I’m moving my household and self, and lovely partner, over the next two months. I might pop up here now and then or not. I’ll return with a backlog and will post poste haste!
Monthly Archives: June 2007
FUDD
Alright, I waded through Behe’s Edge of Evolution.
It provides no positive argument. At all. Counting here its argument from incredulity just for what it is: what biologists can’t readily explain to Behe’s satisfaction must allow for some other explanation. His acceptance of some features of evolution turns out to be complete non-acceptance because he’s enthused by the presumably magical cause at nearly the lowest level, the level everything above it developmentally biological rests upon, so-to-speak. If he has an idea about a superior explanation he offers it nowhere in his book.
Behe, from his Amazon blog. “Like Coyne, Carroll simply overlooks observational evidence that goes against Darwinian views.”
The biologist’s understanding of biological development may come to views that refine or overturn Darwin, but, when this happens, biologists will apprehend a demonstrably superior expanation of how this biological development occurs in nature. Behe hasn’t offered anything explanatory at all.
Behe: “That data demonstrates random mutation doesn’t explain the elegance of cellular systems.”
Okay, said elegant systems are explained by what theory of Behe’s?
By the way, pragmatically, the hallmark of design is anticipation of the prospective result of agency-in-application-to-a-result. Where there is design there is likely to exist evidence of anticipation. This allows us to discern the marvelous apparent undesigned representational veracity of the cloud looking like a bunny rabbit from a designed drawing of a bunny rabbit. Consider what cognitive features anticipation, thus design, are predicated by, contingent upon. You may arrive at a thrilling insight.
On July 1 Richard Dawkins demolishes Behe in the NYT Book Review pointing out that his central hypothesis has already been subjected to definitive experimentation.
But let’s follow Behe down his solitary garden path and see where his overrating of random mutation leads him. He thinks there are not enough mutations to allow the full range of evolution we observe. There is an “edge,†beyond which God must step in to help. Selection of random mutation may explain the malarial parasite’s resistance to chloroquine, but only because such micro-organisms have huge populations and short life cycles. A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of mutational raw materials.
If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test of Behe’s theory, what would you do? You’d take a wild species, say a wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that chivies rabbits underground: let’s call it a Jack Russell terrier.
Read the review for the astonishing payoff!
Filed under science
POST-MODERN PERRINO
Usually a politically oriented posting is posted to Diggeracity, where I rant and rave to blow off steam. However, I offer a clipping of Dana Perrino, Deputy White House Press Secretary, addressing questions and follow-ups about this week’s odd assertion from the office of the Vice President that, in effect, the VP is in a constituionally favored position to opt out of oversight.
I’ve set in bold several parts of Perrino’s unintentionally humorous assaults on logic and language. Her attempt to explain is transcendently convoluted. (She’s not the brightest bulb on the block and this combines with what she is compelled–by her handlers–to force feed to the WH press.) Also, I’ve created several footnotes to clarify several points about the hidden agenda.
June 26; moved to DIGGERACITY <> Bold, Bald, Barking
Filed under current events
WITHOUT A TRACE
I’ve been trudging through the commentaries on Behe and his new book. This is exhausting. I know how it ends.
In a nutshell, Behe has accepted all but the remarkable causal supposition of modern evolutionary explanation. This rejected supposition in sum is that the natural evolutionary mechanics, especially random mutation, are commensurate with the results of biological complexity.
This public thrashing ends with Behe being taken to task for re-introducing a God of the gaps. This time those gaps are found between the researchable landscape of biology and the non-researchable landscape that supposes a designer’s intervention.
John Coyne: What has Behe now found to resurrect his campaign for ID? It’s rather pathetic, really. Basically, he now admits that almost the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is true: evolution, natural selection, common ancestry. His one novel claim is that the genetic variation that fuels natural selection–mutation–is produced not by random changes in DNA, as evolutionists maintain, but by an Intelligent Designer. That is, he sees God as the Great Mutator.
At this late stage of the ID instigation it should come as no surprise that Behe’s argument cannot escape fatal errors. After all, he’s utilizing a conception, design he’s defined a priori solely for the purpose of arguing it to be true post facto. In doing this he’s required–of himself–to create a tortuous argument that is both post-scientific and illogical.
I latch upon the post-scientific because regardless of the fatal flaws in Behe’s argument, we know it ends with his necessarily pointing in the direction of a supernatural intervention able to penetrate nature without leaving any trace. I assume the reason the ID researchers don’t go after any material facts about the supposed intervention is that they themselves assume their designer works without leaving evidence. Thus: post-science.
