Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Panicked Evolutionists: The Stephen Meyer Controversy
The theory of evolution is a tottering house of ideological cards that is more about cherished mythology than honest intellectual endeavor. Evolutionists treat their cherished theory like a fragile object of veneration and worship--and so it is. Panic is a sure sign of intellectual insecurity, and evolutionists have every reason to be insecure, for their theory is falling apart.
The latest evidence of this panic comes in a controversy that followed a highly specialized article published in an even more specialized scientific journal. Stephen C. Meyer, Director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, wrote an article accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The article, entitled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," was published after three independent judges deemed it worthy and ready for publication. The use of such judges is standard operating procedure among "peer-reviewed" academic journals, and is considered the gold standard for academic publication.
The readership for such a journal is incredibly small, and the Biological Society of Washington does not commonly come to the attention of the nation's journalists and the general public. Nevertheless, soon after Dr. Meyer's article appeared, the self-appointed protectors of Darwinism went into full apoplexy. Internet websites and scientific newsletters came alive with outrage and embarrassment, for Dr. Meyer's article suggested that evolution just might not be the best explanation for the development of life forms. The ensuing controversy was greater than might be expected if Dr. Meyer had argued that the world is flat or that hot is cold.
Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, told The Scientist that Dr. Meyer's article came to her attention when members of the Biological Society of Washington contacted her office. "Many members of the society were stunned about the article," she told The Scientist, and she described the article as "recycled material quite common in the intelligent design community." Dr. Scott, a well known and ardent defender of evolutionary theory, called Dr. Meyer's article "substandard science" and argued that the article should never have been published in any scientific journal.
Within days, the Biological Society of Washington, intimidated by the response of the evolutionary defenders, released a statement apologizing for the publication of the article. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the society's governing council claimed that the article "was published without the prior knowledge of the council." The statement went on to declare: "We have met and determined that all of us would have deemed this paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings." The society's president, Roy W. McDiarmid, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, blamed the article's publication on the journal's previous editor, Richard Sternberg, who now serves as a fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institute of Health. "My conclusion on this," McDiarmid said, "was that it was a really bad judgment call on the editor's part."
What is it about Dr. Stephen Meyer's paper that has caused such an uproar? Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, argued in his paper that the contemporary form of evolutionary theory now dominant in the academy, known as "Neo-Darwinism," fails to account for the development of higher life forms and the complexity of living organisms. Pointing to what evolutionists identify as the "Cambrian explosion," Meyer argued that "the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans" cannot be accounted for by Darwinian theory, "neo" or otherwise.
Accepting the scientific claim that the Cambrian explosion took place "about 530 million years ago," Meyer went on to explain that the "remarkable jump in the specified complexity or 'complex specified information' [CSI] of the biological world" cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.
The heart of Dr. Meyer's argument is found in this scientifically-loaded passage: "Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological hierarchy, mainly, within the genetic text. Yet the major morphological innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in the Cambrian explosion."
In simpler terms, the mechanism of natural selection, central to evolutionary theory, cannot possibly account for the development of so many varied and complex life forms simply by mutations in DNA. Rather, some conscious design--thus requiring a Designer--is necessary to explain the emergence of these life forms.
In the remainder of his paper, Meyer attacks the intellectual inadequacies of evolutionary theory and argues for what is now known as the "design Hypothesis." As he argued, "Conscious and rational agents have, as a part of their powers of purposive intelligence, the capacity to design information-rich parts and to organize those parts into functional information-rich systems and hierarchies." As he went on to assert, "We know of no other causal entity or process that has this capacity." In other words, the development of the multitude of higher life forms found on the planet can be explained only by the guidance of a rational agent--a Designer--whose plan is evident in the design.
Meyer's article was enough to cause hysteria in the evolutionists' camp. Knowing that their theory lacks intellectual credibility, the evolutionists respond by raising the volume, offering the equivalent of scientific shrieks and screams whenever their cherished theory is criticized--much less in one of their own cherished journals. As Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Discovery Institute explained, "Instead of addressing the paper's argument or inviting counterarguments or rebuttal, the society has resorted to affirming what amounts to a doctrinal statement in an effort to stifle scientific debate. They're trying to stop scientific discussion before it even starts."
