The Toolbox argument against Intelligent Design

[Byblos]

Computers work with quasi randomness.

What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence.

“But sophistication, design, organization, etc. requires intelligence. “ is evidently false.

Does anyone else see what I see?

[PaulSacramento]

Let me disagree slightly with your statement.

40 years of scientific experiments studying the results of 'random mutation' (whatever that means) and 'natural selection' do show a very definitive tendency.

Oh, yes, I agree.
A "goal directedness" if you will.

[Philip]

Computers work with quasi randomness.

What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence.

“But sophistication, design, organization, etc. requires intelligence. “ is evidently false.

Does anyone else see what I see?

Of course - computers and algorithms are first produced and engineered by intelligent beings (humans!), along with their capabilities, parameters and functionalities - so, I'd say, a really bad use of an analogy by Nils!

[Byblos]

Computers work with quasi randomness.

What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence.

“But sophistication, design, organization, etc. requires intelligence. “ is evidently false.

Does anyone else see what I see?

Of course - computers and algorithms are first produced and engineered by intelligent beings (humans!), along with their capabilities, parameters and functionalities - so, I'd say, a really bad use of an analogy by Nils!

Intelligence simulating unitelligence which falsifies said intelligence by surpassing it in intelligence. I know who's on first but what's on second?

[abelcainsbrother]

The view of randomness in evolution is:
A mutation is caused by environmental factors, such as solar radiation.
That mutation, whatever it is, is a random one- there is no way to predict what that mutation will be.

Let me disagree slightly with your statement.

40 years of scientific experiments studying the results of 'random mutation' (whatever that means) and 'natural selection' do show a very definitive tendency.

“the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment or elimination of the activity of a protein is expected to be 100-1000 times the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that requires specific changes to a gene.”

These results of 40 years of scientific studies specifically observing what the Darwinian processes of 'random mutation' and 'natural selection' are capable of doing at the molecular level demonstrate that...
'random mutation' (or what we define as random mutation) and 'natural selection' by themselves are incapable of producing the structure and complexity that we observe in the DNA of life today and they are also incapable of producing the change and rate of change that we see in the fossil record.

This is not a philosophical assertion. This is a result of 40 years of scientific study specifically observing 'random mutation' and 'natural selection' in tens of thousands of generations of bacteria.

Even so,all the observations of 40 years of scientific study will prove is that you'll only see normal variation amongst the population of bacteria. So that what scientists are doing is observing in real time normal variation amongst the population of bacteria then claiming it evolved and we did not need scientists to prove normal variation amongst the population of bacteria to us.We can ourselves without being in a science lab look at any population and see normal variation amongst any population.Dogs are an example,we see much variety but all are still dogs,even if they cannot breed ie speciation.But also even in Chernobil bacteria adapted the ability to actually live in radiation and yet no evolution just normal variation amongst the population of bacteria. It is the same thing in a science lab - normal variation amongst the population of bacteria. So that life cannot evolve based on the evidence and even when life can adapt it still does not evolve and it remains in its population.But also we have found bacteria that is about 4 billion years old and that bacteria is still like the bacteria of today.

[Nils]

Computers work with quasi randomness.

What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence.

“But sophistication, design, organization, etc. requires intelligence. “ is evidently false.

Does anyone else see what I see?

Of course - computers and algorithms are first produced and engineered by intelligent beings (humans!), along with their capabilities, parameters and functionalities - so, I'd say, a really bad use of an analogy by Nils!

You are partly correct, Philip, Intelligence (human) simulating unintelligence (evolution) by another unintelligence (program/algorithm). But that unintelligence (program) creates knowledge that successfully competes with knowledge created by the intelligence (human).

Note that the knowledge the program creates is NOT built into the program (including capabilities, parameters and functionalities) from the beginning. The programmers didn’t know the knowledge the program came up with, a knowledge that in the future may expand to intelligence. This is a parallel to how an unintelligent natural program (evolution) created intelligence (human).
Nils

[Philip]

Computers work with quasi randomness.

What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence.

“But sophistication, design, organization, etc. requires intelligence. “ is evidently false.

Does anyone else see what I see?

Of course - computers and algorithms are first produced and engineered by intelligent beings (humans!), along with their capabilities, parameters and functionalities - so, I'd say, a really bad use of an analogy by Nils!

