Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable

topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:

[.....too deep to include handles]

We were talking about ID in general, not about SETI. Something that
does not declare what it's testing for is not scientific.

Suggestions were already given: images, pi, primes, that "language"
algorithm, etc.

I was talking about ID in general, not about DNA-ID. I thought you
agreed with me that they're separate concepts and that ID in general
does not predict images in DNA.

I don't think that they are that separate. Finding a strong message in
DNA would certainly boost even Behe's version of ID. I mostly separate
them to avoid mixing up Behe's issues into the more general version
that I am using.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that. I don't think that finding
messages would be conclusive enough to resolve the question of the
origins of the complexity of life.


Are you suggesting that all versions of ID must focus primarily on
*original* origin to be called "ID"? Perhaps we are getting into a
definition issue. I think most would agree that aliens fiddling with
*ape* DNA to result in humans would qualify as "intelligent design" in
a broader sense of the concept even if the ape fiddlers didn't invent
the cell.

Intelligent design eventually means whatever people use it to refer to
so it could also mean aliens fiddling with ape DNA although that's not
the usual thing we think of. But this shows how the broadness of the
concept and allowing for nearly everything makes its testing pretty
damn hard. Tests looking for evidence of aliens in faraway galaxies
sending us probes filled with bacteria which populate Earth via
panspermia a long time ago would not find any evidence of aliens coming
here and fiddling with ape DNA. Tests looking for evidence of alien
tinkering with apes couldn't find any evidence that God interfered with
evolution to produce the octopi. And so on.

Perhaps "liberal creationism" is a better term because many
non-conservative Christians are not concerned with the origin of cells
nearly as much as the origin of man. It is the more extreme ones that
insist on a start-to-finish agent of life. (However, "liberal
creationism" implies a God rather than aliens, so this needs work also.
But liberal christians may be less likely to insist on the supernatural
being a strong boundary from high-end technology.) One's definition may
reflect what their religion hopes to find.

Why would it be a problem that liberal creationism implies God if
you're using it to refer to non-conservative Christians? Doesn't that
imply belief in God as well?

Anyhow, I won't claim my version of ID is a good test of original
origin. It is a better test of Intelligent Tinkering.

(Seems your chart got mis-formatted by my newsreader. Ascii Art is as
much as a longshot as SETI and DNA-ID at times :-)

Mine too. It looked fine when I sent it but not when I read it. Oh
well, that'll teach me.

In fact, it does not predict anything
else either. This makes it untestable and not scientific.


If messages in DNA boosts it, then it is testable. Thus, Behe's ID is
still testable. It may not be the test they hope for, but if reality
dissapoints, so be it. We can't judge an idea by who it makes happy.

I still hold that finding prime numbers in bacteria says nothing about
the origins of the alleged irreducibly complex biological functions.
Like the human analogy, we may have put messages in some DNA or altered
some genes, but we had nothing to do with how that DNA and all the
complex biochemical mechanisms the creature has came to be originally.

(Actually, Behe's version is falsifible by busting "irreducable". In
other words, reducing falsifies it.)

If it's shown how one thing could have evolved, they'll just shift the
goal posts and claim that some other feature or combination of features
is too complex to evolve.


But each example of IC that gets solved reduces the strength of the
claim. Perhaps they will go down with the ship, but so be it.

We can hope :)

As for
DNA-ID, it is still somewhat unclear to me what's the rationale behind
the prediction that there are prime numbers encoded in our DNA is. Is
there one or are they just what-if or why-not possibilities you made
up?

It is one of many messages that a DNA engineer/fiddler might include.
Primes have been proposed by many scientists as a way to get cosmic
attention if we broadcast signals for aliens. It is a "universal
language" if you will.

So, it's just another case of "aliens must do it because humans could
do it"? How do we know that primes are a universal language?
How can we
be sure that aliens or gods conceptualize maths the same way we do or
that they think in terms of numbers at all?

