I believe Collins has already described the difference between “atheistic” evolution and “theistic” evolution.
As for the integration of the concept “logos” as you apply it versus anyone else’s approach - - I must confess it is above my pay grade.
This is the end of the series and I still do not see where you determi8ned that the genetic code is not language. It does communicate information, so it is a language. If it were just chemistry, then the chemistry of my body would be different from the chemistry of yours, but it is not. The chemicals in the bodies of every human being is the same. Only are DNA is different.
That makes it a “natural” language which seems a contradiction in terms because language is associated with thinking, and nature doe not think. However computers tell us that one does not have to think to use language and living things, as opposed to purely physical things are rational in that they have nervous systems.
Finally the universe is rational because it was created by a rational Being for rational purposes without which it could not exist and without which humans could not exist.
I just read a great article that does connect evolution with changing ecology, "The Rise of the Memmals" in the Scientific American, June, 2016, pp-28-35. The authors are not biologists, but paleontologists, and fail to make the theoretical and practical connection between ecology with genetic change.
This is not the end of the series.
Is there a typo here? First you say the article “…does connect evolution with changing ecology…” - - then you say the authors “fail to make the … connection between ecology … [and] genetic change…”
So which is it?
Important Note: I like your point that machines (and we don’t have to mean computers … it could be an old punch card fabric weaving machine!) use language … and they can’t think.
But the problem is who wrote the language? Humans wrote the languages that machines use.
So … must we conclude that someone had to write the ‘language’ that we might say is in the genetic code?
Speaking of the most basic substance and your propensity to describe hypotheses as arguments, what ID argument is consistent with the fact that peptidyl transferase is a ribozyme?
And even more importantly, why did Meyer misinform his readers and tell them that peptidyl transferase is a protein in his book? Why ws that misinformation neither acknowledged nor corrected? That’s the single strongest piece of evidence supporting the RNA World hypothesis!
Yet there’s no claim nor even a suggestion of “proven science.” Why do you put something that the authors didn’t write in quotes?
Statements such as:
“Since then, the field has advanced considerably and now includes the aqueous synthesis of RNA nucleotides.[30] Condensation of these nucleotides can also be achieved under plausibly prebiotic conditions promoted by various means, including divalent cations, clay or lipid surfaces, and solute concentration by freezing conditions. Our model of pre-life…”
are intended to impute proven or at the very least, well researched science that has provided a model of pre-life and the erroneous view that life evolved from inorganics that somehow also evolved into molecules needed for life. Such statements are plainly wrong.
I understand your predilection for arguments and personal attacks, so I will not add to my comments or indulge you in arguments.
The quote you offered simply lists data that are consistent with the hypothesis. It is perfectly reasonable and doesn’t get within a country mile of the “proven science” that you offered as a quote. Why would you put quotation marks around something that wasn’t actually written?
Just a late note on Sy’s “whether ID sees design the way I do”, that is as totally distinct from the question of instantiation. Here is a lengthy quote from a recent interview by William Dembski - noting that it reflects the position since the beginning of ID (though it does not reflect the constantly cited criticisms of ID here as well as elsewhere):
“Design” can be a confusing word in these discussions, because historically it has been put in opposition to nature. Things can achieve their form or structure because it is in their nature to do so—thus, they do it internally, as when an acorn grows into an oak tree. On the other hand, things can achieve their form or structure because an external efficient cause acts to bring it about, as when pieces of wood require an external technological agent to form a ship. This distinction goes back at least to Aristotle, who thus contrasted phusis (nature) with technē (which we translate “design,” but is also the word from which we get “technology”).
Now, my point in No Free Lunch, The Design Revolution, and elsewhere is that ID need not be identified with the design-side of this Aristotelian distinction. And the reason I give is that the materialists have confused the nature-side of this Aristotelian distinction. If nature is understood in materialist and reductionist terms, as is common these days, then we have a far more impoverished view of nature than the ancients had.
Moreover, if we treat design as the set-theoretic complement of this impoverished view of nature, then we really have a much broader concept of design, one that certainly encompasses the external-designer view, but one that also allows for an internalist or immanent teleology. ID, as I’ve argued, is compatible with either of these approaches. What distinguishes ID is the detectability of design qua real teleology in nature. The precise nature of that teleology is logically downstream.
Jon, doesn’t your phrasing here (and Eddie’s obsession with “official” positions of the ID movement) give away the whole game–of portraying theological politics as science? What I see is that you try to bizarrely portray “ID” as some sort of person, instead of simply articulating a testable hypothesis that stands on its own.
Do any truly scientific organizations take official positions on scientific controversies? Don’t they let science (empirical testing of hypotheses) resolve them?
Note that scientific organizations do take positions on political matters, so I’m not saying that scientific organizations don’t take any positions at all.
Not at all, of course. I suggested earlier in the thread a conception of design, and Sy questioned whether it was seeing things the same way as ID people do. Paul Nelson having not rejoined the thread, and my coming across this recent statement by Dembski, it seemed to answer Sy’s question.
It is, of course, a philosophical position rather than a scientific one - but both scientific and philosophical views are (as you are well aware) only ever held by - people.
But you’re welcome to turn the question back to your usual culture wars stance, only don’t expect me to get involved with that.
“It” in your sentence being “a conception of design,” or the whole of ID?
Ben
You have only to read my post of 11 days ago to see that I presented a philosophical distinction to Sy, in the context of theology, related to BioLogos Evolutionary Creation. Since I did not mention or reference Intelligent Design at all, you should easily be able to reason your way to the answer to your own question.
