New Article: Common Descent vs. Common Design: 4 Examples Explained Better by Descent

[Daniel_Fisher]

@Bill_II

Nobody has every said that but it is a strawman you like to pull out.

?

the discussion went from me stating that I found it incredulous that success in small unguided steps of language could be used to justify the claim that large novellas could be similarly claimed as arising without an author, to which I understood you to immediately and directly reply to that that “a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” I sincerely understood you to be endorsing the idea that such novellas could be equally well explained by either hypothesis, as there is nothing to prevent a second step, etc.

If I have misunderstood you i sincerely apologize, no straw man was intended, but i sincerely understood this to have been your position as your claim of “1,000 miles” proceeded immediately upon your quoting my objection IRT Conan Doyle. Please clarify if i have indeed misunderstood…

@Bill_II

@Daniel_Fisher

But if someone used that fact to argue that, say, Conan Doyle’s “The Six Napoleons” or some similar work could equally be explained by said author-less process, you will forgive me for remaining skeptical, and maintaining my belief that an intelligent purposeful author is a better explanation.

A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

Once you show the first step is possible and there is nothing to prevent a second step before you know it you have gone 1,000 miles.

As for what prevents it? I’ll share my thoughts but odnt have time for a protracted discussion. in the prebiotic/abiogenesis scenario, the decomposition of the various building blocks would be at least one item. even assuming one initial compound or structure or enzyme forms by chance, it will simply decay if it is not in a biotic environment in a self-regulating system, to my understanding. Or, one could ask just about any researcher doing origin of life studies… i imagine they are very, very aware of the various obstacles. All the steps they take in labs to overcome certain difficulties, to isolate or purify reaction products, to sterilize environments of deleterious chemistry… these would all be dead ends on the route to life that small incremental steps would find extreme difficulty in overcoming.

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@Ani99

If the air moved randomly most of it would not react the bag to collect the dust and rubbish

And that brings us back to:

@paleomalacologist

But we need to define “random”. Both those promoting randomness and those objecting often confuse different senses. “Random” can mean a specific mathematical pattern where something is best described (from a human perspective) by a probability. For example, flipping a coin, casting lots, will this particular atom decay in the next year, will a particular mutation occur. It can also mean something that is humanly unpredictable, but not probabilistic in that sense. For example, mathematically chaotic behavior has a precise outcome for any given input value, not a range of probabilities. But the outcome is so sensitive to the input value that it is practically unpredictable in the long term. Long-term weather is an example. Another category of unpredictable outcomes would be things that have no math formula, such as the long-term course of history (human history or earth history). Yet another sense of “random” is “unguided” or “purposeless”. But at what level? I can have a purpose for flipping a coin, but no amount of study of the coin or the laws of physics governing it will detect my purpose for it.

Air flow is in the mathematically chaotic category.

I think it might be best if “random” were used for the first category (rolling a die), “chaotic” for the second (molecular motion), and “highly contingent” for the third (history).

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

“North American tanagers” is useful, but a bit inaccurate “Piranga tanagers” encompasses the neotropical ones in Cardinalidae, as well as the northerly ones around here. To add further confusion., the South American-origin (introduced to south Florida, California, Hawai’i, and other places) Red-crested Cardinal and Yellow-billed cardinal are true thraupid tanagers.

[Bill_II]

@Daniel_Fisher

these would all be dead ends on the route to life that small incremental steps would find extreme difficulty in overcoming.

So hypothetically then, once we clear the problem with the origin of life what prevents evolution from making the many small steps needed? You have admitted that life can adapt. I always consider evolution to be a different problem than abiogenesis. Perhaps this is where the work of the original Designer takes place.

[Chris_Falter]

@Chris_Falter

@Daniel_Fisher

So, which is it? I would invite you to simply answer, is your position #1 or #2, without giving any clarification or qualification.

It’s very simple. We have a history of design choices and outcomes reliably connected to human activity, thus we can make reliable Bayesian inferences of human design based on that history.