Those are very interesting questions. Things like Pi are almost
necessary to work our physical world. I am sure at some stage
intelligent aliens have to deal with the math of circles. As far as
primes, perhaps you should ask a math forum. Primes are a natural
property of integer analysis. If somebody claims that integers may be a
human-centric idea, that is a bit hard for me to swallow. It may be
interesting to ask the math forums that question. It is hard to do data
processing without integers. It is hard to run an economy without
counting things as descrete units. Nobody has proposed an alternative
that aliens may adapt that I know of. In other words, integers seem
necessary for any kind of practical modeling of everyday life and
living.

Maybe they are for technological aliens but somehow the concept of God
needing integers for any kind of practical modeling of everyday life
and living seems so mundane. ;) Why would an omniscient one need to
bother with counting and doing divisions, when he knew our number even
before there was anything to be counted.

Aliens may not really recognize Mona as
something interesting or intelligent because they are probably not
human and Mona could resemble their own gal bladder to them.

Well, I don't know, I think it would be fascinating to find a picture
of a human gall bladder in a bacterial genome. How on earth did *that*
end up *there*?


But it is hard to tell a gall bladder from a booger or poop without a
scale.

For whatever it's worth, IMO it would be pretty weird to find pictures
of poop in bacterial genomes too. Them intelligent designers sure are
some strange aliens...be afraid.

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.

Well, it was perfectly clear to me what Zachriel was claiming: that a
relatively simple and unspecific statistical test could detect a bitmap
inserted into DNA.

For what purpose would he want to demonstrate that?

Well, from what I gather it appears that you asked him to.

Perhaps I did. However, that by itself does not make it relavant to the
key issues here. I may have ran off at the mouth, getting off to a
tangent. Every now and then I do that.

So, if the topic is testability, actual tests are off topic. Got it.


I am not sure what his Mona of Means implies about the testability of
it. It seems to confirm that testing is possible (which i never
disputed), but I don't know if his claim that past tests were "thorough
enough" mean much. Isn't that what he is implying? That we are done
testing?

Depends on what you mean by "done testing". Done some testing? Or done
conclusive testing to find out all there ever could be to find? Or done
just about enough testing to make us think that we needn't bother any
more? I thought that Zachriel claimed that some tests that have already
been done would have found some DNA messages because they stick out as
statistical outliers, but I don't suppose he can have meant that they'd
have found every kind of possible DNA message since it is clearly
impossible. It has been discussed earlier in this thread by several
posters, and I don't remember Zachriel disagreeing.

Some here claim it undertested, some claim it not testable, and some
are claiming it OVER tested. I feel like Goldilocks here (even though I
look much more like the bears).

One reason for the confusion may be that "it" refers to different
things at different times. The idea of "a bitmap encoded like this
(description) which we could find via this statistical procedure
(description)" is testable. Some variants of that may be already tested
and done with in some genomes (although not all), if the particular
statistical procedure has been in use in genetics. The idea "there may
be some messages in some DNA" is untestable since even after we've
spent millions of years trying every encoding we can think of on every
single creature's genome, it's always possible that there is some
encrypted message we just can't decode. Millions of years of testing
might reduce the likelihood but can't falsify it conclusively, and
we're not anywhere near that, DNA was only discovered in the fifties.

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.)

Haven't we gone over this ground already in these threads? Creative
ideas are a splendid thing but if they are to become science someone
has to formulate them in a specific way that enables them to be tested.
Here's the idea. Here we explore the implications further and try to
make some predictions about things that might also be true if our
understanding is correct. Ok, so now we have a testable hypothesis.
Let's test it. Hmmm, here are the results, let's ponder about them for
a while and get feedback and constructive criticism to see if other
people think it's any good. Well then, now we need to think of further
tests and attempt to do them.

That is like trying to ponder what SETI's aliens are like.

That appears to be a complete non-sequitur. I was just describing the
process of getting from an idea to a scientific hypothesis,
predictions, tests and further tests. I expect that very few people who
have been pondering about what aliens look like have done it anything
like approaching the scientific method.

