Objectivism and Evolution: No Contradictions

[Brant Gaede]

I've said nothing about irreducible complexity. The discussion, to date, has centered on the following ideas only:

The impossibility of constructing a meaningful sequence of 300 characters by Chance alone (in this case, amino acids that form a functional protein, though the argument is just as valid for strings of letters that form meaningful sentences in English) given the physical constraints of the universe as it actually exists (the physical constraints providing the total probabilistic resources that we have to take into consideration when deciding whether something is probable or not -- "probabilistic resources" answers the question "Probable? By what standard?" ): i.e., no more than about 10^80 fundamental particles; no event occurring over a time period smaller than 1/10^45th of a second (Planck Time); and no event taking longer than our best estimate of the age of the universe, i.e., 12 billion years.

Interesting that you hypothesize infinite time instead of 12 billion years. Had you been really clever, you could have, instead, hypothesized an infinite number of fundamental particles instead of only 10^80; or assumed that physical events can occur over an infinitely small time period, instead being constrained to 1/10^45 second.

I think Objectivists are simply aesthetically attracted to the idea of a Steady State universe. Must be a religious thing.

You don't seem to understand that your theory has not been presented as a falsifiable proposition, which makes it self-invalidating. It's just stock yik yak for ID arguments and essentially an argument from ignorance. You refuse to acknowledge what you don't know in your dogmatist set. People who are knowledgeable and intelligent and sincerely religious know how to compartmentalize that from scientific endeavor for scientists are genuinely humble about what they don't know so qua science they are not absolutists except, maybe, for the very basic, which is no more than reality and reason, reason being for them the scientific method.

--Brant

Edited December 11, 2010 by Brant Gaede

[George H. Smith]

I've said nothing about irreducible complexity. The discussion, to date, has centered on the following ideas only:

The impossibility of constructing a meaningful sequence of 300 characters by Chance alone (in this case, amino acids that form a functional protein, though the argument is just as valid for strings of letters that form meaningful sentences in English) given the physical constraints of the universe as it actually exists (the physical constraints providing the total probabilistic resources that we have to take into consideration when deciding whether something is probable or not -- "probabilistic resources" answers the question "Probable? By what standard?" ): i.e., no more than about 10^80 fundamental particles; no event occurring over a time period smaller than 1/10^45th of a second (Planck Time); and no event taking longer than our best estimate of the age of the universe, i.e., 12 billion years.

Interesting that you hypothesize infinite time instead of 12 billion years. Had you been really clever, you could have, instead, hypothesized an infinite number of fundamental particles instead of only 10^80; or assumed that physical events can occur over an infinitely small time period, instead being constrained to 1/10^45 second.

I think Objectivists are simply aesthetically attracted to the idea of a Steady State universe. Must be a religious thing.

You don't seem to understand that your theory has not been presented as a falsifiable proposition, which makes it self-invalidating. It's just stock yik yak for ID arguments and essentially an argument from ignorance. You refuse to acknowledge what you don't know in your dogmatist set. People who are knowledgeable and intelligent and sincerely religious know how to compartmentalize that from scientific endeavor for scientists are genuinely humble about what they don't know so qua science they are not absolutists except, maybe, for the very basic, which is no more than reality and reason, reason being for them the scientific method.

--Brant

The basic problem for AA is that my question forced him to depart from the Creationist Catechism, and he is not clever enough to ad lib. His thick-headedness in this regard has convinced me, however, that AA is probably not a troll, i.e., someone who is pretending to defend Creationism in order to stir up trouble on OL. No self-respecting troll would have a problem with my question; he would simply say yes, abiogenesis would be possible given sufficient time. But AA -- bless his born-again heart -- is not willing to lie outright. (Jesus is watching, after all.) And he is clever enough to foresee the problems that lie ahead for him if he gives an honest answer.

In short, the recent imbroglio has very much to do with Creationist tactics and very little to do with truth or valid arguments.

Ghs

[Starbuckle]

Duplicate.

Edited December 12, 2010 by Starbuckle

[Starbuckle]

All the stuff about the zillion to one odds of anything happening in the chemical or bio-chemical world "by Chance" is so much stuff and nonsense. The "chances" that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions are 100%.