I gave a simple sentence to explain my reasoning to pick #1. I was certainly not avoiding your question.

1
Uno
Ein
Un

Same answer in any language. Hopefully that is clear and simple enough for you.

Best,
Chris

[Vinnie]

@Chris_Falter

The flow of air is the result of a pressure gradient created by the random activity of gas molecules. A high pressure are is where there is greater overall random activity, and low pressure the opposite.

Because the molecules are randomly moving about, they tend to flow from areas of high pressure to low pressure. If they were in a different state where they were not moving about randomly, there would be no flow. So random motion of gas molecules is the key explanation for the flow of air.

What does random motion of gas molecules mean? Just that we don’t understand what every individual molecule is doing? That they can move in whatever direction despite, say for wind, there being an overall net flow? Their motion is certainly happening and can be described according to forces acting on them.

Vinnie

[Chris_Falter]

As @Paraleptopecten mentioned just above, air flows are chaotic phenomena. Given the numbers and velocities of the molecules, their motion cannot be solved deterministically.

Einstein famously* modeled Brownian motion (a similar chaotic phenomenon) as a stochastic process which involves a set of random variables. It is in that sense that I refer to air flows as random.

Best,
Chris

*Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was for his stochastic model of Brownian motion and not, as many suppose, for his work on relativity.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

@Daniel_Fisher

Indeed. Proof positive that humans can swim from California to Hawaii!!

@Bill_II

Well I know know humans can walk from the east coast to the west if there is nothing to stop them. What do you propose that could stop a process that has taken millions of years?

Actually … to make your example of a human swimming to Hawaii a bit more realistic to the analogy at hand …

It isn’t “one human” swimming all the way to Hawaii (any more than a Chimp one day had a child and it was, amazingly … a human!). No; a human discovers they can swim - and so they do; just a little ways (that proverbial ‘first step’ of a journey). But then (and here we have to use imagination to make this particular example go where the analog needs it to go…) other swimmers are able to start (somehow) where the first swimmer left off just a few feet out from shore. Some of those swimmers go a little farther in the direction of Hawaii - and many others in quite other directions. Eventually (after millions if incrementally building and meandering swim sessions by other swimmers, long after the original swimmer is gone …) somebody reaches Hawaii! … and many other places besides.

[Chris_Falter]

In fact, humans did eventually reach Hawaii without the benefit of advanced ship design, and it was with an incremental, island-hopping strategy.

Chris

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

Depends on how “advanced” is defined.

[paleomalacologist (David Campbell)]

Note that random processes can have apparent direction, in addition to the many processes that have combinations of random and non-random aspects.

A vacuum cleaner uses a fan. It is providing direction, though there is still plenty of random motion and chaotic motion. But if we have two jars of gas, one at higher pressure than the other, and connect them, the net movement from high to low is random. The higher pressure jar has more molecules and/or faster molecules, so the chance of randomly moving some from high to low is greater than from low to high. Likewise, in evolution, starting with one-celled organisms, random variation in the number of associated cells will lead to a rise in the average number of cells over time. An organism can’t have fewer than one cell. It’s random variation plus a fixed boundary, and we start close to that boundary.

[Chris_Falter]

@Paraleptopecten

Depends on how “advanced” is defined.

I agree 100%. I think “modern” would have been a better word choice than “advanced.”

The notion I was trying to convey was that navigating from San Diego to Honolulu aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is unremarkable, but the Pacific Islanders who pioneered Hawaii did not have that technology. So they had to adopt a more incremental, island-hopping strategy, and their ingenuity was no less remarkable than that of today’s naval engineers.

[Chris_Falter]

[quote=“Chris_Falter, post:190, topic:45617, full:true”]

@Chris_Falter

@Daniel_Fisher

So, which is it? I would invite you to simply answer, is your position #1 or #2, without giving any clarification or qualification.
[/quote]

It’s very simple. We have a history of design choices and outcomes reliably connected to human activity, thus we can make reliable Bayesian inferences of human design based on that history.