Arguments against ID are worthwhile and the best ones leave no valid ID leftover in their wake, yet all such arguments strike me as red herrings in the context of the supernatural supposition. It occurred to me, knowing in advance that the speculative literature about the ‘super-nature’ of the designer is barren, that the term design itself rests on an anthropomorphic assumption. We understand that something is designed because we have only human examples of processes of design and this is because the process of design itself results from human intentionality and the implementation of an operational intention to plan out the making of something. In other words, for example, design is an enactment of a particular human consciousness, so to speak of its particularity is also to recognize that short of this instrumental consciousness all other enactments in nature are instances of building, not design. Spiders build their webs. The spider doesn’t design and then build the web.
But, this is only supposed. Design is conceptualized clearly as a matter of describing what is expected to be evidence of observable elements of the process of design. This underlines design being a term about human activity, and a term defined in its own terms to be so. The ID crowd might come up with a new term to at least puncture the language game.
That they do not highlights the central importance of the anthropomorphic conceit, (reversed as: “in the image of God.”) This makes sense in terms of the language regime: a super-human consciousness is able to design just like conventional human consciousness does. God may use the greatest CAD workstation ever created, is an inveterate tinkerer, and is able to employ the most exquisite heuristics known to God and man alike.
But, all this is done with no trace of the intervention and penetration into concrete nature. My own sense, besides that this tracking of assumptions to where they must begin reveals the assumptions to be magical and reflexive nonsense, is that there cannot be any post-science about the super-nature of a creator if there is no trace of this creator’s, as it were, implementation.
To me, the design inference is unsupportable simply because of this anthropomorphic conceit. Ask yourself how one could infer a process of design that is untraceable to the designer? Also, why can’t we get into the head of God, or into the spider’s head?
Consider too that the evidence for design in man created examples is not complexity alone but is rather the evidence of the process of design; planning, documentation of trial and error, supplemental tools, recipes, blueprints, staged elements, and all other types of necessary instrumentality, etc.
Filed under science
BEHEMaTH
Post-creationist Michael Behe has a new book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, and I’ll be adding to my comments here over the next few days. I am not in any way qualified to evaluate the book’s technical argument and ty\he arguments of Behe’s critics unless all such arguments are couched in terms a very intelligent layperson can deal with. Over the many years of my own interest in the whole controversy there have been plenty of those kinds of arguments. Alas, Behe, even if he has attempted to write for intelligent people, has not made any arguments that I am able to analyze and evaluate as being secure in simply the non-technical terms they articulate. On the other hand, others have beat down his arguments in terms I can understand.
This said, no intelligent design proponent has addressed the central question-begging feature of their hypotheses at all. If I split this central feature in two, one of the sides would be meta-biology and would be concerned with how anyone could provide a propositional argument, operationalize it, and then verify the method and argument via which inferences about design could be made from the facts of biology.
The other half is similar but would be defined by a philosophical argument able to ramify a truth claim, or claims, about the same subject matter, albeit this would fall short of a biological hypothesis, and would be only an argument in the domain of the meta-philosophy of science. (Although there could also be a theological argument, I have no idea how one would discern and implicate a warrant for a truth claim in a theological argument.) Obviously such argument-critical propositions, operations, hypothesizing, and claims all have to be true enough. This leads, as I’m inclined to sense a core problem, to a single question: whether the agency of a designer operates wholly from within nature, or, not.
The latter form of argument, with its implicit supernaturalistic supposition, has not been adequately argued anywhere. I would go as far to suggest it cannot be argued successfully until a trace of instrumental agency, regardless of whether it is generated ‘outside of nature,’ is discovered. Without this discovery, all arguments of the latter type are infected by supposing the conclusion is equal to the first term of the argument: the designer is the only explanation because design is self-explanatory; design explains design; common form: complexity implies design.
In the former case, a wholly philosophical naturalistic argument ‘from design’ imposes naturalistic requisites. My own sense is this argument also is required to be dragged back to cosmological ‘first things’ because any argument plugged in elsewhere simply begs the question of at what point of natural development it is necessarily first instantiated. Clearly this eventually requires such an argument to be made about the very first developmental events being designed.
No sound naturalistic argument of this sort has been made outside of the encumbered deistic supposition; and that idea is only supposed. It suffers from the same problem as the supernaturalistic supposition. It supposes its terms and then sets out to take those suppositions as being true.
Filed under science
THE FAT GUY SANG
…and it is over; on TV at least.
There’s nothing Sopranos fans can do about the ending now. The end is past near. Auteur and honcho David Chase surprised all of his show’s viewers, whether they were low, middle, or high brow, and swept away every last piece of speculation that the Sopranos would be snuffed out via some kind of righteous moral or nihilistic satisfaction. At the end T sat rather than stood with his biological family, rather than his ‘blood family’ and contemplated the menu of a decidedly middle road hash joint.
