Most British scientists: Richard Dawkins' work misrepresents science

[Yazata]

I'm unaware of any serious ID proponent calling for or even suggesting that we should just give up and cease efforts to find a natural answer.

Certainly the ID proponents who believe (however privately) that the 'designer' is divine would seem to be implying that their proposed "explanation" is supernatural, hence outside the scope of natural science.

Working entirely within the scope of established science, the ID crowd demonstrate convincingly that no proposed natural processes have even gotten close to explaining life.

I think that it's true that nobody really knows how life originated. What we have instead are all kinds of hypothetical speculations about various chemical pathways and mechanisms that might have been involved. The point being that these hypothetical chemical mechanisms all refer to known chemistry. They don't just say "then a miracle happened".

Appealing to known chemical mechanisms has two advantages over appealing to interventions from the unknown:

1. It renders the hypotheses informative, it gives them explanatory power, by reducing the unknown (the origin of life) to the known (known chemical processes). We know more after hearing these kind of reductive explanations, not less. We've cleared up mysteries, we haven't just piled new mysteries atop the old. (What are 'miracles'? How do they occur? What is their mode of operation? What performs them?)

2. And it renders the hypotheses testable. We already have some knowledge of the known chemical processes, we know the circumstances when they occur and the results of their occurrence, so we can make judgments about how likely they are as explanations for some aspect of the origin of life.

Hence, while not calling for an end to such an industry, it makes perfect sense to allow for the possibility of a supernatural agency.

Moving in that direction takes ID outside the boundaries of natural science and it drains ID hypotheses of whatever explanatory power they might have had.

If not, let's have the neo-Darwinist crowd openly declare atheism as the sole allowed guiding philosophy.

Natural science is a naturalistic pursuit by its nature. It seeks natural causes for natural events. That is not the same thing as atheism. Atheism is a metaphysical position on what does and doesn't exist (a monotheistic 'God') while science takes a methodological position regarding naturalism, seeking in a 'bootstrap' fashion to build upon what is already known by sensory experience about how the natural world functions, hoping to extend the scope of that human understanding into new areas.

But think about what you just wrote - "anyone offering serious critique of abiogenesis". It seems to me that's the only kind of scientific arguments that ID proponents can make, trying to poke holes in origin-of-life theorizing. ID rhetoric seems to all be negative, it seemingly has no positive content of its own.

And the reason that's so, is because the origin of life theorists (your "abiogenesis") are the only ones actually proposing testable physical mechanisms. ID never does that and I don't see how it could.

You can't see the obvious logical flaw in your reasoning there?

There are no flaws that I can see. The quality of naturalistic theories of "abiogenesis" is that they have scientific content. They propose known mechanisms for the origin of life. That's what allows ID to attack them. The problem with ID is that it doesn't provide any similar content with its own speculations. "Then a miracle happened!" There's nothing tangible there, nothing that can be investigated or tested. All ID does is compound the mystery of the origin of life with even larger mysteries of its hypothetical invisible super-powered designers.

The perfectly legitimate role of ID is to both demonstrate the total inadequacies in all proposed naturalistic origin of life hypotheses, and in doing so make a strong case for an IDer.

That leaves ID as simply a destructive parasite on natural science. It's also an impossible task.

ID proponents can argue that this or that particular mechanism won't successfully play the role in "abiogenesis" that others have hypothesized. (ID can only make those limited arguments because the naturalistic hypotheses have scientific content that allows them to be evaluated.) Conventional origin-of-life theorists already criticize each other's arguments and much of the literature consists of those criticisms and replies to them.

But ID proponents seemingly want to make a much stronger negative argument: that no naturalistic explanation can possibly succeed. That's seemingly an impossible argument to make since it would have to eliminate not only every naturalistic argument that has already been advanced, but every unknown naturalistic argument that might be advanced in the future.

Then there's still the problem of the missing positive content: ID's own alternative theory about how life originated. ID has never revealed that positive part of their thesis in the kind of detail that would allow it to be investigated as an alternative scientific research program.