I gave a simple sentence to explain my reasoning to pick #1. I was certainly not avoiding your question.

1
Uno
Ein
Un

Same answer in any language. Hopefully that is clear and simple enough for you.

Best,
Chris

Hello @Daniel_Fisher ,

You asked me to respond to a question about how to infer human design, and I have given an answer.

I am still hoping you will provide some insight into how you or Stephen Meyer or anyone, really, could build a coherent model for differentiating between divine design and scientifically explainable phenomena.

In the absence of such a model, discerning God’s design is an exercise in faith. I am fine with that conclusion. Are you fine with that conclusion, too?

Best,
Chris

[Relates (Roger A. Sawtelle)]

@paleomalacologist

But if we have two jars of gas, one at higher pressure than the other, and connect them, the net movement from high to low is random. The higher pressure jar has more molecules and/or faster molecules, so the chance of randomly moving some from high to low is greater than from low to high.

@Chris_Falter

Einstein famously* modeled Brownian motion (a similar chaotic phenomenon) as a stochastic process which involves a set of random variables. It is in that sense that I refer to air flows as random.

Molecules of air do move in a random manner, but air does not flow randomly. Hot air rises, while cold air falls. Gases and liquids move from higher pressure to lower pressure. Nature abhors a vacuum. Thermal energy moves from hot to cold.

So how are these specific movements random? They are not. They are no more random than water running down hill is moving randomly.

[paleomalacologist (David Campbell)]

If we open a connection between a jar of air and a vacuum, we can predict readily what the net motion will be. At that level, it is not particularly random. But that motion results from the random bouncing around of many individual molecules. Some of them happen to bounce into the connection and out the other side. Until the two sides have equilibrated, there are fewer molecules on the vacuum side, and the chances are greater that random bouncing will move air in a particular direction than in the opposite direction through the connection. At the molecular level, it is random motion. In the case of water flowing downhill, gravity gives it a particular direction, but the individual water molecules likewise are bouncing all over, against each other, against the ground, etc.
Evolution is similar. There are random components as well as directionality. To some extent, it’s a matter of personal judgement as to what is more random or not. Gould argued that things would be drastically different if you could rewind and replay the history of life from the Cambrian. Conway Morris argues that the limits of natural laws would lead to an outcome that’s pretty similar. Would it be basically the same if the mollusks had developed jointed internal skeletons and took on the role that vertebrates did on earth? Depends on what you consider “basically the same.”

[Ani99]

Seeing simpler forms as in single celled bacteria, is not evidence of evolution. We simply see simpler and more complex “machinery”, if we want to call it that.

I am not arguing from incredulity. I am saying the complexity and sophistication is too much for it to have simply evolved and especially from random changes. There is intelligence at the heart of it all, meaningful changes.

There are plenty of cases where we see adaptation, which is being heralded as evolution. However when environmental conditions change the organisms change appropriately and when those environmental conditions change back again to what they were before, again we see the changes to what the organism was before.

[Relates (Roger A. Sawtelle)]

@paleomalacologist

If we open a connection between a jar of air and a vacuum, we can predict readily what the net motion will be. At that level, it is not particularly random.

@paleomalacologist David, I think that we have “met” before. Good to converse with you again.

What you say is in a superficial sense true, but when you look at the whole picture it is false, but first of all we need to clarify some things. All molecules are in perpetual motion. This motion is caused by thermal energy, but it is not motion as we usually think of it. This is oscillation or vibration, which is basically non-directional and therefore random.

Thermal motion is not directional, it is spatial. Let me explain. Thermal energy is heat energy. The faster a molecule vibrates, the hotter it is and more energy it has. Also this energy creates space between molecules. A gas like steam is lighter than water because steam (gas) is less dense than water.

A molecule of H2O is the same whether it is a gas, a liquid, or a solid. The only difference between these states is heat, thermal energy, which makes solids contract. Ice is an exception, which proves the rule, because its unique crystalline structure causes it to expand upon freezing.