If you throw a few relevant elements in a test-tube setup and mix water and heat, you start getting building blocks of life. That was established in the 1950s. Google the Stanley Miller experiment.

What are the probability-table chances that a hydrogen atom will latch onto another hydrogen atom to form H2, or latch onto another hydrogen and oxygen to form H2O? Perhaps some number can be arrived at if you abstract away from any given circumstances and postulate, say, ten different sets of chemical circumstances in which you might find hydrogen. In five of these proposed chemical situations, let's say, the H2 can and would form; in the other five, the H2 cannot and would not form. The "chances," then, under the terms of the proposal, with the hydrogen stipulated to have the same chance of being piped into any one of the ten scenarios, are five in ten that H2 will form; or one in two.

But this is a meaningless perspective when one is dealing with a specific context in which hydrogen atoms are near each other under typical conditions of temperature and pressure and no other atoms are around. When hydrogen is your only kind of atom interacting, you get hydrogen gas. You get H2. You get it because of the nature of the bonds that can form between the atoms. H2 is very stable. H wants to get together with other H. It's not a matter of somebody in a meta-universe watching the hydrogen and flipping a coin to determine whether today the hydrogen is going to behave like hydrogen or not. Hydrogen always behaves like hydrogen. It is extremely hydrogenesque. What does "Chance alone" have to do with it?

Nor is the interaction between organisms, species and environment a matter of "Chance alone." Some organisms are going to be better at producing kids that survive than others. The survival-enhancing traits of the more prolific members of the species are the traits that will be most generally passed on. New traits that make it easier to survive in a particular environment are the traits that are most likely to become widespread throughout the species. The effects of natural selection are manifest in the fossil record, in the relationships between species living now, and in the realtime investigations of evolutionary change such as those of Peter and Rosemary Grant, who documented the changes in bill size of Darwin's finches in response to periods of drier or wetter weather.

The causal interactions that affect the evolutionary history of a species can obviously be much more complex than briefly indicated above, but it's not about "Chance." It's about causality. Cause and effect in the primeval soup also operated; and once a set of any molecules could self-replicate, the evolutionary ball had begun rolling, however slowly. The Miller experiments established that the transition from chemical affinities and processes to biochemical affinities and processes is not that drastic, let alone unthinkable, and regardless of exactly what the geo-chemical processes and environmental circumstances were 3.5 billion years ago.

Edited December 12, 2010 by Starbuckle

[BaalChatzaf]

The first persistent replicator (i.e. a compound or molecular structure that could copy itself) arose by chance. All subsequent copies are the result of physical processes operating according to physical laws.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Starbuckle]

BC wrote: "The first persistent replicator (i.e. a compound or molecular structure that could copy itself) arose by chance. All subsequent copies are the result of physical processes operating according to physical laws."

What do you mean by "by chance"? I would say that a knowledgeable, uninvolved observer could not have known which incident would prove successful in starting off the evolutionary process. But the first incident of persistent replication certainly occurred according to physical laws. It's not as if physical laws were suspended so that it could happen. After the incident, certain kinds of processes were possible that were not possible before it; that's all.

The term "chance" is used equivocally by the creationists. On the one hand it seems to mean "without divine intervention and management." Then again it seems to mean "without systemic causation." Then again it seems to mean "having to do with statistical probabilities/prediction."

When creationists say, "You don't think such and such could happen BY CHANCE, do you?," it is important to know what they mean by "chance." If I can't predict what biological solution might arise to the problem of a specific environmental challenge, that doesn't mean a specific solution can't naturally arise or that the chances are unfathomably low; not even if there's only a 1-in-zillion chance of any particular solution arising from the perspective of my ignorance of how all the relevant factors will interact over time to result in a solution (if one does arise). If I knew more, my ability to predict would improve. But can one estimate the chances of anything very complex occuring unless there is some kind of repeating event or series of events? When we deal with a fair coin, that's one thing; we can flip it endlessly. But we can't again and again unspool and re-spool any stretch of evolutionary history to determine what are the "chances" that evolutionary history will proceed in this direction or that direction.

Edited December 12, 2010 by Starbuckle

[AristotlesAdvance]

Given sufficient time, do you think abiogenesis would be possible?