If ID wants to be accepted as real science, then it needs to specify what kind of 'designers' it's talking about. It needs to propose plausible means of gaining reliable information about those designers. It needs to give some kind of account of what kind of being the designers have, where the designers reside and what their mode of action is. In other words, ID needs to actually propose some testable ID theory. It needs to turn itself into a real scientific rival to chemical "abiogenesis".

That is a typical cynical retort from the atheist/materialist and sorry to say it but it's facile. Who the hell are any of us to demand of some presumed higher intelligence that such has to bow to our puny demands and materialize for a prime time TV Q & A session? Or otherwise offer 'proof of existence'. We need know absolutely nothing about any such personage(s) or whatever game-plan is being worked out irrespective of our petty wants and presuppositions.

If ID wants to be taken seriously as science, its explanations will have to be informative, not mystifying. We will have to know more after hearing them, not less. Science doesn't have to conform to your personal religious scruples, any more than religion has conform to scientism.

And really Yazata, I just can't figure you at all. Taking up the hard-nosed materialist stance here. And then I go back and review e.g. p5 #87, and following. Let me make this plain - I consider your appeals to 'inner revelations' and such, a far, far weaker and entirely subjective argument in favour of a non-material existence.

I get the feeling that ID'ers and 'new atheists' like Dawkins are making a very similar kind of mistake. Everyone is using the word 'science' as an honorific, as a word meaning something like 'superior reason', imagining that it encompasses everything real, and employing it as a way of claiming intellectual advantage.

I think that Dawkins and his 'new atheist' followers are wrong when they do it, when they try to conflate science's methodological naturalism with philosophy's metaphysical naturalism, and try to insist that if something doesn't fall within the scope of science, then it can't be rational and hence that it can't exist.

And I think that 'ID' is wrong when it claims that its' hypotheses about super-powered invisible designers active at the origin of life must be 'scientific'.

Both the 'new atheists' and their ID opponents are conflating science and metaphysics.

By its nature, natural science practices methodological naturalism. It seeks natural causes for natural events. And that's the most obvious place where ID fails to qualify as natural science.

But equally, science is no more justified in proclaiming that its realm of naturalistic expertise is coextensive with reason and reality themselves.

 

[billvon]

Abiogenesis is a conjecture.

No, it's not. It describes the process of life beginning. It's like the term planetary formation; we know it happened, but we don't know all the details. RNA-world is a conjecture.

 

[spidergoat]

I think that it's true that nobody really knows how life originated. What we have instead are all kinds of hypothetical speculations about various chemical pathways and mechanisms that might have been involved. The point being that these hypothetical chemical mechanisms all refer to known chemistry. They don't just say "then a miracle happened"...

Well said, for the most part. However, if you treat the biblical God as an hypothesis, it fails scientifically on almost all points. There is just no good reason to believe it.

 

[Sarkus]

No, it's not. It describes the process of life beginning. It's like the term planetary formation; we know it happened, but we don't know all the details. RNA-world is a conjecture.

Abiogenesis is still technically a conjecture: a conclusion based on incomplete information, for which no proof has been forthcoming.
The term abiogenesis itself is simply a word describing the process of life beginning naturally. That abiogenesis occurred on earth is indeed a conjecture, but one that is fairly much taken as a given by science, much like Fermat's Last Theorem was a conjecture until proven 20 odd years ago.
Conjecture doesn't mean guess, or that it shouldn't be taken seriously or scientifically, or that it's baseless. Aspects of abiogenesis can be hypothesised and tested with regard the process that might have been taken, but the notion that abiogenesis occurred on earth is simply not testable (without a time machine) and thus, while considered likely, it will remain a conjecture, albeit one that is assumed to be the likeliest explanation for how life began on earth.
Bear in mind that creating life from raw materials in a lab is not evidence that it therefore began that way on earth, or that abiogenesis even occurred on earth... it would just make our understanding of possible beginnings greater.

 

[paddoboy]

But in truth the Dawkins thing was settled pretty quickly. They surveyed 1500 scientists and found 38 who didn't like Dawkins's attitude and public tone of voice. That is an underestimate, is how I would bet. But in any case, it wasn't going to run 20 pages.