Nature abhors vacuum because of air pressure seeking to fill all vacuums and partial vacuums with air at the pressure of the weight of a column of air above the earth. Thus air pressure is based on gravity ,just as is water running downhill.

Hot air rises, cold air falls. Heat cause air to expand, and when air expands it becomes lighter and rises as per gravity. This is related to the movement of thermal energy, but is not directly caused by the motion of thermal energy.

What seems ironic is that the “random” motion of thermal energy does not produce random results, but uniform results. Take a cold cup of water and add it to a hot cup of water, it becomes a lukewarm two cups of water almost instantly. The motion of the hot molecules brings the cold molecules up to an equilibrium, or halfway in between.

@paleomalacologist

Evolution is similar. There are random components as well as directionality. To some extent, it’s a matter of personal judgement as to what is more random or not.

Evolution does have random and directional components. The problem seems to be that no one wants say what causes the direction of natural selection, so evolutionary theory has a big fat hole in it.

Conway Morris is more nearly correct, because evolution is based on changing ecology. Gould (and Dawkins) are wrong because he said that evolution is random because it cannot be predicted beforehand. It cannot be predicted beforehand because the whole purpose of the extinction was to change the environment, which allows new life forms to develop according to new conditions. The purpose of evolution is change and change of the environment causes change. It is as simple as that.

@paleomalacologist

Would it be basically the same if the mollusks had developed jointed internal skeletons and took on the role that vertebrates did on earth?

Isn’t that a silly question? How on earth would it be possible for mollusks to to develop jointed internal skeletons? Since that is your field maybe you know?

God can create new alleles and new ecological niches for them at the same time while planning the development of the earth’s environment to bring out the fullest in life. God can chew gum and walk at the same time.

Come on, people! God came up with the plan of evolution and carried it out! Why can’t people just accept it and wonder at its simplicity and complexity

[T_aquaticus]

@Relates

Nature abhors vacuum because of air pressure seeking to fill all vacuums and partial vacuums with air at the pressure of the weight of a column of air above the earth. Thus air pressure is based on gravity ,just as is water running downhill.

Hot air rises, cold air falls. Heat cause air to expand, and when air expands it becomes lighter and rises as per gravity. This is related to the movement of thermal energy, but is not directly caused by the motion of thermal energy.

First, if nature abhors a vacuum then it must abhor the vast, vast majority of the universe which is a vacuum. A vacuum is the norm in the universe, not the exception. Might want to think about that one for a sec.

Second, hot air wouldn’t rise and pressure wouldn’t equalize if molecules didn’t move randomly. It is random movement that results in hot air being less dense, and it is random movement that allows the density of molecules to even out over time. In fact, nature wouldn’t work if molecules didn’t move about randomly.

@Relates

Evolution does have random and directional components. The problem seems to be that no one wants say what causes the direction of natural selection, so evolutionary theory has a big fat hole in it.

Differential reproductive success is what drives natural selection.

@Relates

Conway Morris is more nearly correct, because evolution is based on changing ecology. Gould (and Dawkins) are wrong because he said that evolution is random because it cannot be predicted beforehand. It cannot be predicted beforehand because the whole purpose of the extinction was to change the environment, which allows new life forms to develop according to new conditions. The purpose of evolution is change and change of the environment causes change. It is as simple as that.

Gould said evolution is contingent, which it is. The reason mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians have four limbs is because their common ancestor happened to have four limbs, not because living on land requires four limbs as shown by our insect friends. The evolution of this clade of animals was contingent on random mutations that happened far back in the evolution of their lineage. Paraphrasing Gould, if we rewound the tape of evolution and let it roll again we wouldn’t expect the same result.

At a genetic level it becomes even more obvious. Epistasis is an important part of evolution, and it depends heavily on the accumulation of random and often neutral mutations. A new mutation may interact with previously neutral mutations, resulting in a new beneficial trait. That entire evolutionary pathway is contingent on a random mutation, and couldn’t have happened without it. Epistasis and contingency are the two big factors that seem to be missing from your view of evolution.