You are partly correct, Philip, Intelligence (human) simulating unintelligence (evolution) by another unintelligence (program/algorithm). But that unintelligence (program) creates knowledge that successfully competes with knowledge created by the intelligence (human).

Note that the knowledge the program creates is NOT built into the program (including capabilities, parameters and functionalities) from the beginning. The programmers didn’t know the knowledge the program came up with, a knowledge that in the future may expand to intelligence. This is a parallel to how an unintelligent natural program (evolution) created intelligence (human).
Nils

Nils, the obvious and immense problem you have is that what the program was able to create originated from and was totally dependent upon the already existing intelligent programmers that created it. The program nor the computers that ran it popped out of nothingness by themselves, nor could it create ANYTHING without what was made possible by humans. As once again, your analogy is like Byblos borrowed analogy of the bookcase full of books anchored to absolutely NOTHING - meaning, your argument likewise otherwise collapses!

[Nils]

Computers work with quasi randomness.

What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence.

“But sophistication, design, organization, etc. requires intelligence. “ is evidently false.

Does anyone else see what I see?

Of course - computers and algorithms are first produced and engineered by intelligent beings (humans!), along with their capabilities, parameters and functionalities - so, I'd say, a really bad use of an analogy by Nils!

You are partly correct, Philip, Intelligence (human) simulating unintelligence (evolution) by another unintelligence (program/algorithm). But that unintelligence (program) creates knowledge that successfully competes with knowledge created by the intelligence (human).

Note that the knowledge the program creates is NOT built into the program (including capabilities, parameters and functionalities) from the beginning. The programmers didn’t know the knowledge the program came up with, a knowledge that in the future may expand to intelligence. This is a parallel to how an unintelligent natural program (evolution) created intelligence (human).
Nils

Nils, the obvious and immense problem you have is that what the program was able to create originated from and was totally dependent upon the already existing intelligent programmers that created it. The program nor the computers that ran it popped out of nothingness by themselves, nor could it create ANYTHING without what was made possible by humans. As once again, your analogy is like Byblos borrowed analogy of the bookcase full of books anchored to absolutely NOTHING - meaning, your argument likewise otherwise collapses!

There are two separate aspects. On one hand the setup, i.e. the computers, the evolution algorithm, the parameters etc., the software and a goal or fitness criterium. These are all human made. On the other hand the results of the program run. It is by no means foreseen by the programmers but creates new knowledge, very often far beyond the capacity of any human being.
The equivalence for biological evolution is: The setup is the physical environment and self-replicating entities (with phenotypic variation, differential fitness, and heritability of fitness, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution). The algorithm is natural selection that automatically follows from the setup. The goal is survival. The result, new species for instance, is new knowledge or information. Knowledge that in no way is embedded in the setup.

In both cases knowledge and information is created in a trial and error process. In the computer case the programmer has to describe the goal but in the biological process the goal to survive is automatic. Only processes that has survival as a goal will survive. No godlike intervention is needed.

But this is of cource not the whole story. Creation of the Universe and of life are other parts.

Nils

[Philip]

Nils: It is by no means foreseen by the programmers but creates new knowledge, very often far beyond the capacity of any human being.

Irrelevant! There are many things man creates that go beyond his otherwise natural ability, that provides new knowledge. But that is only made possible by intelligent beings creating and applying their knowledge and ingenuity to a machine, tool or program that makes this possible. The cart does not pull the horse - nor does the cart invent itself or hook itself up to a horse by itself!

Wikipedia: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider and the most complex experimental facility ever built and the largest machine in the world ... Physicists hope that (it) will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity. So, this machine has the potential to answer questions and perform analysis that no human could."

But what made the LHC machine, its parts, its capabilities FIRST come into existence and provide it the abilities to do what it does? Are the results it will produce able to be produced by a mere human? Course not! But what came FIRST???!!! It matters not one bit that results are unforeseen or arrived at via a machine that has capabilities beyond a human. Really, Nils, you are grasping at straws with not-well-thought-out analogies!

[PaulSacramento]

One thing:
Evolution explains the CHANGES that are observed in nature.
It does NOT address HOW life started or even WHY living organisms CAN and DO change.
Its imply address HOW does changes can happen and HOW those changes CAN lead to evolution in the species and even evolution to a different species.

[Nils]

For me the strongest arguments against the adequacy of Darwinistic Evolution come from 40 years of experimentation demonstrating what random mutation and natural selection can and cannot do at the molecular level.