Who’s to say what Chase thought to himself as he watched the final cut. Those thoughts would be surely interesting but they themselves draw out speculation without any prospect of return on my own many-years-long investment. Maybe it’s enough to speculate that Chase’s final act of reflexivity, tattooing as it did his own superior, God-like role over the drawn out machinations of Soprano-world, put the entire audience in their reflexive resting place.
To resist a Conradian truth makes Chase a Beckett for our cabled times. Several things are clear enough in the draft of T’s persistence: he’ll kill some more, sweat domestic cash flow, worry over his kids, and, bribe Carm until a new McMansion is required to store it all.
If this ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’ flow was telescoped at all, it was at the moment Tony had his callow psychedelic insight, “I get it!” Yes, the best delusions are illusions and they cover everything like a blanket or six feet of cold dirt.
Meanwhile, Chase reviewed the contradictions which never became conflicts. Of course this was one of the points of the show. So, Phil’s big head gets reduced, Tony imagines how helpful a lawyer or two in the family will be, and, there’s nothing like some sleek German steel to disabuse a confused son of his notion to kill people overseas, rather than, say, someday, in New Jersey.
If I have a novel, psychologizing sense, it’s this: if there’s a mythic modeling going on, it’s about the badness riveted to any desire to surpass the Joneses. There’s not much to be differentiated between thuggery in North New Jersey, on the cripps and bloods’ territory, in the board rooms of Enron and Tyco, or in the West Wing. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and the underlings pick up the pieces.
Paulie’s miniature crisis of conscience was telling. Aiming to serve but also survive, I couldn’t help but see the strains of the feudal ideal deployed against the incoming rockets of fate, lapses of attention, degenerating brains cells, court intrigue, catalytic converters perched on dry tinder leaves, decits, betrayals, snitches and cold professionalism. Perhaps the family struggles more to ease the wages of want more than the wages of sin.
No, it seemed the point was to squash the transcendent in a penultimate humdrum anti-ending.
Unforgettable: where the secrets are never surely kept, always subject to being let loosed, always remembered, never perishable where everything else can be killed.
If necessary. To protect the franchise.
Filed under personal
WITNESS
This is a first sports post. …gotta let it out, it being elation. I’m first a baseball fan but basketball is my favorite sport to watch on the tv. Last night the Cavs brought a Cleveland team to a pro championship series for only the third time since a Cleveland team actually reigned as champion, (the Browns in 1964.)
For the past few days I’ve waded into the b-ballosphere and read about how terrible the Cavs are despite the King of pearls at their center. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance that arises in my reading the harsh critiques rendered by pro and lay basketball expert alike. Somehow, it would seem, a mediocre team in an awful conference won 50 out of 82 regular season games, 12 out of 16 playoff games, beat the Spurs 2 out of 2 times in the regular season, and did this all while surrounding LeBron with terrible role players whose greatest talent, evidently, is to only appear as if they’re actually a good defensive team.
Many also commented on how average to sucky is coach Mike Brown. Kudos were reserved for LeBron, the noisy homers who fill up The Q, and, after a lights out unveiling over the last ten days, for Daniel Gibson.
Moving on to the Spurs, the Cavaliers are held out as so much cannon fodder. The Spurs are purportedly the exact template of a team able to strip the glow of the Cavs’ success away, leaving only a pearl and a bunch of crap to stand naked to the world.
Now, I’m not an expert, but it seems the Western Conference finalist lost the finals to the Heat last year. Well, I know I’m right about at least this! Conclusion, stranger stuff could happen.
But how? The b-ballosphere reached a consensus last night after the Pistons loss. LeBron had two great games and the Pistons had five terrible games. The Pistons allowed the Cavs to beat them because they couldn’t be bothered to make gimme shots against the Cav’s overrated D. And, Prince was awful the whole series. The Pistons gave away their advantage in experience and their play was over-loaded with anxious emotions when it wasn’t fragmenting into chaos.
It would seem many of the experts reasoned that all the Cavs had to do was show up and let LeBron will the team to remain to the final horn while the Pistons freaked out. At what? The low level of competition?
Filed under play
PINCH ME, PLEASE PINCH KEN HAM
The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.
It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.
The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded. I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.
Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.
Unfortunately, Brownback obviously doesn’t recognize, perhaps is unable to recognize, the simple logical flaws in his string of suppositions. On the face of his editorial, there is a measured reasonableness. Yet, even the slightest scratch of the surface reveals a collision not of fact so much as of propositions.
Biologists would tomorrow gather to study the phenomena of divine or intelligent design if there were phenomena to actually study. The mechanisms of design are only excluded because they haven’t materialized. Such phenomena aren’t prevented from materializing at a future point should they exist and should they be found.
