Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable

neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:

[.....]
we do have the analogy with humans. Plenty of humans have worn a white
beard, driven vehicles drawn by reindeer, made toys and given them as
Christmas presents and even gotten shorter people to help out in their
tasks.


Oh great, fist the extremist evo nazi's are on my tail, and now the
Santa Nazi's also :-)

Actually it is similar to the definition of God issue. If you define
Santa as a guy capable of delivering 4 billion gifts in one night
without detection, then it is a long-shot. If you define him as a nice
guy in old Norway (where they actually dress sorta like Santa out of
culture) who gives a few dozen gifts to the local children, then the
probability estimation goes up.

Similary, "God" may simply be a dude(s) with a spaceship who tweaked
Ape DNA to produce humans. He/she/it could rightfully claim to have
"created man".

Yes. If you define "God", "Santa Claus" or "Intelligent Designer" so
that he's possible and testable, you'll find that he is possible and
testable. However, it doesn't mean that God/Santa/ID of any of the
other definitions people are more interested in are testable. It's just
a case of if you define a carrot as a potato, then carrots are
potatoes. If you define things very wide and broad, eventually concepts
become meaningless. The God who is worshipped by Christianity, Jews,
Islam gets his divine status from the idea that He's the sovereign over
everything, the creator of the whole universe, the Supreme Being who
defines the boundaries of good and evil and oversees everything, sees
your every secret thought and heart's desire, an eternal existence that
decides our ultimate fate. Those who worship this God would most likely
think that it's meaningless to call some dude with a spaceship God, if
he may be dead already and has no say about our morality or our
salvation, no power over us, doesn't answer or hear prayers and whose
only common feature with God-as-usually-defined is that he did some
experiments with primate DNA.

Well, we are talking about derivations of ID, not Creationism. ID does
not declare up front the "type" of intelligence that is being tested
for.

ID would have a better shot at being science if it was somewhat more
specific and told us its hypothesis: What is it that we're supposed to
be looking for?

How is SETI allegedly specific? It makes *no* claims about the aliens
other than that they use radio. DNA-ID (or IF where F=fiddle) makes no
assumptions about the nature of the intelligence other than being able
to manipulate DNA enough to leave patterns/messages that we may detect.
Humans have both used radio and have put messages in DNA.



If we define "science" or "testable" by what is popular, then perhaps
scientists should be studying and hypothesizing about American Idol. A
literal interpretation of a Biblical god is probably not testable.

Seems to me that certain literal interpretations of what the Bible
means have been tested already and found inadequate. Maybe we can't
test for God, directly, but we can examine the claims that the Bible
makes about the world.

Perhaps. But that is sort of outside of our scope here it seems.
Frankly, I don't care what the religious right-wingers think.


In the "message in the bottle" link above, scientists propose it as a
way to "save" messages for future generations. And certainly mining DNA
that is already sequenced for other purposes is cheaper than digging
into mountains.

Lots of genomes are publicly available. Someone just needs to go ahead
and create specific search algorithms. It's a better hobby than some I
could think of.

Maybe. Again, I am only claiming testability, not tested.

And if someone does any testing, you're claiming the wrong specs were
used, instead of the ones you refuse to give because it's not your
burden?

I am not sure what you are refering to.

Well, you complained that Zachriel used wrong specifics but haven't
been willing to say what should have been used instead.

I did give specifics regarding searching the already-presented lists of
studies. I thought it was pretty clear that making your own tests up to
find mona was not allowed. Perhaps it was not clear and I misworded it.
If so, that was unintentional. He went outside of the challenge as
originally stated.

Not allowed?!? So, in fact you don't actually want to have DNA-ID
tested; you just want to make claims about its testability and leave it
at that, because tests could turn out to bring results you don't like?

It was a specific challenge. If somebody wants to introduce something
outside that specific challenge, be my guest as long as it is clear
what you are testing and claiming.



The way I see it, both SETI and DNA-ID have a handicap here since they
don't start from puzzling evidence in need of explanation, the
rationale is more along the lines of "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there
was some puzzling evidence that we might explain by invoking
aliens/Gods/robots, let's go look for some."

That is an interesting observation. Many don't consider SETI a legit
scientific endevour either.

I didn't say it wasn't legit, there's nothing wrong with trying to find
out if there are narrowband patterns in some data, it's just that it
starts out from speculation, although perhaps not quite as iffy as "If
Alien Genome Project left its logo somewhere in the ecosystem we might
find it", "If Tooth Fairy sends me e-mail I'll know that she exists" or
"If Thor decides to prove his existence by sending out some great
lightnings which form hammer patterns we'll be able to observe quite
fabulous thunderstorms."

Again, this appears to be a case of "silly tainting". Nobody knows how
to build tooth fairies or make people fly into bedrooms undected, but
we *do* know how to put messages in DNA and launch probes that may
taint planets hundreds of light-years away (taking a long time to get
there). We could "seed" space.

Maybe we could but I don't see what that has got to do with what I was
saying. We don't have evidence that points to aliens sending us radio
messages (unless SETI has come up with something I'm unaware of) and we
don't have evidence that points to aliens or gods leaving messages in
our DNA. If we had such evidence we would have such evidence, but as we
don't... It's speculation. There are any number of other speculations
which would be interesting if only we had any evidence that they were
true but as a matter of fact we don't. SETI is ahead of DNA-ID,
however, in that it has given us its speculations in a fairly specific
form which allows hypotheses to be tested.