I agree, the headlines re misrepresenting science is way over the top.

 

[paddoboy]

Abiogenesis is a conjecture. This is not to say that many hypotheses do not start out as conjectures, which the conjecturer [not a real word] then proceeds to search for evidence to support or refute it.

My point though is that abiogenisis by whatever paths, is really the only scientific solution.

 

[billvon]

Abiogenesis is still technically a conjecture: a conclusion based on incomplete information, for which no proof has been forthcoming.

Abiogenesis is the transition from nonliving to living matter. That happened; that is not a conjecture. HOW it happened is open to conjecture.

 

[iceaura]

Given your claim that NO 'A fundie' types (and any and all ID researchers qualify in your book) know how to do probability estimates right,

No - my observation is that the ones who bring such calculations into fora like this one always get them wrong - they make basic, elementary, and (we observe - including Dawkins, the original topic) characteristic and identifying - mistakes of reasoning.

There are some who do not embarrass themselves in public this way, by not doing such calculations at all. They may very well be competent.

I can weigh-up Peltzer's argument about Maillard reactions screwing up any chance of long, useful peptide chains forming from an amino acid soup.

But you can't say anything about the probability of abiogenesis from that. Anything at all.
You are making a basic error of reasoning, which we see immediately in the utter meaninglessness of your term "useful" in this context.

Similarly, I don't need an actual odds calculation to know trying to balance three pointy pencils upright and end-to-end is just not going to work, no matter how many attempts one tries.

That's because you have defined the starting conditions - if someone starts using a styrofoam block for the first one, and pressing the sharp points into the rubber ends of the subsequent ones, you are going to complain about cheating. When you know the paths, especially if you have definitely excluded all but a couple, you can estimate cumulative probabilities.

When you don't, and haven't, you can't. Not even approximately. The ID folks have crashed on that one dozens of times - from birdwings to eyeballs to blood clots.

Behe deals with the established biology angle - post abiogenesis.

So do you. Entirely and apparently obliviously. That's where you get the word "useful" from, for example.

Only I was not much impressed. For one because the evolutionary appearance of that highly complex, tightly structured and integrated secretory system itself needed a plausible explanation. And two, because a gradual evolution from secretory system to flagellum just made no sense. What is the survival advantage - natural selection at work - in some pissy little intermediate doo-da arrangement that acts to block secretion but can't yet work as a real outboard propeller?

The ID of the Gaps again.

What Kenneth did there was blow a handwaving probability "estimate" out of the water, by including a set of pathways not before considered. Just one set, of an unknown number, was enough.

Your response is to make yet another such handwaving "estimate", based in one of the smaller areas of total ignorance that yet remain to you. Someone with a bit more biological information can back you up yet more, into a still smaller gap, by pointing out that flagella-like "hairs" can and do serve many other purposes than propulsion - including guiding secretions, scaffolding them, etc - but that's not the point:

The point is that the entire argument is futile, from the beginning, in the context of evolutionary theory. The major advance of evolutionary theory was the dismissal of that argument. Evolutionary development is not constrained, a priori, by purpose. That makes it more complex than you can imagine by invoking ostensible or visible a priori purpose. Far more. Orders of magnitude more.

 

[Sarkus]

Abiogenesis is the transition from nonliving to living matter. That happened; that is not a conjecture. HOW it happened is open to conjecture.

It is certainly accepted by many/most scientists that it happened on earth (and it is abiogenesis on earth that is being referred to). But it is simply not testable that it was the cause of life on Earth. That is why it is considered conjecture. A highly rational conjecture to accept, but conjecture nonetheless. Feel free to provide an example of how you would test it, and I will happily concede the point though.
At best we can test specific mechanisms that might have occurred. But this is not evidence that it actually happened on earth.

 

[billvon]

It is certainly accepted by many/most scientists that it happened on earth

Well, no, that's conjecture. All we know is that it happened, since life exists. It could have happened on another planet, or around another star, and been propagated here.

 

[spidergoat]

Well, no, that's conjecture. All we know is that it happened, since life exists. It could have happened on another planet, or around another star, and been propagated here.