When the Biological Society of Washington issued its embarrassing apology for publishing the paper, the organization pledged that arguments for Intelligent Design "will not be addressed in future issues of the Proceedings," regardless of whether the paper passes peer review.
From the perspective of panicked evolutionists, the Intelligent Design movement represents a formidable adversary and a constant irritant. The defenders of Intelligent Design are undermining evolutionary theory at multiple levels, and they refuse to go away. The panicked evolutionists respond with name-calling, labeling Intelligent Design proponents as "creationists," thereby hoping to prevent any scientific debate before it starts.
Intelligent Design is not tantamount to the biblical doctrine of creation. Theologically, Intelligent Design falls far short of requiring any affirmation of the doctrine of creation as revealed in the Bible. Nevertheless, it is a useful and important intellectual tool, and a scientific movement with great promise. The real significance of Intelligent Design theory and its related movement is the success with which it undermines the materialistic and naturalistic worldview central to the theory of evolution.
For the Christian believer, the Bible presents the compelling and authoritative case for God's creation of the cosmos. Specifically, the Bible provides us with the ultimate truth concerning human origins and the special creation of human beings as the creatures made in God's own image. Thus, though we believe in more than Intelligent Design, we certainly do not believe in less. We should celebrate the confusion and consternation now so evident among the evolutionists. Dr. Stephen Meyer's article--and the controversy it has spawned--has caught evolutionary scientists with their intellectual pants down.
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R. Albert Mohler, Jr
The actual question to be answered is whether the induced mutations are targeted, random, or some combination. And what part this plays in evolution.
Sorry to have mixed up your C&D response on the second.
You are talking to an example a bit different than what I have built up here. My example is fifty coins all tossed all landing heads -- there is NO prediction of outcome, we speak only of the observation we can make. We observe that all fifty coins are heads up -- and from that, and that observation alone we infer to a degree of certainty that is as sure as any observation we can ever practically make in this world even with the best precision equipment and tens of thousands of peers repeating the observation ... what?
I hope to respond by Sunday. Until then I have to go observe the experiment in the coin tossing lab.
Sometimes one needs a h1 tag to make a point. On the one hand, I'm sure I was rude. On the other hand, I've tried, in my inept way, to be subtle in the past, and it's made no impact.
Now that we have that straight, I would like to know your opinion of my contention that Boltzmann's conception of the second law as a law of disorder is not an exhaustive basis for the investigation of biological systems, which seem to be characterized by the ability to manifest higher and higher degrees of self-organization. Boltzmann's experiments with classical gasses apparently did not indicate this type of behavior.
It's not an exhaustive basis for the description of biological systems. Biological systems are not equilibrium systems, and are far more complex than can be fully described by thermodynamic variables (which an ideal gas could, BTW). However, a living system does have a single thermodynamic entropy, which is unremarkable in comparison, say with a comparable mass of protein DNA and water. That thermodynamic entropy is in principle measurable (though we tend to avoid doing calorimetry on bodies) It is calculable, in principle, from first principles. We have decent values for entropies of proteins and other biological components in water and other aqueous media. Stat. mech. has come a long way since ideal gases. Most of all, however, there is nothing mysterious or unusual about it. It is not the font of some mystical order unique to life; it's just a quantity, like the temperature, or the energy, or the heat emitted.
I have no problem with people speculating about what unusual properties life may have. Certainly there must be some properties unique to life. I don't even think we have the alphabet to talk about those properties yet. However, whatever those properties are, they have nothing to do with the thermodynamic entropy. To mystify the entropy is to give credence to the specious arguments that somehow the Second Law says something about evolution. I feel the same way about quantum mechanics; while QM may seem mystical and exotic to people outside physics, it's really quite mundane, and in my not so humble opinion, if you're going to build a theory of biological complexity, QM won't be a foundation for it.