Given enough time, do you think that lots of monkeys typing randomly on lots of laptops could manage to create "Atlas Shrugged"?

[AristotlesAdvance]

You don't seem to understand that your theory has not been presented as a falsifiable proposition, which makes it self-invalidating.

That's because it isn't a theory. I'm stating simple matters of physical fact and performing a 7th-grade math calculation in probability on that basis of those facts. I'm not theorizing about anything.

You've committed a simple category error.

Anyway, Karl Popper -- the originator of the idea that a true scientific theory differentiates itself from other sorts of discourse (such as religious doctrine, psychological analysis, aesthetic opinions, etc.) by being falsifiable -- was careful to make clear to his readers that this does not mean that STATEMENTS in the non-sciences (religion, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, etc.) that might not be amenable to falsifiability are not, by virtue of that fact, necessarily false. The issue for Popper was not "true statements vs. false statements" in which the former is coextensive with science; the issue for him was the so-called "demarcation problem": i.e., how to differentiate "science" from "all other branches of knowledge." He wasn't claiming that any non-falsifiable statement in the latter had to be false.

[BaalChatzaf]

BC wrote: "The first persistent replicator (i.e. a compound or molecular structure that could copy itself) arose by chance. All subsequent copies are the result of physical processes operating according to physical laws."

What do you mean by "by chance"? I would say that a knowledgeable, uninvolved observer could not have known which incident would prove successful in starting off the evolutionary process. But the first incident of persistent replication certainly occurred according to physical laws. It's not as if physical laws were suspended so that it could happen. After the incident, certain kinds of processes were possible that were not possible before it; that's all.

The term "chance" is used equivocally by the creationists. On the one hand it seems to mean "without divine intervention and management." Then again it seems to mean "without systemic causation." Then again it seems to mean "having to do with statistical probabilities/prediction."

When creationists say, "You don't think such and such could happen BY CHANCE, do you?," it is important to know what they mean by "chance." If I can't predict what biological solution might arise to the problem of a specific environmental challenge, that doesn't mean a specific solution can't naturally arise or that the chances are unfathomably low; not even if there's only a 1-in-zillion chance of any particular solution arising from the perspective of my ignorance of how all the relevant factors will interact over time to result in a solution (if one does arise). If I knew more, my ability to predict would improve. But can one estimate the chances of anything very complex occuring unless there is some kind of repeating event or series of events? When we deal with a fair coin, that's one thing; we can flip it endlessly. But we can't again and again unspool and re-spool any stretch of evolutionary history to determine what are the "chances" that evolutionary history will proceed in this direction or that direction.

Do you believe every last event in the Cosmos is strictly determined? If so, then out fates were sealed billions or trillions of years ago.

The results which test quantum physics indicate there is an indeterminism in some interacts. For example when an electron goes through a Stern-Gerlach magnet there is a 50-50 chance it will come out spin-up or spin-down. There is nothing in the electron that says to the electron you are doomed to come out spin-up when you go through a Stern-Gerlach magnet.

If one assumes both locality and determinism, one derives an inequality (Bell's Inequality) which is refuted by many experiments. So if the world is local, it is not deterministic. If it is not local and deterministic that means two events which are space-like separated can be causally connected (the interaction therefore occurs at greater than light speed).

Ba'al Chatzaf

[9thdoctor]

Given sufficient time, do you think abiogenesis would be possible?

Given enough time, do you think that lots of monkeys typing randomly on lots of laptops could manage to create "Atlas Shrugged"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sUQIpFajsg

5 minutes in. Learn to use the quote function.

[AristotlesAdvance]

The "chances" that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions are 100%.

Sure. If only we were omniscient.

So let's see:

One presumed Objectivist claims life would definitely arise from abiogenesis if only there were infinite time.

Now another presumed Objectivist claims we would see the truth of the above statement if only we had infinite knowledge of all possible conditions necessary for it to arise by means of abiogenesis.

The first is wishful thinking, similar to "if pigs had wings"; the second is naive determinism.

If you throw a few relevant elements in a test-tube setup and mix water and heat, you start getting building blocks of life. That was established in the 1950s. Google the Stanley Miller experiment.