In 2010 Michael Behe wrote an interesting paper for The Quarterly Review of Biology titled “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/96cf/d ... 1536717721

From the Abstract of the Article

Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function; therefore, it is of
basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under
particular circumstances. Because mutation occurs at the molecular level, it is necessary to
examine the molecular changes produced by the underlying mutation in order to assess whether
a given adaptation is best considered as a gain, loss, or modification of function. Although that
was once impossible, the advance of molecular biology in the past half century has made it
feasible. In this paper, I review molecular changes underlying some adaptations, with a particular
emphasis on evolutionary experiments with microbes conducted over the past four decades.
I show that by far the most common adaptive changes seen in those examples are due to the loss
or modification of a pre-existing molecular function, and I discuss the possible reasons for the
prominence of such mutations.

From the Conclusion

Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function. Therefore, it is of basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under particular circumstances. The results of decades of experimental laboratory evolution studies strongly suggest that, at the molecular level, loss-of-FCT and diminishing
modification-of-function adaptive mutations predominate.

FCTs as defined by Behe are:

In this review, I focus on adaptive evolution by gain, loss, or modification of what I term Functional Coded elemenTs (FCTs). An FCT is a discrete but not necessarily contiguous region of a gene that, by means of its nucleotide sequence, influences the production, processing, or biological activity of a particular nucleic acid or protein, or its specific binding to another molecule.

A high level overview of Behe's article can be found here:
https://evolutionnews.org/2010/12/micha ... ule_of_ad/

Here are a couple of key points

” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment or elimination of the activity of a protein is expected to be 100-1000 times the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that requires specific changes to a gene.”

In short, the logical outcome of Behe’s finding is that some process other than natural selection and random mutation must be generating new FCTs. If Darwinian evolution is at work, it tends to remove FCTs much faster than it creates them — something else must be generating the information for new FCTs.

The bottom line is forty years of evolutionary experiments have demonstrated that at the molecular level, the Darwinistic processes of random mutation and natural selection are incapable of producing either the complexity and structure that we find in the DNA of life today or the changes that we find in the fossil record.

I have no problem with Bele’s article. But I have a problem with your interpretation. Why do you leave out the rest of the conclusion:
“In retrospect, this conclusion is readily understandable from our knowledge of the structure of genetic systems, and is concisely summarized by the first rule of adaptive evolution. Evolution has myriad facets, and this one is worthy of some notice.” [italics added by me]

Why do you cite a Discovery Institute article that misinterprets the article (without mentioning the source, Discovery Institute, which is the headquarter of the Intelligent Design movement).
If what you say is a generally accepted opinion then the problem for evolution would be widely described and analysed in hundreds of scientific articles and in current books on evolution and I don’t find anything about it in Wikipedia for instance. Do you?
Nils

[abelcainsbrother]

For me the strongest arguments against the adequacy of Darwinistic Evolution come from 40 years of experimentation demonstrating what random mutation and natural selection can and cannot do at the molecular level.

In 2010 Michael Behe wrote an interesting paper for The Quarterly Review of Biology titled “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/96cf/d ... 1536717721

From the Abstract of the Article

Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function; therefore, it is of
basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under
particular circumstances. Because mutation occurs at the molecular level, it is necessary to
examine the molecular changes produced by the underlying mutation in order to assess whether
a given adaptation is best considered as a gain, loss, or modification of function. Although that
was once impossible, the advance of molecular biology in the past half century has made it
feasible. In this paper, I review molecular changes underlying some adaptations, with a particular
emphasis on evolutionary experiments with microbes conducted over the past four decades.
I show that by far the most common adaptive changes seen in those examples are due to the loss
or modification of a pre-existing molecular function, and I discuss the possible reasons for the
prominence of such mutations.

From the Conclusion

Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function. Therefore, it is of basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under particular circumstances. The results of decades of experimental laboratory evolution studies strongly suggest that, at the molecular level, loss-of-FCT and diminishing
modification-of-function adaptive mutations predominate.

FCTs as defined by Behe are:

In this review, I focus on adaptive evolution by gain, loss, or modification of what I term Functional Coded elemenTs (FCTs). An FCT is a discrete but not necessarily contiguous region of a gene that, by means of its nucleotide sequence, influences the production, processing, or biological activity of a particular nucleic acid or protein, or its specific binding to another molecule.