If you mean they wrote algorithms to detect candidates, I will
perfectly agree that they are further along. But was SETI "not science"
when they first proposed the idea? If not, at what point did it become
science? What is the threashold? Many here behave as if they have these
black-box threasholds in their heads here, but cannot seam to
articulate exactly what they are. It is almost, "I cannot define
science, but I know it when I see it because I am smarter than you".
That is not a usable/analyzable/testable claim. (I am not accusing you
of such, but it is diffucult to get specific threasholds here.)


I think this is the right-wing (and most vocal) version of ID. Many
middle-wingers suspect that God may have used evo, and simply
interfered or "guided" it to create man.

Just man? Isn't that kind of partial interference covered by "somebody
guided the formation of functional DNA or some of it"? It seems to me
that the difference between apes and humans is so slight as there are
no new organs or biological functions involved that there isn't much
that God needs to do to guide evolution at that point if all the rest
before that was created by natural evolution. He might have had to
insert the soul but this does not appear to be covered by 'guiding
evolution'.

Roughly 30% of the american population, including recent Catholic
doctrine, accepts the possibility that God may have used evolution to
create man. If that is the case, then God may have merely guided it
along its way rather than built it from scratch or guided it heavily.

You present this as if it's some kind of objection to what I was saying
but I'm of the opinion that God using heavily or lightly guided
evolution is covered by "somebody guided the formation of functional
DNA or some of it" and that this is not a particularly right-wing
version of anything.

I am not sure. Either way, let's just agree that a sizable portion of
the population has no hangups about the idea that God(s) may have
guided the evolution of man by tinkering along the way.

Now what the DNA-ID seems to be all about are messages in the DNA.
There seems to be no reason to suppose that the picture of Mona Lisa
also happens to code for any important biological functions such as
proteins involved in the making of the bacterial flagella or the
vertebrate eye. In theory, there's nothing to say that all functional
DNA couldn't also be interpreted as pictures, but designing it so
requires so much more sophistication that any limited designers would
probably go for the easier option and put messages in separately from
functions. So we're most likely talking about non-functional 'junk' DNA
which isn't used to produce proteins. I'm not aware of any tests we
could use to determine if the functional bits of DNA that aren't part
of Mona Lisa were originally thought up by a genetic engineer.

The question I was asking is: in your book, does inserting functionless
'junk' DNA to make a point count as the same kind of guidance as the
guidance involved in guided evolution and intelligent design, in which
the designer considers the functions and how they could be improved?
Even though inserting functionless bits does not necessarily mean that
the inserter had anything to do with designing the functional parts.

This seems to relate to the origin versus guidence issue described
earlier. DNA-ID is probably a better test of the second.

I don't see why, if you mean "origin" as in "created from scratch" and
"guidance" as in "helped evolution along towards some specific goal",
which both involve interference with functional DNA. If I'm right
saying that DNA-ID would be more likely to find images and patterns in
non-functional DNA because the pictures that can be forced into
functional genes are constrained by what works biologically (*) and
produces an useful protein then what's to prevent both the
creator-from-scratch and the just-helping-evo-along-a-bit-designer
from leaving their logos in the non-functional part.


I thought you argued against such before, saying that a literal
biblical interpretation does not support a god who would put logos or
peotry into DNA.

Do you think it does? There's nothing that I can think of in the Bible
that points to God hiding poetry in DNA, and many passages convey the
idea that God's handiwork is clearly visible in the wonders of nature,
not hidden away. Of course, the Bible does not tell us everything that
God has done, and its authors were unaware of DNA, so I don't think we
can say that the Bible denies the possibility but I think that it's
clear that it's not a biblical idea or supported by the Bible, it's
something that modern people have cooked up.

The Bible also has some silly recipes/rituals for cleaning mold off of
walls, etc. Many don't take these literally. Many view the Bible as a
rough guide, not literal instructions for everything. Some religious
fanatics don't poop until they find permission in the Bible.


In any case, why do you drag up the literal biblical interpretation now
when you've repeatedly said that the aim of DNA-ID is not to make
biblical literalists happy and that there are plenty of other potential
designers? Surely then we cannot equate design-from-scratch with
biblical literalism since there must be an infinite number of other
potential designers who did it from scratch but not as described by
the Bible.

I am just exploring the possible links between DNA-ID and the Bible or
Christians as we know them. It is sort of a side issue.

(*) Of course, an omnipotent designer could by definition make anything
work, even a human with no DNA and proteins at all, so if the creator
is omnipotent all genomes may be giant messages which can be read in an
infinite number of ways backwards and forwards and sideways in an
infinite number of languages and make sense each time

There are a lot of confusing or contradictory implications of
"omnipotent". An example is God using his infinite powers to make a
rock so heavy that even he can't lift it. But if he is omni, then he
should be able to lift anything.


Findings may
not make right-wingers happy, but middle winger Christains may be right
at home with it. (They may attribute the fiddling to angles or perhaps
even satan).

-T-

.

Relevant Pages

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    ... we do have the analogy with humans. ... Actually it is similar to the definition of God issue. ... Ape DNA to produce humans. ... ID would have a better shot at being science if it was somewhat more ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
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  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
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  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
    ... we do have the analogy with humans. ... Actually it is similar to the definition of God issue. ... Ape DNA to produce humans. ... don't start from puzzling evidence in need of explanation, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
    ... we do have the analogy with humans. ... Actually it is similar to the definition of God issue. ... Ape DNA to produce humans. ... Unless perhaps the God or God-claimant gives us evidence. ...
    (talk.origins)