As I posted earlier, the geochemists refuted the conclusions of the Urey-Miller experiment in the 1950s quite soon after the results were published, which is why this experiment carries no weight today in origins-of-life research. The sort of "reducing atmosphere" that Miller assumed existed in the early atmosphere, in fact, never existed. When Miller repeated his experiments using the sorts of gases that geochemists were certain comprised the early atmosphere, the results of the experiment were nil: instead of getting amino acids, he got sludge. Moreover, even if you had a pond full of pre-existing amino acids, and found some clever way to make them aggregate together into chains (normally, that is done by the ribosome in the cell), you still have the probability problem I've broached earlier: standard length for a protein that actually functions and does something critical for a living organism is about 300 amino acids, and those amino acids have to be in a certain order on the chain; like letters in a word, a random order won't do. Additionally, the bond between one amino acid and the next must be a peptide bond, and each amino acid must be of the left-handed variety. We've already seen that the odds of any specific functional combination of those variables occurring is 1 in about 10^600.

I can tell that you still don't get it. The problem in abiogenesis is not one of chemicals. The problem is not "how can we account for the existence of amino acids?" The problem is: given the existence of amino acids, how did they happen to form just those specific sequences that form functional useful proteins? How did those amino acids manage to circumvent the far greater number of useless combinations?

Biochemist Michael Behe has an amusing chapter in his first book "Darwin's Black Box," titled, I think, "Road Kill" which illustrates the typical methodology of origin-of-life experimenters. His analogy, IIRC, went something like this:

Imagine a busy 8-lane superhighway. Imagine a squirrel on one side of the highway whom researchers "tag" for the purpose of determining if this squirrel can manage to get from one side of the highway to the other (without, of course, getting squashed by an oncoming car). We assume the superhighway is busy at all times of day and night. Now, the way most origin-of-life researchers go about their experiments would be similar to the squirrel researchers doing the following:

To prevent the squirrel from "aggregating" against an oncoming car (i.e., getting flattened) in the first lane, they put in a special inclined ramp the cars would travel on for a few yards before ramping back down to the highway; this permits the squirrel to crawl under the ramp as the cars "loop" over him, allowing it to get to the second lane. At this point, the squirrel researchers are greatly encouraged, because this seems to prove that "under certain conditions, it IS POSSIBLE for a squirrel to get to the second lane intact." Yeah . . . but only because the researchers circumvented the actually existing forces present in the given environment that obviously would have prevented the desired outcome.

The researchers then notice a problem: in trying to get the squirrel from lane 2 to lane 3, the poor squirrel had a tendency to stay put out of abject but understandable FEAR of getting flattened under a tire of a car moving at 70 mph. Hmmmmm. They hadn't thought of that. So they had a helicopter come in and drop down some heavy concrete dividers that forced all oncoming traffic in lane 2 into lanes 1 and 4. Aha!!! What joy!! They noticed that when they did this, the squirrel "effortlessly" crossed lane 2. They immediately sent out a press release: Under "certain conditions" we have found that after "successfully negotiating" the route across lane 1, the test subject was able to move with little difficulty across lane 2. This undeniable fact proves that "it can be done."

For each lane, the researchers exercise their wonderful ingenuity in solving the following problem: how do we get the squirrel across the next succeeding lane without his getting squashed by oncoming cars? They were especially proud of this one: To cross lane lane 4 to lane 5 -- which was on the other side of a concrete divider -- they "repurposed" the helicopter that had been brought in earlier: they cleverly attached a harness to the squirrel and had the helicopter lift the critter up, across lane 4; in fact, they discovered that they could drop him right onto lane 7, thus greatly "amplifying and accelerating the process" of getting the squirrel from one side to the other. News was spreading quickly of their success.

They finally managed to get the critter completely over to the other side by setting up a wooden pole at the border of lane 8 and tying a long string to the top. They then "tethered" the squirrel to the string and had him swing past lane 8, Tarzan-like. Admittedly, they did have another researcher waiting on the other side, ready to catch the squirrel and untether him -- a decision that the researchers fear will be interpreted by those nasty, nasty, creationists and ID people as "making use of design within the experiment" but which the researchers are quite sure will not be taken seriously by anyone outside of the Squirrel Research lobby in academia. For the conclusion of the experiment is now writ large:

Even the most cynical skeptic will have to admit that it is possible for a squirrel to cross a busy 8-lane superhighway without getting hit by oncoming cars. In fact, "given the right conditions," it is a virtual certainty.