A high level overview of Behe's article can be found here:
https://evolutionnews.org/2010/12/micha ... ule_of_ad/

Here are a couple of key points

” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment or elimination of the activity of a protein is expected to be 100-1000 times the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that requires specific changes to a gene.”

In short, the logical outcome of Behe’s finding is that some process other than natural selection and random mutation must be generating new FCTs. If Darwinian evolution is at work, it tends to remove FCTs much faster than it creates them — something else must be generating the information for new FCTs.

The bottom line is forty years of evolutionary experiments have demonstrated that at the molecular level, the Darwinistic processes of random mutation and natural selection are incapable of producing either the complexity and structure that we find in the DNA of life today or the changes that we find in the fossil record.

I have no problem with Bele’s article. But I have a problem with your interpretation. Why do you leave out the rest of the conclusion:
“In retrospect, this conclusion is readily understandable from our knowledge of the structure of genetic systems, and is concisely summarized by the first rule of adaptive evolution. Evolution has myriad facets, and this one is worthy of some notice.” [italics added by me]

Why do you cite a Discovery Institute article that misinterprets the article (without mentioning the source, Discovery Institute, which is the headquarter of the Intelligent Design movement).
If what you say is a generally accepted opinion then the problem for evolution would be widely described and analysed in hundreds of scientific articles and in current books on evolution and I don’t find anything about it in Wikipedia for instance. Do you?
Nils

Do you go by what people say or evidence because regardless of what they claim we can look at their evidence and see that adaptation does not cause any kind of life to evolve.They claim that adaptation is one of many facets of evolution but have no evidence to back it up.Even when bacteria adapted to live in hostile conditions such as Chernobyl,or eskimoes adapting to live in the extreme cold they did not evolve and they remained in their population so that they can never evolve.If they claim it causes life to evolve they MUST prove it and not just say it.

[DBowling]

For me the strongest arguments against the adequacy of Darwinistic Evolution come from 40 years of experimentation demonstrating what random mutation and natural selection can and cannot do at the molecular level.

In 2010 Michael Behe wrote an interesting paper for The Quarterly Review of Biology titled “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/96cf/d ... 1536717721

From the Abstract of the Article

Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function; therefore, it is of
basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under
particular circumstances. Because mutation occurs at the molecular level, it is necessary to
examine the molecular changes produced by the underlying mutation in order to assess whether
a given adaptation is best considered as a gain, loss, or modification of function. Although that
was once impossible, the advance of molecular biology in the past half century has made it
feasible. In this paper, I review molecular changes underlying some adaptations, with a particular
emphasis on evolutionary experiments with microbes conducted over the past four decades.
I show that by far the most common adaptive changes seen in those examples are due to the loss
or modification of a pre-existing molecular function, and I discuss the possible reasons for the
prominence of such mutations.

From the Conclusion

Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function. Therefore, it is of basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under particular circumstances. The results of decades of experimental laboratory evolution studies strongly suggest that, at the molecular level, loss-of-FCT and diminishing
modification-of-function adaptive mutations predominate.

FCTs as defined by Behe are:

In this review, I focus on adaptive evolution by gain, loss, or modification of what I term Functional Coded elemenTs (FCTs). An FCT is a discrete but not necessarily contiguous region of a gene that, by means of its nucleotide sequence, influences the production, processing, or biological activity of a particular nucleic acid or protein, or its specific binding to another molecule.

A high level overview of Behe's article can be found here:
https://evolutionnews.org/2010/12/micha ... ule_of_ad/

Here are a couple of key points

” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment or elimination of the activity of a protein is expected to be 100-1000 times the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that requires specific changes to a gene.”

In short, the logical outcome of Behe’s finding is that some process other than natural selection and random mutation must be generating new FCTs. If Darwinian evolution is at work, it tends to remove FCTs much faster than it creates them — something else must be generating the information for new FCTs.

The bottom line is forty years of evolutionary experiments have demonstrated that at the molecular level, the Darwinistic processes of random mutation and natural selection are incapable of producing either the complexity and structure that we find in the DNA of life today or the changes that we find in the fossil record.

I have no problem with Bele’s article. But I have a problem with your interpretation. Why do you leave out the rest of the conclusion:
“In retrospect, this conclusion is readily understandable from our knowledge of the structure of genetic systems, and is concisely summarized by the first rule of adaptive evolution. Evolution has myriad facets, and this one is worthy of some notice.” [italics added by me]

I have no problem with the rest of the conclusion that you quote.