Let me explain why this irritates me. One of the things I do for a living is calculating ensemble properties using stat. mech.; I also do quite a bit of QM. That means I think it, I teach it, I direct research on it; I publish papers on it. If I didn't love it from the start, in the manner of an arranged marriage, I have developed a strong affection by now. It annoys me when people say things about it that aren't true, or use it to argue what IMO are specious points; and it annoys me that people think you can approach it casually and generate conclusions without going to through the details of how it works.
Speculate all you want. It's harmless; it may even be valuable. Just don't try to tie your speculations to well-established scientific ideas which don't need to to be make look mysterious when they're not. If life or consciousness were based on stat. mech or Q.M., we'd have figured them out decades ago.
It's funny, I just had a discussion with a visiting colloquium spaker about this; she was describing some research on the very complicated molecular motions a single protein kinase does when it's fulfilling its biological role. She was recounting how one of my colleagues got annoyed with the detailed description of the molecular mechanism, which is just one of thousands of very complicated and different mechanisms, which all interact with each other in other even more complicated ways. Most of us think they are complicated because there are literally trillions of different things even a moderate sized protein molecule can do, and so over a billion years life has selected many different ways of doing things. And the question is, when you've described all this vast clockwork, is there more to it than just the details? He thought there should be; he wanted some great insight, some ghost in the machine (oddly enough, he's a fairly rabid atheist.)
The answer is, we don't know if there is more than the details. But I think we're not yet in a position to ask the right questions. And trying to claim it's just billiard balls ignores the incredible detail of what those billiard balls get up to. Given natural selection, a simple set of rules can create the most fabulously complicated things. That may be all there is.
End of homily.
That's beautifully put. It reminds me of what Darwin said at the end of Origin of Species, 6th edition:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.I don't know how it all got started, but anyone who thinks this isn't awe-inspiring is really missing out.
That is rather ambiguously worded, isn't it?
If (see the last four words in italics) they do it to survive, then that makes it sound like it isn't random.
If you mean, "mutations happen all the time, but it is usually changes in the external environment which give some of the mutations more survival value than they had before" that would be different. . .
Cheers!
Any sequence of 50 coins is more likely to occur than any contract bridge deal. Actually more than ten quadrillion times as likely. That doesn't make bridge impossible to play though.
Thank you for your reply!
Thank you for your beautiful “homily,” RWP. I’m truly grateful for it. In it you said many things which sounded the ring of truth to my ear. I’d like to offer a few comments, FWTW.
First of all, in the interest of full and fair disclosure, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever held myself out to be such. In all likelihood, I was born a philosopher, and will die a philosopher; a leopard cannot change his spots. But that is not to say that I undervalue science. On the contrary, even though in my formal academic career I tried to avoid the sciences wherever possible, later in life I have found science, especially physics, to be irresistibly attractive, compelling in terms of the usages of my personal time. I have tried to correct the deficiencies of my formal education at every opportunity since. Still, there are gaps, I admit. But gaps are there to fill, and that’s what I’m about.
Having said that, with my philosopher’s hat on here, it seems to me that the sciences face daunting epistemological challenges these days. One is the sheer fact of the proliferation of specialties, and the concomitant enormous proliferation of increasingly detailed knowledge within specialties. The second derives from the first: It becomes increasingly difficult for specialists to integrate the body of their work into more integrated wholes, for that would require a familiarity with all the other specialties, and there is not enough time in a life to do that anymore (if there ever was). I don’t know whether you would agree with me, but I think that’s a serious problem.
I gather Bohr’s answer was simply to say that science was only about making good descriptions of nature, not about “explaining” nature. And actually I admire that attitude. But that still leaves a whole lot of “’splaining to do.” Or so it seems to me. You cited the on-point case of your colloquium speaker, who seemed to intimate that there must be a “ghost in the machine.” Personally, I don’t think there is a ghost in the scientific sense – for there are no ghosts in science. The point is, your atheist ghost-seeker is probably looking, not for some kind of Deus ex machina operation in nature, but an ultimate principle that ties absolutely everything together. As you wrote,
… the question is, when you've described all this vast clockwork, is there more to it than just the details? He thought there should be; he wanted some great insight, some ghost in the machine (oddly enough, he's a fairly rabid atheist.)