When the critics point out that design was not merely employed in the final step, but at practically EVERY step, by means of circumventing the normal lethal forces that would be arrayed against the creature's crossing the highway through the use of clever artifice -- i.e., design -- and, moreover, that in the absence of such artifice, it is ALWAYS the case that squirrels get squashed by cars when attempting to cross always-busy 8-lane superhighways, the researchers pretend that they have no idea what the critics are talking about -- "What do you mean? We just showed that UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS not only can a squirrel cross an 8-lane busy superhighway but that it is quite easy for it to do so, and that its chances of doing so -- UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS -- are practically 100%. After all, a famous Objectivist wrote that The "chances" that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions are 100%. Isn't it part of the squirrel's identity to scamper? And another Objectivist -- this one not so famous -- wrote something like "the critics are as dense as osmium, for ALL experiments employ design."

Sure. But valid experiments do not employ design for the purpose of excluding precisely those influences, forces, and conditions that would normally undercut the desired outcome, in the absence of the intelligent intervention of the experimenters. Michaelson did not design his experiment in such a way that he could "help things along" until he got a desired interference pattern from the "lumineferous aether." He set up his experiment in such a way that a negative result -- failure to find a pattern indicating an aether wind -- would be considered a valid and fair outcome. (He was so shocked by the outcome of his first experiment, that I believe he even repeated it, with better, more expensive, and more sensitive equipment -- and it still came out negative. When that happened, he didn't claim that "more research needs to be done to establish the existence of an aether wind." He realized that science had to abandon the idea of an aether).

Szostak's experiment does zero to establish the existence of a putative "RNA World" creating both proteins and DNA in one fell swoop. He and his team performed an designed engineering feat, and then mistakenly (or dishonestly) imputed that ability to nature itself. Without the intervention of Szostak, et al., even synthesized RNA becomes roadkill -- nature kills it.

The normal result of a squirrel trying to cross a very busy 8-lane superhighway is a flattened squirrel. The normal result of Szostak's RNA experiment is warm ponds of cross-linked, precipitated, stringy, useless RNA. (And RNA also has to be synthesized; it isn't found in nature.)

If the squirrel researchers wish to make claims about the high probability of a squirrel crossing an 8-lane superhighway, they ALSO must show that, left to its own devices, unaided by intelligent researchers, the squirrel itself, or nature itself, would provide something very similar to up-and-down ramps for the squirrel to get past lane 1, cement roadblocks to get past lane 2, helicopters, harnesses, wooden poles, sturdy rope, and a solid steel screw eye to attach the rope to.

Szostak, et al. have to do the same in their research.

For without those intelligent interventions by the researchers themselves, both squirrel and RNA will be nothing but roadkill.

[Brant Gaede]

When reason fails, words will do.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

To AA:

Are you aware the Michael Behe was demolished on the witness stand during the Dover (PA) trial. He was shown as foolish as is his hypothesis concerning intelligent design.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[AristotlesAdvance]

To AA:

Are you aware the Michael Behe was demolished on the witness stand during the Dover (PA) trial. He was shown as foolish as is his hypothesis concerning intelligent design.

Ba'al Chatzaf

No, Chatzaf, I was unaware that arguments regarding scientific theories are decided "true" or "untrue" in courts of law. When did that trend start?

Part of your malfunction is that you spend zero time reading primary sources with which you suspect you already disagree on an ideological level, and too much time reading trashy secondary sources like "The New Yorker."

Too busy? Or too afraid that you simply have no rational replies to a number of thorny problems in origins-of-life research that cannot be solved by invoking mathematical miracles?

[AristotlesAdvance]

7 minutes in, Dawkins admits that the genetic algorithm for "Me Thinks It Is Like A Weasel" is cheating (and by "cheating" he means "employing DESIGN for the sake of arriving at a predetermined goal"). He calls it "looking into the future." Everyone else calls it "teleology" or "deciding on a goal" ("goals" are all in the future).