And nothing in your quote conflicts with the conclusion:
"In short, the logical outcome of Behe’s finding is that some process other than natural selection and random mutation must be generating new FCTs. If Darwinian evolution is at work, it tends to remove FCTs much faster than it creates them — something else must be generating the information for new FCTs."

Why do you cite a Discovery Institute article that misinterprets the article (without mentioning the source, Discovery Institute, which is the headquarter of the Intelligent Design movement).
If what you say is a generally accepted opinion then the problem for evolution would be widely described and analysed in hundreds of scientific articles and in current books on evolution and I don’t find anything about it in Wikipedia for instance. Do you?

I quote a Discovery Institute article, because Michael Behe (the author of the The Quarterly Review of Biology article in question) is a member of the Discovery Institute.
And the Discovery Institute article accurately represents the position of the author, Michael Behe.

[Nils]

Nils: It is by no means foreseen by the programmers but creates new knowledge, very often far beyond the capacity of any human being.

Irrelevant! There are many things man creates that go beyond his otherwise natural ability, that provides new knowledge. But that is only made possible by intelligent beings creating and applying their knowledge and ingenuity to a machine, tool or program that makes this possible. The cart does not pull the horse - nor does the cart invent itself or hook itself up to a horse by itself!

Wikipedia: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider and the most complex experimental facility ever built and the largest machine in the world ... Physicists hope that (it) will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity. So, this machine has the potential to answer questions and perform analysis that no human could."

OK, I have to be more specific. What I referred to is the ability of creative intelligence.(I wrote in #29: “What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence”)
LHC is a physcial experiment with enormous amouts of computer power but the algorithms are well known and the computers could be substituted by humans even if that would take eons of time. The computers are only needed to speed up the process. The genetic/evolutionary computer process is in some way a search for new algorithms, algorithms that are completely unknown to the programmers beforehand. These types of program are used and find knowledge that isn't available to humans in any other way. If you want I can descibe it in detail.

But what made the LHC machine, its parts, its capabilities FIRST come into existence and provide it the abilities to do what it does? Are the results it will produce able to be produced by a mere human? Course not! But what came FIRST???!!! It matters not one bit that results are unforeseen or arrived at via a machine that has capabilities beyond a human. Really, Nils, you are grasping at straws with not-well-thought-out analogies!

LHC isn’t a good example to compare with genetic programming. I am not talking about capabilities regarding computing speed but of intelligence.
Nils

[Byblos]

Nils: It is by no means foreseen by the programmers but creates new knowledge, very often far beyond the capacity of any human being.

Irrelevant! There are many things man creates that go beyond his otherwise natural ability, that provides new knowledge. But that is only made possible by intelligent beings creating and applying their knowledge and ingenuity to a machine, tool or program that makes this possible. The cart does not pull the horse - nor does the cart invent itself or hook itself up to a horse by itself!

Wikipedia: "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider and the most complex experimental facility ever built and the largest machine in the world ... Physicists hope that (it) will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity. So, this machine has the potential to answer questions and perform analysis that no human could."

OK, I have to be more specific. What I referred to is the ability of creative intelligence.(I wrote in #29: “What I know is that computer algorithms mimicking biological evolution and using quasi randomness can generate knowledge that is beyond human intelligence”)
LHC is a physcial experiment with enormous amouts of computer power but the algorithms are well known and the computers could be substituted by humans even if that would take eons of time. The computers are only needed to speed up the process. The genetic/evolutionary computer process is in some way a search for new algorithms, algorithms that are completely unknown to the programmers beforehand. These types of program are used and find knowledge that isn't available to humans in any other way. If you want I can descibe it in detail.

But what made the LHC machine, its parts, its capabilities FIRST come into existence and provide it the abilities to do what it does? Are the results it will produce able to be produced by a mere human? Course not! But what came FIRST???!!! It matters not one bit that results are unforeseen or arrived at via a machine that has capabilities beyond a human. Really, Nils, you are grasping at straws with not-well-thought-out analogies!

LHC isn’t a good example to compare with genetic programming. I am not talking about capabilities regarding computing speed but of intelligence.
Nils

Then let me ask you this, what is required in order to determine intelligence?