Intelligent Design Creationists are really upset that their views aren't taken seriously by real scientists. They want to claim that Intelligent Design Creationism is science. So far they haven't succeeded but that doesn't stop them from trying again and again.The latest attempt by DaveScot has just been posted on Uncommon Descent [P. falciparum - No Black Swan Observed]. Let's look at this stunning example of creationist logic.
DaveScot says that scientific statements have to be capable of falsification in order to qualify as science. That's one view of what science is all about (Popperian) but it's not the only one. Nevertheless, let's run with this definition and see where it takes us.
DaveScot gives us an example of a falsifiable statement, "All swans are white." The discovery of a single black swan would falsify that statement. That's correct. Now he goes on to make a statement about intelligent design, "All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent agents."
Hmmm .... that's an interesting statement isn't it? There are no known examples of complex biological systems that have been generated by intelligent agents. From a logical perspective, it's like saying that Pluto is made of green cheese. But, what the heck, let's see where he's going with this.
What we don’t know is whether any non-intelligent means can generate complex biological systems. A single observation of a complex biological system generated by a non-intelligent cause will falsify the biological ID hypothesis.Now I see the logic. All the evidence for the natural evolution of complex biological systems doesn't count for a damned thing. You have to actually see something like that evolve with your own eyes before you can believe it. If you don't actually witness the thing then it's logical to assume that it doesn't exist. Right?
What's the data? Well, according to DaveScot, scientists have given it their best shot and no complex biological system sprang into being. The experiment was performed with Plasmodium falciparum the protozoan that causes malaria [Plasmodium falciparum Causes Malaria].
P.falciparum replicating billions of trillions of times in the past few decades represents the largest search to date for a “black swan”. This is orders of magnitude more replications than took place in the evolution of reptiles to mammals wherein there are many exceedingly complex biological systems that separate them. If P. falciparum had been seen generating any complex biological systems such as those that distinguish mammals from reptiles then it would have falsified the ID hypothesis. None were observed. This doesn’t prove ID but it certainly lends strong support to it. All perfectly scientific.Don't you just love creationist logic? Just because we haven't seen any complex biological systems spring naturally into existence in Plasmodium falicparum it follows that it's impossible for such thing to happen. Therefore Intelligent Design Creationism is strongly supported. QED.1.
WARNING!!!
This experiment could be harmful to your brain. Don't try this at home.
Let's try using this logic ourselves. P. falciparum has replicated trillions of times and not once did we see an Intelligent Designer making anything. This scientific observation lends strong support to the idea that Intelligent Designers don't make complex biological systems, right? It means that evolution is correct.
Furthermore, after hundreds of years of observation involving billions of people, we haven't got a single documented case of anyone actually seing God. This doesn't prove the non-existence of God but it certainly lends strong support to it. All perfectly scientific. At least that's what DaveScot would say, I assume.
1. The argument would make some sense if evolution predicted that complex biological systems should evolve in protozoa every few hundred years. Since evolution predicts no such thing then nothing has been demonstrated except that Intelligent Design Creationists are IDiots. But we already knew that.
[Photo Credit: photo by Graham Stephinson at canberabirds]
14 comments :
Of course the real logic behind the scenes is that the IDiots need to shift the focus away from their careful efforts not to predict any of the real expectations we would have for design of organisms, as well as away from the many falsification tests that evolution passes.
Whether it's cladistics, the different (and predicted) evolutionary patterns seen among sexual and asexual organisms, or the fact that birds have wings made out of leg components, evolution (and not the excruciatingly slow "design" of Behe) is very well documented, and they know it (so that DaveTard and Behe both accept the predictions of MET as proving common descent, while denying the causes that gave us those predictions).
Well, what do you do when MET is so well evidenced? Just come up with a false prediction from MET (P. falciparum will not exhibit stasis beyond adaptations to our drugs, even though its hosts are in virtual stasis on the time-scales considered), and let the fight be over that. It's always good for them to set the agenda, and to keep us on the defensive.