Sure. Just identify what force, or what entity, in nature functions as the designed computer algorithm specifying the desired target sequence of "Methinks It Is Like A Weasel" and I'll be happy to grant that a Darwinian process of "blind search" -- plus the ability to REJECT those options that don't conform to the desired target sequence -- can lead to structures that appear to have been designed by intelligence, and do it in a relatively short amount of time. Ain't teleology wonderful?

Since Dawkins already admitted that his program is an instance of cheating -- employing a predetermined goal, and a program that would know which letters to retain in furtherance of the goal, and which letters to reject -- it is obviously irrelevant for abiogenesis, in which we know that the universe does not give chemicals a predetermined goal to move toward.

Dawkins is simply a bit sneakier than Sagan, who (most charmingly) simply waves his hand and blows off the whole problem of creating life from scratch. Dawkins first shows a computer program that might appear to the uninitiated that random choices can lead to complex and intelligible results (and it isn't until the end of the demo that he admits, coyly, that he's cheating by implanting the future goal -- the target phrase, plus the program -- toward which everything has been preordained to move), and then blows off the major problems in evolving a functional eye. He's hoping that his audience -- especially naive materialists and gullible types like you -- will unconsciously assume that if the "random" computer program that Dawkins has falsely claimed is "Darwinian" can arrive at a structure like a phrase from Shakespeare, then the same "Darwinian" process in nature can just as easily arrive a complex structure like a functioning eye.

The truth is that the bottom row of numbers on his monitor -- the one labeled "Random" -- is much closer to a true Darwinian process of random mutation. The middle row -- the one he labeled "Darwin" -- is supposed to be his version of "Natural Selection", but you can see immediately (and, again, Dawkins admits at 7 minutes) that such "selection" only works if it has an idea of what its goal is supposed to be. How did the middle row know what goal to move toward in selecting random numbers from the bottom row? Dawkins supplied it. Like all such examples, it is always the experimenter who provides the predetermined goal toward which the model is desired to move.

It's just pure stolen concept and intellectual dishonesty. I'm not surprised you're impressed by it.

[merjet]

Imagine a busy 8-lane superhighway. Imagine a squirrel on one side of the highway whom researchers "tag" for the purpose of determining if this squirrel can manage to get from one side of the highway to the other (without, of course, getting squashed by an oncoming car). We assume the superhighway is busy at all times of day and night.

LOL. Assume the roads are in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in non-urban areas.

[AristotlesAdvance]

Imagine a busy 8-lane superhighway. Imagine a squirrel on one side of the highway whom researchers "tag" for the purpose of determining if this squirrel can manage to get from one side of the highway to the other (without, of course, getting squashed by an oncoming car). We assume the superhighway is busy at all times of day and night.

LOL. Assume the roads are in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in non-urban areas.

ROFL!!

Now try actually observing reality. If the superhighway that real researchers confront when trying to move their critters from one side to the other were like an empty one in North Dakota, why must they always resort to intelligently-designed artifices for every lane to help the critters to the other side?

In reality, most natural forces are completely hostile to the formation of life. Even Francis Crick claimed that the gap between non-living chemicals and the simplest living organism was far greater than the gap between the simplest living organism and man. He understood that the superhighway that needed crossing was more like a 100-lane one with constantly moving, hi-speed traffic.

Advice to Objectivists: try to stop fantasizing about alternate realities where all physical forces are good, benign ones, that push along non-living matter into complex living organisms. Doesn't happen.

Though I expect very soon on this board to witness a resurgence of the old fallacy of spontaneous generation.

[George H. Smith]

Given sufficient time, do you think abiogenesis would be possible?

Given enough time, do you think that lots of monkeys typing randomly on lots of laptops could manage to create "Atlas Shrugged"?

It worked for the Bible.

Would you care to answer my question in a straightforward manner?

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Advice to Objectivists: try to stop fantasizing about alternate realities where all physical forces are good, benign ones, that push along non-living matter into complex living organisms. Doesn't happen.

Which Objectivists (or evolutionists in general) are you referring to?

Advice to AA: stop pulling statements out of your ass.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

7 minutes in, Dawkins admits that the genetic algorithm for "Me Thinks It Is Like A Weasel" is cheating (and by "cheating" he means "employing DESIGN for the sake of arriving at a predetermined goal"). He calls it "looking into the future." Everyone else calls it "teleology" or "deciding on a goal" ("goals" are all in the future).