Both SETI and DNA-ID are based on the assumption that aliens may do
similar things to what we do or are capable of doing. They don't have
much beyond that to really go on. We have no idea what aliens or
intelligent fiddlers would actually do or look like. Human behavior as
a model would imply that we could not predict their behavior. We cannot
assume they are always rational, purposeful, and economical if we
assume they may have traits similar to ours.

For SETI aliens, it may be safest to keep their mouth (antennas) shut.
Who knows what kind of cosmic riff-raff may come along if you broadcast
your presence. Preventing loneliness may get them all killed......or
worse: flooded with inter-galactic spam.

Still don't see the connection to what was said before but never mind.
Currently we haven't got very much to go on if we want to ponder about
aliens so it's more or less pure guesswork. Either they are similar to
humans or they aren't. That's not very much to base well-grounded
scientific hypotheses on or to make predictions.

We tend to test versions of speculation/ideas/theories that resemble
what we are familiar with because that is the low-hanging fruit of
detection.

People complain about Mars life experiments assuming earth-like life in
science press conferences. The researcher simply replied that this is
because we know best how to detect earth-like life. More
general-purpose life experiments would be much more expensive and
bulkier.

There's nothing wrong with looking if low-hanging fruit exists but just
because humanlike aliens could be low-hanging fruit in some respects
doesn't give us logical justification to presume that aliens are
necessarily humanlike, that's all. Either they are or they aren't. We
don't know.

"If God gave us evidence that he did something, we'd have evidence that
he did something" does not constitute a testable hypothesis.

If we're honest about it I think we'd be forced to admit that we
wouldn't even be debating about whether SETI is science or not if SETI
had left it at the level of an idea. "Hey, I got this cool idea that
there might be aliens in the outer space and they might be using
technology, such as radio." However exciting it might be, science it
ain't, and I don't think that you'd easily find anybody who claimed
otherwise.


Okay, but what is the SPECIFIC point in time that it allegedly became
"science", and what is the criteria that made it such at this magic
juncture?

I don't know the history of SETI so I'm unable to point to a specific
point in time. If you're interested, maybe you can go look at their
site and find out when the hypotheses were developed and testable
predictions made.

Make up a hypothetical best-guess one and tell me at each stage whether
it is "scientific" or not and exactly why. I have not been able to
dissect the reasoning processes in your guy's heads as far as what you
call science and don't call science and where the boundary lays.
Everytime you propose something, comparing it to SETI seems to pop it.

I've already told you my views on science. I've got no stake on SETI
and if SETI should turn out not to fulfill my criteria and to be
unscientific, it wouldn't rock my world but I'm quite sure that DNA-ID
in its current vague incarnation ("there might be something in some DNA
because someone put it there, but all the actual tests someone might do
to detect something in some DNA are definitely off topic") does not
quite cut it. Let's formulate some precise predictions and ways to test
them and we'll see.

Are you implying that you won't defend SETI as being "scientific" or
"scientifically testable" either? I suppose that would boost my claims
that DNA-ID is SETI-like as far as testability and science.

I don't know much about SETI beyond what everybody knows so I'm not the
best judge but here's something I've thought:

Some of this debate ultimately comes down to conflating two levels of
'scientificity' (is there such a word?). There is the scientificness of
a theory or underlying explanation of the world, and the scientificness
of the research that are done. They are interrelated but not the same
thing, and it seems to me the levels get mixed up all the time in this
thread. A proper scientific theory takes into account existing
knowledge, attempts to explain further evidence and makes predictions.
Proper scientific research uses certain rigorous methodology to test
some prediction. Science usually takes a scientific theory and does
research in order to test that theory, but it is possible to do
scientific testing of claims that do not really qualify as scientific
theories or even scientific hypotheses. As A. Carlson pointed out in
another thread, we can test dowsing or ESP, etc. scientifically but it
doesn't mean that dowsing or ESP are therefore automatically
legitimized as viable scientific hypotheses or theories.