So sure, we point out what a stupid "test" the IDiots have come up with. That's still far better than allowing the rubes to look at the fulfilled expectations of evolution which abound in biology. The point is to treat them like honeybees, keeping them quietly in the hive with a bunch of smoke, which they'll always mistake as coming from a fire which is burning down the house of "Darwinism."
Glen D
damned html.... anyway, here I was thinking Non Sequitur was just a cartoon. My mom taught us to think before we speak.... guess there mothers didn't
I read DaveScot's blog post on UD and even as a non-scientist, it was clear his logic was simplistic and that it is a strawman argument.
As a non-scientist, I get the basic gist of why P. falciparum will not evolve into something more 'complex', even after many generations, but I'm not sure I could articulate it particularly well - i.e., an explanation of why organisms stay in stasis. Can anybody provide a good layperson's explanation or point to a good source? It seems a fairly common ID theme nowadays and I would like to be able to be in a better position to refute these arguments.
It also begs another question - are there conditions (or could they be contrived) in which P. Falciparum could be moved out of 'statis' and different kinds of mutations could be observed (has an experiment like that been done?)
Thanks!
Now I have seen God's glory, does that count?
James E. Morgan
elwyn04usa@yahoo.com
DaveScot, Mike Behe et al. seem unaware that the human malarial parasite P. falciparum (one of four species that infects humans, btw) is just one species in a huge clade of plasmodia that infect other primates, rodents, birds, lizards, etc.
Surprise! These various malarial parasites show a clear nested hierarchy that makes perfect sense from an evolutionary viewpoint.
e.g. "The Perkins and Schall study found that the malaria parasites of mammals
form a well-supported clade. Rodent parasites are one clade, and the sister
clade is the primate parasites. P. falciparum and P. reichenowi form a distant
sister clade to the rest of the mammal parasites. Thus, P. falciparum really is a
different parasite, but falls within the mammal malaria parasite clade."
ref: Perkins, S. L. and J. J. Schall. 2002. A molecular phylogeny of malarial
parasites recovered from cytochrome b gene sequences. Journal of
Parasitology 88:972-978.
lol nice
u beat the guy at his own game!
That's one view of what science is all about (Popperian) but it's not the only one.
More specifically it is naive popperianism, where each and every claim ("statement") should be tested.
But if we replace an old theory with a new, it is in principle enough that it passes roughly the same tests the old one passed and a few more. General relativity was very much like that, explaining the perihelion precession of Mercury (and later gravitational light deflection and redshift). OTOH quantum mechanics has been tested to correspond to classical physics in theory and in practice in some specific cases due to practical difficulties.
But in both cases we have of course not yet tested all the possible predictions, mainly because we don't yet know them or have enough data.
Enter evolution theory, which is well tested in the popperian sense. But also uses a lot of non-popperian methods, like likelihood methods, to propose hypotheses that may or may not be supported or tested by later data. If they are, the better. But it is still science as it is connected to and supported by theory.
If P. falciparum had been seen generating any complex biological systems such as those that distinguish mammals from reptiles then it would have falsified the ID hypothesis.
- Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.
We don't want to test evolution here, we also don't want to test if it momentarily or indefinitely fails to deliver an explanation in some cases, we want to test a statement from IDC.
If IDC made a testable hypothesis, we would be on it like a dog on a meal. It would be enough to describe one mechanism that could say how often we expect to observe design events. Then we could decide whether it measures up to those predictions or not.
Meanwhile we are stuck with the same ol' theological gap argument as always. We don't see the, at this time really diminutive, IDC ghosts despite much observations. So we will assume they don't exist until evidence comes along.
- Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
an explanation of why organisms stay in stasis. Can anybody provide a good layperson's explanation or point to a good source?
Um, I'm not sure you got a layperson's explanation, so I will stick my paddle in the muddy waters until professional help takes over and steer clear. (IANAB.)
Sven DiMilo points out that malarial parasites has evolved. And continues to do so, it evolves in response to advances in our immune system or medical treatments.
