"Hallmarks of Creation" vs. Actual Signs of Artificial Products

[angrysoba]

Anyway, there is a field of theory and practice that might be relevant to your presentation.

Artificial Life:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life

 

[arthwollipot]

Not sure if that is quite true. Some animals such as monkeys, chimps and crows appear to have actually made tools have they not? I recall seeing that some of the evidence that pointed to early arrival in the Americas turned out to be flint tools likely created by capuchin monkeys. Also, crows apparently not only use sticks to get insects but actually fashion hooks on the sticks to get the insects.

By some measurements, several species of monkeys have entered their stone age.

 

[angrysoba]

When the space aliens arrive to make first contact, they'll be so confused. On the one hand, this species has skyscrapers, jet airplanes, nuclear reactors, and an Internet. On the other hand, that species has... sticks... for... pulling bugs of burrows... Maybe the aliens should hedge their bets, and contact both just in case.

Yeah, yeah. I get it. But that wasn’t the point I was making. You have said the exact same thing in a more relevant situation regarding whether animals have language etc….

But in this case my point is simply that humans are not the only tool makers. This doesn’t mean I don’t think they are the best. So cut out the strawman rebuttals please.

 

[theprestige]

Yeah, yeah. I get it. But that wasn’t the point I was making. You have said the exact same thing in a more relevant situation regarding whether animals have language etc….

But in this case my point is simply that humans are not the only tool makers. This doesn’t mean I don’t think they are the best. So cut out the strawman rebuttals please.

I question the premise that crow-sticks count as intelligent design, to the degree that we are considering for Wowbagger's question. It's like a crow saying a skyscraper can't be a product of intelligent design, because it's not the simple stick-based technology used by all the intelligent designers he knows.

The fact is, we couldn't design a stable, long-lasting planetary ecosystem even if we wanted to. We don't even know where to begin. Having never done it ourselves - being fundamentally incapable of doing it ourselves (so far) - I believe we are entirely unequipped to judge whether our ecosystem was intelligently designed, in whole or in part. We have no idea what modularity and tooling marks would look like in such a scenario, or how they would look any different from what we actually observe. Similarly, the ID proponents are in the same boat.

Thus, I believe the only rational rebuttal to an ID claim is, "that which is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

 

[sphenisc]

I question the premise that crow-sticks count as intelligent design, to the degree that we are considering for Wowbagger's question. It's like a crow saying a skyscraper can't be a product of intelligent design, because it's not the simple stick-based technology used by all the intelligent designers he knows.

You really don't get arguments by analogy do you?

 

[theprestige]

You really don't get arguments by analogy do you?

I get them just fine. An amusing (to me) comparison is not the same as demanding agreement on Conclusion A via foisted or begged agreement on Conclusion B.

But that's all beside the point, which is that I believe Wobagger's argument is essentially an appeal to authority/appeal to incredulity. And that not all atheist beliefs are amenable to rational argumentation. The belief in not-ID is an example of this.

 

[Roboramma]

One difference that I'd expect between evolved and designed self-reproducing systems is in evolvability. Many adaptations in the life the we know are adaptations that make it easier for that life to more readily evolve. This may mean that descendants differ more from their ancestors than those ancestors might otherwise like (ie. some of your genes won't make it!), but it has the benefit of being able to adapt to changing conditions. Such adaptations include a finely tuned degree of DNA repair, enough so that most offspring survive, not too much that your descendants have no mutations at all. It includes sex itself, which increases variability. It includes the non-brittleness to minor mutations, such that at least in some significant fraction of cases mutations lead to small rather than large changes in the overall organism, and part of this is due to the way that growth and development work, with genes that turn other genes off or on.
But if you, as a designer, have some particular use that you wish to put your designed self-reproducing machine to, you probably don't want it to change from one generation to the next, and will design in a robustness to change. You might design in mechanisms such that minor changes will lead to complete failure of the machine, thus preventing evolution away from your design purpose from happening before it can begin. Otherwise over time your machine will just evolve away from whatever you've optimized it for and start optimizing reproduction instead.

Here's a quote from J. Storrs Hall's Nanofuture that gets at the difference:

At a lower level of description, of course, what goes on in a cell doesn't resemble an assembly line, automated or not. In particular, the parts that a cell produces, protein molecules, are not picked off the production machine and carefully conveyed to meet the next part in the process. Instead they float loose to bump randomly into other parts until they meet one they click together with, in a process called self-assembly.