In case you missed it, Dawkins' point is that complex sequences and structures need not be formed all at once. Natural selection, like his computer simulation, works in stages; it employs a filtering process and is therefore not "random" in the sense that Creationists use the word. His simulation was offered as an illustration of this process, not as some kind of definitive proof for evolution. The very fact that Dawkins acknowledges that some "cheating" is involved in this particular case indicates that he is not depending on it to make his entire case. He goes on to argue that evolution requires no such predetermined goal.

As I have noted before, you have ruled out all controlled experiments in this area, including artificial simulations, because all such experiments are designed to some extent. And you do so because your crackpot calculations have informed you in advance that abiogenesis is impossible. Perhaps you should write a book titled A Creationist Guide to A Priori Science: How to Dismiss Empirical Evidence Before You Even Know What It Is."

Ghs

[BaalChatzaf]

No, Chatzaf, I was unaware that arguments regarding scientific theories are decided "true" or "untrue" in courts of law. When did that trend start?

When the scientists for the plaintiff (the anti ID side) told the lawyers just what to ask Dr. Behe. He was deconstructed by molecular biologists. His claim that the flagellum of a bacteria (I forget exactly which species) was irreducibly complex was totally demolished. The case for the defense was so weak that Dr. Dembski, a PhD from Lehigh University and an ID-er declined to testify for the defense (the pro ID side).

Even the Judge, a Christian gentleman, a conservative and a Bush appointee agreed that the stuff that the ID-ers were trying to push in the Dove P.A. schools was not science. The Plaintiffs did a masterful job of showing up the Creation Institute as frauds and liars and their pro ID nonsense was at best pseudo science and at worst a lying scam.

The Panda ended up with his thumb up Darwin's Black Box.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[George H. Smith]

No, Chatzaf, I was unaware that arguments regarding scientific theories are decided "true" or "untrue" in courts of law. When did that trend start?

When the scientists for the plaintiff (the anti ID side) told the lawyers just what to ask Dr. Behe. He was deconstructed by molecular biologists. His claim that the flagellum of a bacteria (I forget exactly which species) was irreducibly complex was totally demolished. The case for the defense was so weak that Dr. Dembski, a PhD from Lehigh University and an ID-er declined to testify for the defense (the pro ID side).

Even the Judge, a Christian gentleman, a conservative and a Bush appointee agreed that the stuff that the ID-ers were trying to push in the Dove P.A. schools was not science. The Plaintiffs did a masterful job of showing up the Creation Institute as frauds and liars and their pro ID nonsense was at best pseudo science and at worst a lying scam.

The Panda ended up with his thumb up Darwin's Black Box.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Behe also gets sliced and diced in Finding Darwin's God, by Kenneth R. Miller -- a cell biologist and the author of several texts on evolution who also happens to be a theist. Here are some typical comments:

[behe] has dusted off the argument from design, spiffed it up with the terminology of modern biochemistry, and then applied it to the proteins and macromolecular machines that run the living cell. Once we've figured this out, we can ask the key question: Is there anything really so different about proteins and cells that makes the argument from design work better at their level than it does at the level of the organism? We'll address this question below, but as the reader may suspect, the argument from design is about to take another fall (p. 136).

...

Remember Behe's statement that "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional"? Well, there's just no other word for it -- that statement is wrong. What evolution does is to add parts that expand, improve, and sometimes completely refashion living systems. Once the expansion and remodeling is complete, every part of the final working system may indeed be necessary, just like the malleus, incus, and stapes [in the human ear]. That interlocking necessity does not mean that the system could not have evolved from a simpler version -- and in this case we know that is exactly what happened (p. 139).

...

As a cell biologist, I was particularly amused by {Behe's] suggestion that the complexity of the cilium is irreducible (p. 140)...What we actually see among cilia and flagella in nature is something entirely consistent with Darwin's call for numerous gradations from the simple to the complex. Once we have found a series of less complex, less intricate, differently organized flagella, the contention that this is an irreducibly complex phenomena has been successfully refuted (p. 143).

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

The "chances" that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions are 100%.

