Mark wrote this, so I wrote this, so Mark wrote this. The upshot: Olson is still wrong about the role and function of Intelligent Design in biology. Let's find out why.
1. My first point, that sexual reproduction is not the be-all end-all of evolutionary theory, is indeed tangential, but still important, because it illuminates how misunderstandings crop up in these discussions. In fact, for over one billion years, sexual reproduction didn't exist. It is mutation, not sex, that is the engine of variation, according to the Neo-Darwinian view.
2. Olson repeats the idea that neither ID nor evolutionary biology discusses or predicts the time it would take to evolve organisms or features. Olson has raised this argument before, yet has ignored research into those very questions. (See here and here for examples. For others, simply Google the phrase "rate of evolution.")
3. Olson does not refute my contention that merely saying "that doesn't work" is no substitute for a theory, and, to mirror his language, the sets of "Darwin was wrong" and "ID is right" are not automatically joint. Much healthy disagreement occurs within the camp of those who do not see a guiding hand in the development of life on earth, and are busily hashing out the empirical and theoretical implications of their clashing scenarios. Eve Jablonka and Lynn Margulis, for example, question whether the rate of RM+NS is adequate to compass the range of biodiversity, yet neither is remotely close to the position that classical or Neo-Darwinian explanatory lackings are thus evidence of design. As you can see, the ID hypothesis and the lack-of-time hypothesis are anything but "isomorphic."
If my reasoning isn't already clear enough, consider an anecdote. Suppose a scientist is the first to discover the Mima Mounds, a seemingly organized and vast cluster of bumps on the landscape that, to some, bespeaks design. Let us also suppose that the scientist comes up with a theory: their origin is glacial. "Ah," says an onlooker, "but the last ice age was too long ago, and those bumps would have eroded to mere nubbins in the time since then." The scientist nods, until the onlooker says, "And, therefore, the mounds were created by divine agency. In fact, those statements are isomorphic."
Is the non sequitur now clear?
(I might add that mostly, ID isn't about time. It's about Irreducible Complexity, the idea that organisms can't evolve in principle. So Olson is even more wrong than he thinks.)
6 comments:
The anecdote involves time rather than size because that's the argument Olson was raising.
Anyhow, who are we to suggest that glaciers aren't intelligent agents?
Irreducible complexity, in my view (which I don't see as wrong), is the same as "time". The reason you don't think random processes produced your pants is because it would take too long for those random processes to occur. One of an inifinite number of monkeys will type Hamlet on the first go. You can calculate how long it will take a finite number of monkeys to type it. If the number of monkeys gets very small, then it will take a really, really long time. Hence, irreducible complexity s still about time.
And the existence of research into questions of the time for evolution to occur, being the crux of the ID question in my view, is exactly what the scientific community should be pointing to when it "confronts" ID. That is, to say ID is science, that is in fact "this question" (time to evolve), it is a good (fundamental question), and it's being studied.
The work on that question (which you linked) is a start not the end. None of that work is ready to predict, as in (your I think) previous example of whether the time for a cave fish to evolve to not having eyes, optic nerves, or optic centers in the brain might take or a more generic theory to predict how long, to pick an ID "hot" issue how long it would take for flagella to evolve.
Since it's time at the heart of the question (for flagella for example) the mechanisms of mutation are also key, not just the fact of mutation. ID, so far as I am aware, certainly does not deny mutation and evolution as occurring, just that the "given set of mechanisms" are insufficient to explain the data. And as nobody, ID or not, can answer the rate and mechanisms in any quantitative fashion, it's a he-said/she-said argument.
And to the last, the proposition is not "therefore the agent must be divine" but ends with the claim that it must be something else, not considered as yet.
Irreducible Complexity is not about time; it is about function and pathways. Think about the word "irreducible:" cannot be reduced or broken down. Consequently, it can have no evolutionary precursor by definition. As Behe writes,
"An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional" [emphasis added].
Dembski's clarification of the "irreducible core" likewise precludes the existence of any sort of precursor.
"A system performing a given basic function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system's basic, and therefore original, function. The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core of the system" [emphasis added].
There simply is no amount of time for the gradual accumulation of changes into the synthesis of a novel function, if Behe and Dembski are correct.
blogmaster,
You are correct that "deep time" is an extraordinarily long time--longer than most people realize. Life on earth has been around for about 3.5 billion years--time enough for quadrillions of generations of bacteria. A teaspoon of soil can contain 1 billion bacteria. The amount of diversity and development in just bacterial life over the eons has been staggering.
Intelligent design is creationism wrapped in a white lab coat.
beepbeep, then ID bought the lab coat at Costumes 'R Us. The amount of actual lab research going into ID, especially compared to its PR output, is laughably small.
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