurs just as much in patterns as “good design”. I’ve worked with both good and bad designers. They all use essentially the same toolbox. Some are inept at its use. While it is true that Wells and I both assume a competent designer, such would be the default assumption in _any_ sort of reverse-engineering activity. I’ve had to reverse-engineer code from designers who I neither knew them individually nor even their names. Yet the default assumption when investigating a designed system is that the designer had some idea what they are doing. This is a completely different mode than when tracking down a bug, even if it is a beneficial bug! Happenstance and design look completely different when you are chasing causes. When investigating non-designed occurrences, usually you investigate it according to temporal changes — what system changes occurred most recently, what other things have been occurring differently. When investigating designed occurrences, you look for design patterns, try to find the purpose, and have a default assumption of purpose for all unusual finds.

4) “To reiterate, indeed there are traits that would be selectable, but which have not been reached through natural selection. That is why we see solutions that are suboptimal, and why ecological niches may go unfilled.” This assumes that all ecological niches would be filled, and all possible combinations tried, in order for design to be valid. Design is valid because function/purpose is more important in examining and understanding biological systems than evolvability.

5) “Mr. Bartlett acknowledges that ID is “magical”.” It isn’t magical, any more than any other intelligent agent working is magical. (if you consider intelligent agency of the ordinary human type is “magical”, then, sure, ID is magical). The reason I referred to it as “magical” is because it was inanimate objects that would need to take on the form of intelligent agents to function as they are described.

6) “Such tests have been highly successful and productive over the last ~ 150 years.” I would disagree. They have been successful in pointing to the way that variation occurs, but they have not been successful in explaining the origins of intricate, holistic systems, for which it was claimed that it solved.

7) “ID meanwhile, has no positive evidence for its magical solutions. ID has a lack of poof.” DNA. Symbolic, self-referential codes. Complex, specified information. Holistic systems. The ability to determine functionality based on design principles. I’d say ID has a _lot_ of positive evidence. In fact, I’d say that at least some of what has been claimed as a victory for evolutionary biology in the past 150 years has been unintentionally using ID assumptions.