I don’t find this at all remarkable. There is something about human nature that just demands there should be some ultimate principle to explain and validate the physical laws and the evolution of the universe, and then demands to know what it is. The great interest in developing a GUT or a TOE demonstrates this.
And so you have this weirdo philosopher out here, “speculating.” (That would be me.)
In the italics at the top, you mentioned you have strong doubts that QM could have little to contribute to the solution of the problem of life, and that entropy is an expression given in some kind of a quasi-mystical terms. (My interpretation, times two; correct me please if I’ve “gone off the reservation” here).
Well, I don’t know about QM per se, which places everything in terms of a probability distribution. (BTW, does such a probability distribution contain only those terms which are knowable to the human mind, or might such a distribution contain yet-unknown or possibly unknowable elements?) But for me the great attraction of quantum theory is its penchant for reducing all the operative terms of the universal process into discrete items; e.g., space as Planck length, time as Planck time; the photon as discrete particle (although we know it also has a waveform under certain conditions); the Lorenz transformability of mass and energy, gravity in terms of graviton, etc.). Now it seems that information theory also has a “discrete particle,” the bit. So I wonder whether we might have the beginnings of a “common language” here capable of associating like terms in fruitful, meaningful ways?
And I do wonder about entropy, whether it has, as you say, a “mystical property.” You wrote: “To mystify the entropy is to give credence to the specious arguments that somehow the Second Law says something about evolution.” I dunno, RWP; but it seems to me that, absent entropy, no evolution of the universe itself, nor of any of its constituent systems, living or non-living, could occur in the first place.
If entropy seems to have a quasi mystical quality, perhaps that might be due to the fact that it specifies a “negative quantity.” Maybe science can take such abstractions quite in stride in the formulation of its equations, but to a philosopher, a “negative quantity” is noteworthy in principle. Especially since what entropy is usually taken to mean is the amount of thermal energy not available to perform useful work. Thus in living systems, which seemingly must perform a whole heck of an amount of useful work just to stay living, this would seem to be an important quantity.
As you noted, there seems to be little interest in the scientific community at the present time in trying to quantify entropy in living systems. And yet it seems that a very loose consortium of scientists of many different disciplines have come together in recent times trying to explicate the role of entropy in living systems. Unfortunately, I know of no scientist of note of American extraction who is participating in this effort, which seems to largely come from the national academies of science of such countries as Hungary, Israel, India, and China. The lack of American participation in this project (as informal as it is, since I imagine that each of the scientists involved has his own theory in view, yet the common thread tying them all together is the methods used) is deeply distressing to me. For whatever that is worth!
Well I’ve ranted enough by now for an evening. Thanks for listening, RWP.
More importantly than that, however, thank you ever so much for sharing your thoughts with me. I am in your debt.
Oh, but here's the really unsettling part, dear Patrick: Stephen Wolfram demonstrated evolution from the simplest of instructions, leading to the most unexpected outcomes/behaviors, and "natural" selection had nothing to do with it. Wolfram- (programmer)-selection had everything to do with the establishment of the initial conditions. And what subsequently followed offers an object lesson, so to speak.
Wolfram's cellular automata in their various evolutions (from different instruction sets) seemed to settle into a very small number of general "behaviors" or descriptions. They could rapidly (usually) evolve into a condition of virtually complete redundancy (e.g., either black or white; virtually no information content there); or quickly would begin to display regular and seemingly ad infinitum patterned behavior (low information content there); or they could stun you by surprise with the entirely unexpected and unpredictable evolutionary development they progressivly achieved, in which certain "branches" of the "forthcoming" development died out, while other branches flourished and propagated new forms (extremely rich information content probably involved here).
Please check out the Rule 110 cellular automaton, and then try to tell me that you have not seen Darwin's evolution theory captured in graphical form. :^)
Thanks so much for writing, dear Patrick.
I think this is where you are missing the big picture.
Concerning that issue, the phrasing is correct for thermodynamic entropy:
The American Heritage Dictionary gives as the first definition of entropy, "For a closed system, the quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work." So it's a negative kind of quantity, the opposite of available energy.