To expand a little, since the the question of design and purpose on God’s part is (a) teleological and (b) supernatural, the definitions of design per se clearly all lie outside the remit of science (as, of course, does the definition of “science”, and the question of its methodology, which are also philosophical).
But just as that does not preclude science from using its philosophical assumptions to identify what is within in its remit (for example, “natural”, “efficient causes”), so design can well become a suitable subject for empirical scientific study, in principle.
Sy’s question was whether those involved in ID also make those kind of distinctions. The Dembski citation gives one answer.
Thanks Jon, your Dembski quote does indeed clarify to a great extent the philosophical position of some portion of ID thought. When combined with some of Behe and Denton’s writing, I would agree that this philosophical (and sometimes theological) viewpoint is useful and consistent with design, true teleology in biology, and some of the gaps we cannot avoid in our current theories of abiogenesis, code evolution and the translation system.
And yet, on this very thread we have Paul Nelson discussing his 2011 paper attacking Yarus’ body of work as artefactual and value-less. While many of the points in that paper pointing out the shortcomings of Yarus approach are valid, most workers in the field, including Yarus himself, recognize those shortcomings. As I said above, clearly the stereochemical hypothesis cannot entirely explain the evolution of the canonical code, nor the complete mechanism of translation, but nobody has said it could. What Yarus shows convincingly, I think, is that the binding of some amino acids to some codons suggests that it played some role in those origins.
As science, the Nelson paper is disappointing in its dogmatic and sweeping conclusions. And this to me is the heart of the problem. As philosophy, I think ID can make a valuable contribution to the debate, including the use of scientific evidence when appropriate (as in the problems with aptamers in explaining code evolution in entirety). But when framed as scientific hypotheses, where science is defined as the material naturalistic approach to nature we have been discussing at some length the past few months, (or is it longer?) it is unconvincing.
I should add as a post-script to my comment above, that my suggestion that ID does better philosophically than scientifically, is not at all a put down. Unlike the majority of people I know with science doctorates, I happen to feel that philosophical progress is at least as important as scientifically valid hypotheses when we speak of the mysteries of origins in biology.
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Sy
That all makes sense - but it takes the matter away from design per se and into the scientific issue of “saving the phenomena”, ie sufficiency of efficient causes, which is a matter for legitimate scientific dispute. “Does this evidence show what it’s purported to show?” is one of the basic questions scientists discuss, and even occasionally (or nearly always, when it comes to medical science at least!) disagree on.
“Disappointing and dogmatic” is compatible with both “gravely mistaken” and “annoyingly right”, and would seem inevitably to be partly, at least, a matter of human judgement… unless biology has become a lot more like classical physics than when I studied it.
The bigger scientific question to me, from the outside, is whether, assuming the Yarus results to be valid, they are as you suggest a useful clue as to the evolution of the genetic code, or rather an obstacle to it. On the face of it, it would seem that the functionality of the code as a “universal standard” depends on its lack of chemical determinism - its “arbitrariness”, if you like.
To use the linguistic analogy, a finding that pain is neurologically tightly knit to vocalisation in animals (ie Fido yelps when you kick him) and that the same pathways exist in humans tells you little, if anything, about the development of symbolic, semantic language. I learned that fundamental distinction from Margaret Mead in social psychology back in 1972.
If, though, it turns out that the weakness of the stereochemical bonds is such that they are sufficient to “kick-start” the genetic code, but so weak that they were easily overcome as the rest of the code evolved, then as Asa Gray wrote it would leave the question of design untouched, and he would argue that the overall functionality of the code (which would include those “fine-tuned”, Dentonesque vagaries of chemistry), would be far better explained by design than by undirected causes.
Gray was employing the same kind of design/execution distinction that I mentioned to you above, and which Dembski’s quote also endorses, and consciously (in Gray’s own context of early Darwinism) drawing a philosophical conclusion from the empirical findings of science: and yet drawing it in terms of finding design a more rational conclusion for an intelligent scientist to conclude than the alternative. One finds the same kind of linkage (sometimes conceded to be strictly speaking philosophy or theology, but more often just treated as part of the argument about science) in Alfred Russel Wallace (as a scientist) or Benjamin Warfield (as a theologian trained in science).
With such distinctions understood (yet the close linkage between science and philosophy accepted, rather than rejected - as you accept it), the kind of question that TEs so often ask (along with skeptics), ie, “If this was designed, how did the designer do it?” bespeaks some kind of epistemological muddle on the part of the questioner.
It’s tempting to say they could learn a thing or two from Vincent Torley!
The article clearly associates genetic change with changes in ecology, which strongly implies a direct connection. However it fails to make that connection. this is probably what I should have written.
As you have noted the literature does closely associate evolution with ecological change. What I am looking for is the direct connection between Natural Selection and ecological change. If Variation + Natural Selection = Evolution, which is Darwin’s formula, and Genetic Change + Ecology = Evolution is the current view, then clearly Ecology takes the place or plays the role of Natural Selection.
Whether this shift in understanding has taken place is open to great doubt. Until I am satisfied that Science has made this change, I am going to insist that it must.
I don’t think your parsing of these terms leads to helpful conclusions.
Variation for Darwin was necessarily vague, because he didn’t know about DNA.
Natural Selection is the logical process at work - - as you like to say, it is “determinate” (or, as I like to say, it is “lawful”).
“Ecology” was not a term in use during Darwin’s time … but he certainly recognized it as how the Earth provided different environmental circumstances… how different islands of the Galapagos provided unique environmental niches… and how different environments created different survival pressures. So… Darwin ACKNOWLEDGED ecology using different terminologies.
And your second equation needlessly removes “natural selection” … without natural selection, none of these equations work.