In a nanomachine, as in a human-sized factory, parts are never set loose to drift around. They are moved by robotic arms, shuttles, or conveyor belts from spot to predetermined spot and are assembled by mechanical force. This has two big advantages: things more much faster, going directly to the spot where they're need rather than having to do a walkabout; and parts can be designed for their function alone, instead of having to be designed for their function and also to pop together by themselves. Designing for self-assembly is a major constraint: not only must the parts that are supposed to fit together do so, but parts that aren't intended to go together had better not fit. In a regular factory, if tab A would fit into slot C, where it doesn't belong, as well as a slot B, where it does, it's not aa problem; you simply don't put it into slot C.

The nanomachine is a lot faster and simpler in some ways than the machinery of the cell. On the other hand, it has a big disadvantage: it can't evolve. Cells work the way they do in part because it's easy to make small changes that leave the whole thing working. Suppose you want to add a part to an existing machine. All you need to do is start producing it. If you get the shape right, to match the existing machine, the part will bump into the machine, latch on, and start working. In an assembly line context, you need to design not only the new part, but the conveyance equipment, the assembly machinery, the process flow, and the control mechanism or software.

Now remember that in evolution, 999 changes our of 1000 are for the worse, and die out. If you try to build a new part and get it wrong, it simply doesn't fit and nothing much happens. But in the factory model, to have any effect at all, you have to do a whole bunch of changes at the same time and get all of the right the first time.

There is a slight difference between my point and Hall's, in that he suggest that this is just a difference inherent in the way nano machines will be built, whereas I suggest its a feature that designers of nano machines would built in intentionally: a brittleness to small changes such that they lead to catastrophic failure not just some fraction of the time but basically always, so that these designed self-reproducing machines cannot evolve, because any evolution is necessarily away from their designed purpose.

Of course, you could have designed a machine for the purpose of evolving. But that's a pretty high constraint on what you want it to do, given that it will optimize for reproduction over all else.

 

[Roboramma]

Not sure if that is quite true. Some animals such as monkeys, chimps and crows appear to have actually made tools have they not? I recall seeing that some of the evidence that pointed to early arrival in the Americas turned out to be flint tools likely created by capuchin monkeys. Also, crows apparently not only use sticks to get insects but actually fashion hooks on the sticks to get the insects.

Yeah, I actually considered including that caveat, but decided it didn't really impact on the point I was making so left it out. Point taken, though.

 

[Roboramma]

Assuming you're referring to chain letters and emails, rather than armour, they do not reproduce themselves. They are viruses - they hijack someone else's reproductive system in order to replicate.

I don't think the distinction is quite as clear as you make out. All life reproduces itself within the context of some particular environment. We require certain molecules that are made by other living things and which we cannot make ourselves in order to survive and reproduce, and without them we could not do so. Some living things require the functioning machinery of other life to reproduce: for instance a bee carries pollen from one flower to another and the plant couldn't reproduce without it, parasites can only reproduce within the body of their host which they rely on for many of the functions of life, the leaf-cutter ant relies on a particular type of fungus which to which it feeds leaves and which it in turn eats, and the fungus relies on the leaf cutter ant both to feed it leaves and to transfer it to new nests, etc.

Certainly viruses are the extreme version of this, and chain letters* are more analogous to viruses than to other self-reproducing entities, but the distinction exists along a spectrum, and I don't see a good justification for saying that viruses aren't self-reproducing but bacterial parasites are, even though I agree that the virus is certainly more reliant on the machinery of its host than is the bacteria.

*thanks for that term, it definitely felt weird to write "chain mail" there.

 

[theprestige]

One difference that I'd expect between evolved and designed self-reproducing systems is in evolvability. Many adaptations in the life the we know are adaptations that make it easier for that life to more readily evolve. This may mean that descendants differ more from their ancestors than those ancestors might otherwise like (ie. some of your genes won't make it!), but it has the benefit of being able to adapt to changing conditions. Such adaptations include a finely tuned degree of DNA repair, enough so that most offspring survive, not too much that your descendants have no mutations at all. It includes sex itself, which increases variability. It includes the non-brittleness to minor mutations, such that at least in some significant fraction of cases mutations lead to small rather than large changes in the overall organism, and part of this is due to the way that growth and development work, with genes that turn other genes off or on.
But if you, as a designer, have some particular use that you wish to put your designed self-reproducing machine to, you probably don't want it to change from one generation to the next, and will design in a robustness to change. You might design in mechanisms such that minor changes will lead to complete failure of the machine, thus preventing evolution away from your design purpose from happening before it can begin. Otherwise over time your machine will just evolve away from whatever you've optimized it for and start optimizing reproduction instead.