When speaking of biological systems on the forum, the term "entropy" is a stumbling block because there are several types and many people are only familiar with the thermodynamic.
The above article discusses thermodynamic entropy and logical entropy and mentions others. Thermodynamic entropy is related to the 2nd law. But in biological systems, thermodynamic entropy is directly related to logical entropy. And without considering that relationship, it may seem like biological life violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics ergo evolution is impossible.
Concerning information theory and molecular biology there are three types of entropy involved:
Logical Entropy: Shannon probability-distribution entropy
Algorithmic Entropy: Kolmogorov-Solomonoff-Chaitin sequence/algorithmic complexity.
Because the term "entropy" is confusing in this context, we usually call it "uncertainty". As you can see from the above link, the difference reduces to the unit of measure, bit v. joules per K. See also, The Evolution of Carnot's Principle
AFAIK, Adami is the only notable investigator in the field who is attempting to also bring in algorithmic entropy. We happen to have an expert in algorithmic information theory on the forum, Freeper tortoise. He briefly reviewed Adami's approach to Information Theory and Molecular Biology and was not particularly impressed with his math [post 582 calling it 'immature'.]
Seems to me it would only complicate this particular discussion to raise a third kind of entropy, when we can put the issue to bed with the first two.
If we don't raise logical entropy, and leave thermodynamic entropy to fend for itself in the face of biological systems - then the gain of information content (incl. autonomy and semiosis) in biological systems, functional complexity, "energy storage" and the ilk will continue to be raised as as evidence of biological systems violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Now I see your complete problem. If you want to discuss science, you first need to learn science, NOT from philosophers who get their scientific definitions from a common dictionary.
Thanks for the 2nd Law link. Now I know where 2beathomemom got her garbage.
But you have clouded the issue and also supported their side by using false science. Unless you are prepared to use REAL science, I don't believe discussing entropy with you will be productive.
Here is why creationists have picked up on "entropy". Basically they are trying to play upon the ignorance of the population.
"In all of physics, there is perhaps no topic more underrated and misunderstood than entropy. The behavior of large collections of particles, such as the universe, a grain of sand, or a tuna salad sandwich, is dictated by two universal laws: one involving energy, the other involving entropy. And yet, while energy is described in great detail throughout any introductory physics textbook, entropy is relegated to about two or three pages, and is usually badly described."
However, the links are certainly not from websites that a Young Earth Creationist would use. The first source is the only one which might raise an eyebrow because it is "panspermia.org" - which embraces "cosmic ancestry" including the old age of the universe. Cosmic ancestry is roughly the same as astrobiology (NASA, etc.) Crick (of DNA fame) was a panspermia supporter.
The arguments of panspermiasts are however largely indistinguishable from Intelligent Design supporters - but that is not the issue we were addressing. The question was whether an appeal to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a valid objection to evolution theory. The panspermia page was selected for an overview to the general subject of entropy.
But you have clouded the issue and also supported their side by using false science. Unless you are prepared to use REAL science, I don't believe discussing entropy with you will be productive.
Ok then, I am herein sending up the call to the most credentialed scientists and mathematicians on the forum. They stand as their own authority in their respective disciplines.
If they believe that my sources are bad or I am not understanding the material, then I will take my lumps and try to do better.
To all the experts I've pinged: the post in question is #1773 dealing with entropy and biological systems - for which there are five sources, one panspermia.org and the others http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov http://bayes.wustl.edu and http://www.arxiv.org.
The objection is to the sources (Schneider, Jaynes, Adami) and how I have interpreted them for the discussion.
My position all along is that the appeal to 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to argue against evolution is invalid, that biological systems do not violate any physical laws, that the phenomenon of life which seems to work against thermodynamic entropy (emergence, autonomy, function, organization or complexification) is actually explained by another kind of entropy, Shannon entropy [Shannon-Weaver model, Schneider et al] - and possibly, down the road, algorithmic entropy.
It explains how Shannon entropy is related to Boltzman entropy.
Self organization may play a role in producing change, but selection still shapes the direction of change. It makes no difference what causes or produces the change.
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