But essentially I believe parasites reasonably adapted to their hosts evolve with them. I.e. small and sometimes rather loosely structured parasites (not constrained by a specific body plan) may have the ability to develop much faster, but the larger and often complex hosts don't. So the stasis is apparent, contingent on that we perceive the host as static.
different kinds of mutations could be observed (has an experiment like that been done?)
The original posts describing why Behe's claims on P. falciparum are erroneous described mutations more beneficial, complex and often occurring than Behe claimed.
> The original posts describing why Behe's claims on P. falciparum are erroneous described mutations more beneficial, complex and often occurring than Behe claimed.
Note first of all that Behe does not make the mistake noted by Prof. Moran:
"The TREE reviewer goes on to complain about my noting that no protein-protein binding sites evolved in malaria in an astronomical number of opportunities: 'He apparently thinks that evolutionary theory says anything should evolve a new binding site in response to any arbitrary situation.' The reviewer’s complaint begs a large question, however: when does evolutionary theory say that a protein-protein binding site should evolve? What non-arbitrary situation would cause that? In fact, evolutionary theory says nothing about specifics of what should or shouldn’t evolve. [emphasis added] Therefore, we need to get our ideas about what should or shouldn’t evolve not from evolutionary theory, but from evolutionary data. And what we see in our best set of data from malaria is that no such protein sites evolved by Darwinian means in an astronomical number of opportunities. Furthermore, mutations in only one protein, pfcrt, were really able to do much in the face of chloroquine, showing that the number of proteins that it may be helpful to evolve in any given situation might be extremely small: one, maybe none. Ditto for pyrimethamine resistance."
"If only one protein could evolve to help malaria avoid chloroquine poisoning, why should we think that a cell will luckily have a dozen or score of proteins that happen to be able to evolve to make a molecular machine?"
And Behe addresses the claim that mutations are more numerous, saying for instance they may not in fact promote resistance in some instance, and also that other compensatory mutations are needed to keep the organism viable, and so on.
And I'm still hoping for a review of The Edge of Evolution from Prof. Moran--unless I missed it.
lee_merrill says,
And I'm still hoping for a review of The Edge of Evolution from Prof. Moran--unless I missed it.
No, you haven't missed it. I'm still working on it but I have a rather busy schedule these days. Besides, the review is going to be complicated because I'll also have to address some of the errors in previous reviews.
Most of the reviews that have been published have not addressed the real issues in Behe's book. Instead, they have concentrated on trivial things that don't make a difference to his main argument.
Note first of all that Behe does not make the mistake noted by Prof. Moran
You are confusing what Behe claims and what DaveScot claims. None of which address the errors in Behe's book.
And Behe addresses the claim that mutations are more numerous
He doesn't address that more mutations than the fixated ones would be (and is) observable, probably because he fails to understand the mechanisms involved in evolution, the theory he presumes to address.
And most importantly, he discount all these instances with or without protein-protein binding sites (which, according to his own text, he shouldn't discriminate among as he accepts that evolution isn't targeted - all variation may eventually contribute to a PP site). Including the ones he specifically "forgot" to originally mention, the ones that didn't figure in the references he used to achieve his artificially low numbers.
The game is up.
[Caution: comments from a lay person] I think DaveScot’s argument is that evolution requires that complexity occur over generations, whether it wants/needs to do so.
Rather than predict complexity, doesn’t evolution predict that every niche opportunity be exploited?
Malaria has a unique lifestyle utilizing ubiquitous blood-sucking insects. Does it have much competition from its world’s view? Doesn’t developing resistance to medical treatments demonstrate its evolutionary response to stressors in its environment? If it’s fat and happy where it is, why evolve complexity that could only piss-off its host?
JimD, I think Moran answer that very point of DaveScot, as he mentions "evidence for the natural evolution of complex biological systems". DaveScot may be retooling the old "macroevolution isn't observed" scam, but that point is moot, there is plenty of evidence that tests this.
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