Sure. If only we were omniscient.

We don't need to be omniscient to know that things with a certain identity will function in a certain way under certain conditions, and that when all the necessary and sufficient conditions are present, the probability of the outcome is 100 percent. The purpose of evolutionary biology is to ascertain what those necessary and sufficient conditions were, and this doesn't require omniscience, either. So what the hell are you talking about?

So let's see:

One presumed Objectivist claims life would definitely arise from abiogenesis if only there were infinite time.

No one on OL that I know of has made this claim. I certainly didn't.

Now another presumed Objectivist claims we would see the truth of the above statement if only we had infinite knowledge of all possible conditions necessary for it to arise by means of abiogenesis.

No one has made this claim, or anything close to it, either.

You have to be one of the dumbest Creationists I have ever had the misfortune to encounter -- and we are talking about a very low bar here. If you are unable to read and understand even simple posts, then how do you expect anyone to take anything you say seriously?

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

While reviewing some literature on the Creationism debate, I happened across this statement by Duane Gish , former vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research:

We do not know how the Creator created, what processes He used, for He used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to creation as Special Creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative processes used by the Creator. (Quoted in Theodore Schick, Jr., and Lewis Vaughn, How to Think About Weird Things, p. 217.)

In other words, in place of explanations via natural processes, the Creationist says, Somehow, and science cannot tell us anything about this somehow.

Thus does the Creationist immunize himself against the same type of criticisms that he levels against naturalists, since it is impossible to apply any calculations of probability to a contentless somehow. Only a Creationist would regard this retreat into unintelligibility as a competing explanation to naturalism.

Ghs

[AristotlesAdvance]

The very fact that Dawkins acknowledges that some "cheating" is involved in this particular case indicates that he is not depending on it to make his entire case. He goes on to argue that evolution requires no such predetermined goal.

Then for the sake of keeping his demonstrations relevant to the point he is trying to make -- sound pedagogy, after all -- he should run a computer simulation that's actually like the evolutionary process he wants us to believe in. Run a simulation without a target sequence, and without a "filter" selecting letters by the standard of the target sequence, and see how far you get. Dawkins already admitted how far he'd get: nowhere.

His demonstration showed us that Darwinian processes work great in the presence of teleology: desired end-goals and a designed filter that accepts or rejects things according to the standard of the end-goal. No surprise there.

He needs to demonstrate that intelligible end results can be achieved without teleology -- without building into the experiment what the desired end goal ought to be, and without specifying to a filter what things it ought to accept and reject. He demonstrated no such thing. He showed us a bunch of illustrations of eyes, simple and complex, and would somehow have us believe that in the absence of The Big Dawkins In The Sky instructing evolution to use

As I have noted before, you have ruled out all controlled experiments in this area, including artificial simulations, because all such experiments are designed to some extent.

Nah. I've only ruled out dishonest experiments -- or (to put in a positive light) I've ruled out engineering feats that masquerade as experiments.

There are designed experiments that fairly permit the squirrel to attempt to cross the superhighway without helping him along at each step; if the critter manages to dodge traffic on its own and make it to the other side, then the experiment fairly demonstrates that "It can be done.". Conversely, if the critter gets squashed, then there's your answer: "it cannot be done." The point of an experiment is to try to establish the truth of the matter one way or the other. The Michaelson-Morley experiment is an example of that.

Then there are designed experiments that unfairly do not permit the squirrel to attempt to cross the superhighway without helping him along at each step: the researchers from the start are highly doubtful that the critter will manage to dodge traffic, so they help it along across every lane of traffic, employing clever engineering artifice to do so. When the critter makes it to the other side, the most you can validly say is "In the presence of cleverly designed engineering artifice, a squirrel can happily cross a busy multi-lane superhighway." That's it. You cannot leave out the "cleverly designed engineering artifice" bit because it obviously affected the outcome of the experiment (it didn't merely "affect" the outcome of the experiment, but pretty much determined it). The researchers must certainly not say "Proven: squirrels can cross multi-lane superhighways without getting hit by a car." At best, it's a lie by omission.

The truism that "all experiments are designed" doesn't mean the researcher gets to stage-manage events in a such a way so as to get the outcome he desires, and then claim his experiment was a success.