When it comes to SETI I don't have any reason to suppose that their
research project, trying to locate narrowband patterns, isn't done in a
scientific manner. Presumably people who are brighter than me have gone
over the methodology and pointed out problems. It is a perfectly
legitimate scientific research question to try to find out whether
there are narrowband patterns coming in from the direction of Proxima
Centauri or not, just as it is okay to try to find out if there are
quasars thereabouts. Whether they are right in what they assume about
the intelligent origin of narrowband patterns is not for me to say, and
whether SETi has a well-founded scientific theory that explains about
extraterrestrial intelligence is another matter altogether. I'm not
aware of one but have they even claimed to have one? There is currently
so little data about extraterrestrial intelligence to be explained that
there is nothing much to base theories on, and given that, going on and
on about one's favourite scifi story in the name of science would be
suspect anyway. There's no use trying to climb up a tree asbackwards.

As for DNA-ID, there seems to be no scientific research program,
methodologically rigorous or otherwise, unless you count the tests done
in this thread and genome research done for other purposes. There is
lots of evidence about certain genomes but precious little that points
to any intelligent tinkering. There are, however, plenty of theories
about intelligent tinkering, ranging from "God did it all 6000 years
ago", "God did some of it some other time", "aliens did it to bacteria
and sent the spores here in lead-lined spheres", "aliens did it to apes
here", "Xenu did it". "an extraterrestrial called Yahweh came in a UFO
and did it" and "eight-armed aquatic robots did it to octopi". Very few
if any of these count as scientific and they're not based on evidence
so it's climbing up the tree the wrong body part up. It is conceivable
that some parts or implications of these claims could be tested in a
scientific manner, even if the claims are so much nonsense, but
currently they're not and that's that. I'm not very willing to count
research that was done to show something else altogether, even though
it could have pointed out some DNA messages as a side effect or
excluded the existence of some. So, there is no scientific DNA-ID
research and there is no scientific DNA-ID theory, just a lot of
blathering. If SETI has a scientific research program it's one up on
DNA-ID.

DNA-ID resides currently at "Hey, I got this cool idea that
there might have been somebody somewhere who might have done something
that changed something in some DNA." If it's to become scientific we
need more specific hypotheses that may be tested.

So, is there anything more specific? Not that there's anything wrong
with this notion, it may be perfectly true, but it's not testable as
such.

How is SETI more specific? As described above, we know jack sh8t about
aliens. We are only testing the idea that some may be using radio.
Using radio that leaks into space is the ONLY link to testability at
this point for SETI (other than sci-fi-pie-in-sky speculation).

Well, that is all they claim to be able to test, isn't it? You claimed
that messages in DNA are a test for intelligent design.

Look at this way:

SETI tests for something non-human capable of building radio wave
generators.

DNA-ID tests for something non-human capable of manipulating DNA.

One uses radio as the medium, the other uses DNA as the medium. In this
sense they are nearly identical. The only real diff is the medium used.
Some ET's phone home, some write home, some graffity home, some
postcard home, and some text-message.

So if their DNA message is here it means that Earth is home? What makes
them extraterrestrial then? :)

(By the way, wouldn't a god qualilfy as an ET?)

The Greek gods lived on Olympos, didn't they?

As far as extrapolating DNA fiddling to original origin, see above.

-T-

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
    ... aliens' grandchildren, now long dead. ... Intelligent aliens arrive and fiddle with bacterial DNA. ... Sure but that's not what DNA-ID is going to prove if it finds patterns, ... but how is this relevant to DNA-ID? ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
    ... aliens' grandchildren, now long dead. ... God creates life using laws of chemistry and guided evolution. ... Intelligent aliens arrive and fiddle with bacterial DNA. ... but how is this relevant to DNA-ID? ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
    ... aliens' grandchildren, now long dead. ... God creates life using laws of chemistry and guided evolution. ... Intelligent aliens arrive and fiddle with bacterial DNA. ... but how is this relevant to DNA-ID? ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
    ... SETI starts with the idea that if there are intelligent aliens somewhat ... Humans have also put messages in DNA. ... and so is DNA-ID. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable
    ... Well, IMHO they're both long shots, but DNA-ID even longer than SETI. ... than that those aliens visited the planet and tampered our DNA leaving ...
    (talk.origins)
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