Here's a quote from J. Storrs Hall's Nanofuture that gets at the difference:


There is a slight difference between my point and Hall's, in that he suggest that this is just a difference inherent in the way nano machines will be built, whereas I suggest its a feature that designers of nano machines would built in intentionally: a brittleness to small changes such that they lead to catastrophic failure not just some fraction of the time but basically always, so that these designed self-reproducing machines cannot evolve, because any evolution is necessarily away from their designed purpose.

Of course, you could have designed a machine for the purpose of evolving. But that's a pretty high constraint on what you want it to do, given that it will optimize for reproduction over all else.

Counterpoint: C. J. Cherryh writes stories in which designers take evolution into account, and make designs that have evolvability. The premise that populations must change over time, and that a good designer must provide for evolution and try to guide it rather than try to thwart it, is central to her novel Cyteen.

I don't think we know enough about the design of the systems in question to make any kind of informed speculation about how they should or should not present, compared to naturally occurring versions of those systems.

 

[Roboramma]

Zookeeper fallacy. Good design of complex systems very often involves informed decisions about priorities and tradeoffs. The blind spot at the optic nerve is suitably compensated for and eliminated elsewhere in the system.

Compensated for and eliminated doesn't equate to a good tradeoff though.

We have a good understanding of why the blindspot evolved in which it is not a good tradeoff of a cost for some greater benefit. A similar and I think more powerful example is the nerve in giraffes (we have the same one, it's just more obviously a problem in giraffes) which takes a route from the brain all the way down the neck, does a little loop, and then comes back up the neck again. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, where in some ancestor the nerve routed around a small shift and worked, and at each stage in the evolution of the giraffe from there on it just grew along with the neck of the giraffe. But there is no tradeoff in organism design that explains the routing of that nerve.

You might reply: "How do you know? There could be a complex interplay of genes and biological mechanisms that makes that particular design a good tradeoff", but if such complex interplays leading to nerves routing around the body in these strange ways actually happened, they'd happen in ways that didn't have obvious explanations* based on an evolutionary framework as well. Yet we never see that. Your explanation can't explain the lack of such occurrences.

*The explanation isn't just obvious, we actually have the lineage of the giraffe in which we can see this happening.

 

[Roboramma]

Counterpoint: C. J. Cherryh writes stories in which designers take evolution into account, and make designs that have evolvability. The premise that populations must change over time, and that a good designer must provide for evolution and try to guide it rather than try to thwart it, is central to her novel Cyteen.

I don't think we know enough about the design of the systems in question to make any kind of informed speculation about how they should or should not present, compared to naturally occurring versions of those systems.

Yeah, I think this is a valid point. I can at least imagine that in some cases it could make sense to design a system that could evolve. It doesn't seem like the general case and I think that evolvability should make us update (in a Bayesian sense) our credences away from a hypothesis of design, but I agree that it's not definitive.

 

[angrysoba]

I question the premise that crow-sticks count as intelligent design, to the degree that we are considering for Wowbagger's question. It's like a crow saying a skyscraper can't be a product of intelligent design, because it's not the simple stick-based technology used by all the intelligent designers he knows.
The fact is, we couldn't design a stable, long-lasting planetary ecosystem even if we wanted to. We don't even know where to begin. Having never done it ourselves - being fundamentally incapable of doing it ourselves (so far) - I believe we are entirely unequipped to judge whether our ecosystem was intelligently designed, in whole or in part. We have no idea what modularity and tooling marks would look like in such a scenario, or how they would look any different from what we actually observe. Similarly, the ID proponents are in the same boat.

Thus, I believe the only rational rebuttal to an ID claim is, "that which is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

The highlighted only underlines the point. "Intelligent designers we know" is a very species-centric view. In fact, it is anthropocentric, which is something you complain about elsewhere in the thread.

Sure, aliens are more likely to regard humans as intelligent than crows, but just because crows don't build skyscrapers we should hardly determine that that does not count as intelligent or of design.

We have not really seen a good definition of "intelligent design" and that would surely be an important starting point. In fact, it might even be a deflationary point against proponents of Intelligent Design. Why? Because clearly there is an evolution of intelligence and with it, design.

 

[theprestige]

The highlighted only underlines the point. "Intelligent designers we know" is a very species-centric view. In fact, it is anthropocentric, which is something you complain about elsewhere in the thread.

Yes, and I think a corvidocentric rebuttal of intelligent design fails for the same basic reasons as an anthropocentric rebuttal. I bring up the corvidocentric scenario to illustrate how silly I find the "it doesn't look like something we humans would do" rebuttal.