Note: When I speak of randomness I am using the statistical definition. I am not making any ontological or theological claims. I am only saying that what we see matches our mathematical models of what randomness should look like.

[T_aquaticus]

@Daniel_Fisher

I appreciate your consistency, at least, I must say. But when the basic principles that undergird evolutionary thought would seriously require me to believe that random letter generation is as good or better an explanation for English novellas than having been written by an author, then my skepticism is to that extent confirmed that there is something seriously wrong with the entire theory.

Genomes aren’t novellas. While written languages might be a helpful analogy for some of genetics it still fails as an analogy for all of genetics. Genomes are much, much more elastic than languages or computer code which is why the analogy ultimately fails.

But if you want to claim that random mutations can’t produce the differences we see between species then go for it. Find a difference between two genomes and explain why those differences could not be produced by the known and observed processes that produce mutations. All of the evidence we have is consistent with these known, observed, and natural processes producing those differences, and I have yet to see a single shred of evidence pointing elsewhere. For example, when we compare the human and chimp genome we see the excess of transition and CpG mutations that we would expect to see from natural random mutations, as detailed in @glipsnort’s wonderful essay here at BioLogos:

https://biologos.org/articles/testing-common-ancestry-its-all-about-the-mutations

In an earlier post I believe you mentioned Occam’s Razor, and how it is just a rule and could be ignored if we felt like it. In science this is a more general rule called parsimony. At its most basic it says that if lower causes are sufficient to explain the observations then you don’t invent higher causes that exactly mimic the lower ones. I really don’t see how we could do science without this rule, and more generally how we could rationally talk about anything around us without this rule. We would have to throw out nearly all of science if we concluded that supernatural processes could somehow exactly mimic the natural processes that we have proposed. Rain? God could supernaturally make water fall from the sky in a way that exactly mimicked natural condensation, so should we throw out the natural explanation? According to your thinking, we should throw out the natural explanation.

What we have with the 4 examples in the opening post is exactly what we would expect from natural processes. Therefore, the natural processes are the best explanation. Anyone can dream up a scenario where a supernatural process could exactly mimic the natural one, but that doesn’t make the supernatural explanation equal to the natural one.

[T_aquaticus]

@Daniel_Fisher

No, no, and no. This is borne out if one considers either biology or mechanical engineering. a designer typically starts with a template, and modifies the original template in those ways that are most conducive to achieving the final ends.

If I had started with a basic mammal, and wanted to make a flying mammal… would anyone really want to suggest that it is easier, or more direct, to somehow import a bird’s wing a somehow paste that into a mammal rather than simply modifying a mammal’s forearm into a wing? a bird’s wing is fine tuned to the avionics, weight, etc., of a bird , not a mammal. if we he were to try to import the design of a bird’s wing onto a mammal to make a flying mammal, one would need to redesign practically everything about said mammal… bone structure, leg structure, weight, cardiovascular system, etc. etc.

This type of explanation has always fascinated me. I can’t think of a better example of projecting our own humanity onto views about God. Let’s just think on this for a second. It is easier for humans to start with a template that they know already works because humans have very limited resources, time, and knowledge. Does God have those limitations? Apparently so. It appears that humans and God have the same knowledge, intelligence, and resources. If God were all powerful, all knowing, and possessed both infinite resources and time then it would be just as easy for God to start from scratch for each created kind as it would to modify already existing forms.

In fact, it’s worse than that. God, in the scenario laid out in the quote above, is less knowledgeable and less inventive than humans. We humans have mixed and matched genes between species many, many times. I have done it in the lab. I have put jellyfish genes in human cells, and human genes in bacteria. God can’t mix and match genes from disparate genomes? God can’t do what humans can do?

For these reasons and many others, we wouldn’t expect a nested hierarchy if God created species separately. There is absolutely no reason we would expect ID to mimic evolution.