It's a pretty good guess, since Earth is warm and wet.

 

[billvon]

It's a pretty good guess, since Earth is warm and wet.

Agreed. But at this point, that's what it is.

 

[spidergoat]

Agreed. But at this point, that's what it is.

Scientific guesses aren't like other kinds of guesses, they are informed by data. It's not only likely that life came about here, but it seems like it happened more than once.

 

[Q-reeus]

I
...But equally, science is no more justified in proclaiming that its realm of naturalistic expertise is coextensive with reason and reality themselves.

The rest of your post is way too long winded for me to go through point by point. You still baffle me. Taking some high middle ground it seems but imo it's vacuous.
Can you summarise, real briefly, what you do believe? Like, is there only a material world will do. If the answer is 'don't know', that will give me enough handle.

 

[Q-reeus]

No - my observation is that the ones who bring such calculations into fora like this one always get them wrong - they make basic, elementary, and (we observe - including Dawkins, the original topic) characteristic and identifying - mistakes of reasoning.

Feel free to keep asserting such things. And so on for the rest of that post. Of course the vast majority here will nod in agreement. paddoboy gives it a 'Like' - the ultimate stamp of approval. LOL. Such is SF. You folks are set in your ideological beliefs, I in mine. Too much time and energy wasted in endless exchanges that convince no-one to change.

The ID of the Gaps again.

What Kenneth did there was blow a handwaving probability "estimate" out of the water, by including a set of pathways not before considered. Just one set, of an unknown number, was enough.

Your response is to make yet another such handwaving "estimate", based in one of the smaller areas of total ignorance that yet remain to you. Someone with a bit more biological information can back you up yet more, into a still smaller gap, by pointing out that flagella-like "hairs" can and do serve many other purposes than propulsion - including guiding secretions, scaffolding them, etc - but that's not the point:

The point is that the entire argument is futile, from the beginning, in the context of evolutionary theory. The major advance of evolutionary theory was the dismissal of that argument. Evolutionary development is not constrained, a priori, by purpose. That makes it more complex than you can imagine by invoking ostensible or visible a priori purpose. Far more. Orders of magnitude more.

I will just torpedo your high and mighty triumphalism on that one. Just did a quick search, and found this: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/07/why_the_type_ii097821.html
Have a read, all the way through. Just a hiccup no doubt.

 

[iceaura]

Feel free to keep asserting such things.

With evidence, even argument, the first few times - remember the cumulative probability you still haven't figured out?

I will just torpedo your high and mighty triumphalism on that one. Just did a quick search, and found this:

Matt Baker is a different guy - you did notice that you are introducing yet another, different article, rather than dealing with the problems of your reaction to the one? That Matt Baker and Kenneth Miller are not the same person? But ok -

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/07/why_the_type_ii097821.html
Have a read, all the way through. Just a hiccup no doubt.

Here's the first hiccup, before we even get to the basic errors:

So in the interest of accuracy, let's reframe Baker's argument for him.

Why do creationists keep doing that? No, let's not. Don't do that. It doesn't work. Deal with the actual argument the guy made.

Otherwise, you are going to screw up like this:

First, at most the sequence similarity can establish, as Baker puts it, that "they have clearly come from the same genetic ancestor." But Michael Behe is quick to remind us why establishing common ancestry is different from establishing a Darwinian explanation:

An actual Darwinian explanation is not even on the horizon here. It's not part of the picture. It's not part of Baker's argument. Nobody has - and we may never have, it's a very difficult matter - the, or even a, decent Darwinian-aligned explication of the actual steps, what actually happened, in the evolutionary development of the flagellum driving complexes in various organisms, such as bacteria. What was established was that the original ID handwaving claim of absurd and impossible-level improbability was garbage, based as it was on ignorance of possible paths and denial of the evidence that some such paths were taken.