ETA: In a nutshell, my problem with the anthropocentric rebuttal is that it is based on "not how we would do it", when the truth is that we cannot do it, and have no business rendering judgement on how it could or should be done. It would be a different proposition , if humanity had one planetary-scale designed ecosystem to its credit. But it doesn't, and I think it's hubris to make arguments pretending like it does.

 

[angrysoba]

Yes, and I think a corvidocentric rebuttal of intelligent design fails for the same basic reasons as an anthropocentric rebuttal. I bring up the corvidocentric scenario to illustrate how silly I find the "it doesn't look like something we humans would do" rebuttal.

I think we are agreeing then.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

To show that life evolves, we can demonstrate how evolution works- the drivers (environmental pressures, natural selection), and the process (mutations leading to greater survival rates).
To show something is manmade, we can demonstrate how it is made. You can disassemble it and look at the individual parts, and show how they could be made, and you can also show how a factory could assemble the whole thing.
The problem for Creationists, of course, is that their whole argument is an appeal to magic. They can't show how their creator created anything: they just assert that he did, and that's that.
I think that might lead to problems with trying to demonstrate Intelligent Design: there is, to my mind, no actual practical way of doing that, as we have no idea how the creator god actually did it.

 

[Ryan O'Dine]

One hallmark of creation, and this has been touched on, would be discontinuity. A creature that didn't look like anything around it or anything from the historical record. Creationists use the platypus since they believe it fulfills the requirements. We know it doesn't, but given a sufficiently discontinuous lifeform, I feel that such an argument could at least prove "this thing was not evolved."

 

[Planigale]

A related phenomena is specieist nazism. The idea that species have some sort of existential purity having been created as an entity. In my experience once you start explaining how humans and all other animals are chimaeras mad up from bits and pieces of others creationists tend to freak.

Mitochondria a key energy producing organelle originate from parasitic bacteria; the closest living relative is probably chlamydia.

A key gene needed for placental formation in humans was donated by a virus. We actually only reproduce because a virus left part of itself behind. (other placental mammals don't use this particular viral oncogene to produce the syncitial trophoblasts).

When you look at some insects they have really complex mongrel genomes. Now maybe the intelligent designer just stuck into the genome bits she had lying around in her make and mend box, but most creationists don't like to think of us as patchwork quilts but rather as individually designed and unique works.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC169886/

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/779579v2https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305212120

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2300465120

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

What would genetic design look like to a genetic designer a million years ago, in the opinion of someone who has no clue where to even start designing the genetics of a complex organism? For all you know, the homochirality of sugar is in fact the hallmark of a designer.

There are many many parts in genetics that could be designed far better than nature did.
Seperate chromosomes, ribosomes and tRNA's for mitochondria or mitochondria and chloroplasts in Eukaryotes for instance have no inherent extra value over just using a single set, whereas they cost tons of energy to create and maintain.

Sure, we can use the cop-out of not knowing what a designer would want, but if you look at how genetics is 'organized' either that designer is intentionally making mistakes to hide its existence of just does not exist.

 

[theprestige]

To show that life evolves, we can demonstrate how evolution works- the drivers (environmental pressures, natural selection), and the process (mutations leading to greater survival rates).

I strongly disagree with this claim.

We can infer how evolution works. But the evolutionary process of speciation via random mutation and natural selection over time happens over timescales that are far beyond our ability to experience, observe, or demonstrate.

You absolutely cannot demonstrate the evolution of an eyeball. You cannot even demonstrate the process of carcinization, even though it's pretty obviously happening.

You cannot demonstrate the evolution of land creatures from sea creatures. You infer it because you believe in evolution, and you can draw a line between the gross phenotypes - eyes to eyes, spine to spine, fins to feet, scales to hairs, etc. But remember what Myriad said about modularity being a hallmark of design? What if a designer just reused a lot of the same phenotype modules for land and sea creatures? What if you can draw a line between them not because one evolved from the other but because they both came from the same design studio and the same asset library?

Or remember what Ryan O'Dine said about discontinuity being a hallmark of design. So okay, whales, humans, birds, and fish are all clearly using a lot of the same modules, but what about the octopus? Where did that come from? Sure, the eyeball looks like a highly modified version of the standard eyeball module, but what about the rest of that octopus nonsense? Random mutation and natural selection, resulting in a discontinuous phenotype? Or a studio skunkworks challenging the design paradigm with a discontinuous design?

---

I'm not saying evolution is wrong. I'm saying it's one thing to have a solid theory with a lot of good evidence to support it, and it's another thing entirely to let it go to your head. The theory of evolution is nice and all, but what would really impress me is if skeptical atheists developed a theory of not letting things go to their head same as happens to everyone else.