But it doesn't matter: The whole thing, and everything like it, is already responded to, in advance (because as with that one the ID folks keep making the same basic mistakes, over and over and over) here:

Your response is to make yet another such handwaving "estimate", based in one of the smaller areas of total ignorance that yet remain to you. Someone with a bit more biological information can back you up yet more, into a still smaller gap, by pointing out that flagella-like "hairs" can and do serve many other purposes than propulsion - including guiding secretions, scaffolding them, etc - but that's not the point:

The point is that the entire argument is futile, from the beginning, in the context of evolutionary theory.

 

[paddoboy]

Feel free to keep asserting such things. And so on for the rest of that post. Of course the vast majority here will nod in agreement. paddoboy gives it a 'Like' - the ultimate stamp of approval. LOL. Such is SF. You folks are set in your ideological beliefs, I in mine. Too much time and energy wasted in endless exchanges that convince no-one to change.

You really seem extremely obsessed with me liking a post or not. Do my "likes" trouble you that much? Your abnormal interest seems rather peurile don't you think?
[reminds me of a previous nut who was somewhat obsessed with me also ]

On your rather weird statement, "You folks are set in your ideological beliefs, I in mine" again you are far off the beaten track.....Us folk as you put it, or us whatever labels you chose to transfix us with, are simply following the scientific method and understanding that Abiogensis is the only real scientific solution.....whether that be Earthly abiogensis or something akin to Panspermia. Your second inference re yourself is correct though.

 

[paddoboy]

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/chemistry/calilasseia-78-papers-on-abiogenesis-t845.html
1) A Combined Experimental And Theoretical Study On The Formation Of The Amino Acid Glycine And Its Isomer In Extraterrestrial Ices by Philip D. Holtom, Chris J. Bennett, Yoshihiro Osamura, Nigel J Mason and Ralf. I Kaiser, The Astrophysical Journal, 626: 940-952 (20th June 2005)
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X ... 7d30dfdde0

2) A Production Of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions by Stanley L. Miller, Science, 117: 528-529 (15th May 1953) (Full text requires a password)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/c ... 7/3046/528

3) A Rigorous Attempt To Verify Interstellar Glycine by I. E. Snyder, F. J. Lovas, J. M. Hollis, D. N. Friedel, P. R. Jewell, A. Remijan, V. V. Ilyushin, E. A. Alekseev and S. F. Dyubko, The Astrophysical Journal, 619(2): 914-930 (1st February 2005) {Also available at arXiv.org]
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X ... 32e381ebda

4) A Self-Replicating Ligase Ribozyme by Natasha Paul & Gerald F. Joyce, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA., 99(20): 12733-12740 (1st October 2002)
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/20/12733.full

6) Activated Acetic Acid By Carbon Fixation On (Fe,Ni)S Under Primordial Conditions by Claudia Huber and Günter Wächetershäuser, Science, 276: 245-247 (11th April 1997) (Full text requires a password)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/a ... 6/5310/245\

7) An Asymmetric Underlying Rule In The Assignment Of Codons: Possible Clue To A Quick Early Evolution Of The Genetic Code Via Successive Binary Choices by Marc Delarue, The RNA Journal, 13(2): 161-169 (12th December 2006)
http://rnajournal.cshlp.org/content/ear ... l.pdf+html (Pretty Pictures!)

8) Attempted Prebiotic Synthesis Of Pseudouridine by Jason P. Dworkin, Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 27: 345-355 (1997) (Full text requires a password)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/t12681n4n572727m/

9) Carbonyl Sulphide-Mediated Prebiotic Formation Of Peptides by Luke Leman, Leslie Orgel and M. Reza Ghadiri, Science, 306: 283-286 (8th October 2004) (Full text requires a password)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/a ... 6/5694/283

10) Catalysis In Prebiotic Chemistry: Application To The Synthesis Of RNA Oligomers by James P. Ferris, Prakash C. Joshi, K-J Wang, S. Miyakawa and W. Huang, Advances in Space Research, 33: 100-105 (2004)
http://rpi.edu/dept/chem/chem_faculty/p ... 20Res..pdf

11) Cations As Mediators Of The Adsorption Of Nucleic Acids On Clay Surfaces In Prebiotic Environments by Marco Franchi, James P. Ferris and Enzo Gallori, Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 33: 1-16 (2003) (Full text requires a password)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m17817464n0q0774/

12) Chemistry for the Synthesis of Nucleobase-Modified Peptide Nucleic Acid by R. H. E. Hudson, R. D. Viirre, Y. H. Liu, F. Wojciechowski and A. K. Dambenieks, Pure Appl. Chem., 76(7-8) 1591-1598, 2004
http://old.iupac.org/publications/pac/2 ... 7x1591.pdf

13) Coevolution Of Compositional Protocells And Their Environment by Barak Shenhav, Aia Oz and Doron Lancet, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Part B, 362: 1813-1819 (9th May 2007)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2442395/ (Pretty Pictures!)

14) Computational Models For The Formation Of Protocell Structures by Linglan Edwards, Yun Peng and James A. Reggia, Artificial Life, 4(1): 61-77 (1998) (Full text requires a password)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs ... 4698568440

15) Conditions For The Emergence Of Life On The Early Earth: Summary And Reflections by Joshua Jortner, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Part B, 361: 1877-1891 (11th September 2006)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1664691/ (Pretty Pictures!)

16) Coupled Growth And Division Of Model Protocell Membranes by Ting F. Zhu and Jack W. Szostak, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 131: 5705-5713 (2009)
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/ja900919c (Pretty Pictures!)

17) Darwinian Evolution On A Chip by Brian M. Paegel and Gerald F. Joyce, Public Library of Science Biology, 6(4): e85 (April 2008)
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info ... io.0060085 (Pretty Pictures!)

18) Early Anaerobic Metabolisms by Don E Canfield, Minik T Rosing and Christian Bjerrum, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Part B, 361: 1819-1836 (11th September 2006)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1664682/ (Super cool equations!) (Fun Graphs/Charts!)

19) Emergence Of A Replicating Species From An In Vitro RNA Evolution Reaction by Ronald R. Breaker and Gerald F. Joyce, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 91: 6093-6097 (June 1994)
http://www.pnas.org/content/91/13/6093.full.pdf+html

20) Evolution And Self-Assembly Of Protocells by Ricard V. Solé, The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology, 41: 274-284 (2009) (Full text requires a password)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o ... 13157fac8d

 

[Sarkus]

Well, no, that's conjecture. All we know is that it happened, since life exists. It could have happened on another planet, or around another star, and been propagated here.

Apologies, I was under the impression the discussion was specifically about abiogenesis having happened on earth, and that this was the cause of life on earth. But if talking more widely about abiogenesis in general, you are correct in that it is the only logical scientific explanation: the universe was devoid of life, now has life, ergo life formed from non-life. Thus not conjecture. So apologies for any confusion.

 

[Q-reeus]

With evidence, even argument, the first few times - remember the cumulative probability you still haven't figured out?
Matt Baker is a different guy - you did notice that you are introducing yet another, different article, rather than dealing with the problems of your reaction to the one? That Matt Baker and Kenneth Miller are not the same person? But ok -
Here's the first hiccup, before we even get to the basic errors: Why do creationists keep doing that? No, let's not. Don't do that. It doesn't work. Deal with the actual argument the guy made.

Otherwise, you are going to screw up like this: An actual Darwinian explanation is not even on the horizon here. It's not part of the picture. It's not part of Baker's argument. Nobody has - and we may never have, it's a very difficult matter - the, or even a, decent Darwinian-aligned explication of the actual steps, what actually happened, in the evolutionary development of the flagellum driving complexes in various organisms, such as bacteria. What was established was that the original ID handwaving claim of absurd and impossible-level improbability was garbage, based as it was on ignorance of possible paths and denial of the evidence that some such paths were taken.

But it doesn't matter: The whole thing, and everything like it, is already responded to, in advance (because as with that one the ID folks keep making the same basic mistakes, over and over and over) here:

And the neo-Darwinist/abiogenesis storybook Faithful will nod in approval once again, at all that assertive polemic. Meanwhile, up the rear, paddoboy has been busy click-harvesting a welter of links to articles he could never hope to understand in detail. But so what, that latest flood just looks overwhelmingly impressive. And that's what counts with most here.