Dembski is still missing the point

Hmm, I haven’t posted anything here for a while. And it is even longer since I last posted something about the Intelligent Design movement.

William Dembski now has a second edition of his book “The Design Inference” and this time Winston Ewert is listed as a co-author. I have not read the book. But I have read the excerpt that was posted at the Evolution News blog. And, from that excerpt, we can already see some of the ways that Dembski and Ewert are misunderstanding the theory of evolution.

Randomness

There are two common misunderstandings of evolution that we see coming from anti-evolutionists. The first of these has to do with the role of randomness.

The theory does talk of random mutations. The anti-evolutionists tend to see this as something like coin tossing, and having the good luck to come up with a suitable result. You can see this kind of thinking in Dembski’s subtitle “Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities”. What Dembski argues, is that the probabilities are too small, and therefore there must have been a design.

That’s not how I look at random mutations.

On the EAAN

The EAAN, or Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, is an argument by Plantinga.  The Wikipedia entry provides a reasonable summary.

In a recent post at the Uncommon Descent blog, Barry Arrington gives an argument based on the EAAN.  This will mostly be a response to Arrington.

What is the EAAN?

Here’s a short quote from the Wikipedia article.

The EAAN argues that the combined belief in both evolutionary theory and naturalism is epistemically self-defeating. The reason for this is that if both evolution and naturalism are true, then the probability of having reliable cognitive faculties are low.

Personally, I’m inclined to see the EAAN as a reductio ad absurdum of a traditional account of epistemology.  Traditionally, it is said that knowledge is justified true belief.  I’ve disagreed with that in the past, and I continue to disagree.

That Wikipedia quote talks of both evolution and naturalism as being true.  I have never subscribed to naturalism (nor to materialism), because I don’t know what it would mean to say that naturalism is true.  And evolution, as used in that quote, refers to the theory of evolution.  I tend to think of scientific theories as neither true nor false.  Rather, I see a theory as a set of pragmatic conventions that provide a guide to how we should talk about the world.  As such a framework, the theory sets standards, in this case for biology and related fields.  Those standards give as ways of coming up with factual (true) statements about reality.  But whether or not we see the theory as true does not seem important.

Coming out of the woodworks

The title refers to creationists.

Checking the comment moderation queue today, I found a message waiting for approval.  It was a comment on an older post about Newton.  The comment seemed off topic.  But, to be fair, there was another comment rating Darwin as more important than Newton.  So I suppose the creationist comment was a reaction to that.

I thought it was worth a laugh.  But, I wouldn’t want to have all the fun myself, so I decided to share that comment.  So here it is:

DARWIN WAS A DAMNED FOOL! HE HAD FAIR ABILITIES AS A NATURAL SCIENTIST IN OBSERVING AND NOTING DETAILS CONCERNING PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE FORMS. HIS DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION, AKA EVOLUTION, WAS A TOTALLY MISGUIDED JUDGEMENT OF HIS DATA. DARWIN TO THIS DAY IS THE GREAT PROPONENT OF “BOGUS SCIENCE”, BS FOR SHORT. DARWIN DOES NOT EVEN BELONG ON THE LIST OF THE TEN THOUSAND GREATEST SCIENTISTS WHO EVER LIVED. HIS FOOLISH CONJECTURES HAVE HELD TRUE SCIENCE BACK EVER SINCE HE FIRST PRESUMED TO PUBLISH HIS ABSURD NONSENSE. – XXXX XXXXXXX / 6443

I “X”ed out the name, though you can find it at the actual comment.

So there we have it.  All capitals, and pretty much fact free.

Animal consciousness and evolution

According to a post at ENV, recent evidence for the consciousness of other animals is bad news for evolution.  This seems to be a strange viewpoint, but perhaps it is simply a case of ID proponents managing to see everything as refuting evolution.

I suppose it is possible that David Klinghoffer, the author of that post, really did intend to only criticize Darwinists, and not evolution in general.  However, my experience is that ID proponents such as Klinghoffer tend to use the term “Darwinist” to refer to any proponent of evolution, including those who have explicitly said that their view is not Darwinian.

Klinghoffer does acknowledge the strangeness of the view he expresses in that post:

According to this style of anti-Darwinian thinking that I’ve backed away from, which prefers to draw a super-sharp distinction between people and other creatures, more scientific evidence of how much we share with animals should be good news for the Darwin side in the evolution debate, and bad news for us.

The primrose path

Wikipedia, in its definition of “primrose path” says:

Not to be confused with “led up the ‘garden path'”, which is an idiom suggesting that one is being deceived or led astray.

Strictly speaking, I am making that confusion.  For this is about a blog post by Cornelius Hunter, where he unwittingly shows that he has led himself up the garden path.  His blog post is, in part, about primroses and that is the basis for the title that I chose.

I am a behaviorist

In an earlier post, I said something about what I am not.  Now it is time to say something about what I am.

Psychologists tend to divide themselves into cognitivists and behaviorists.  The behaviorists study behavior of people or of experimental animals.  Cognitivists tend to study beliefs, thoughts, and the like.  It sometimes seems as if those two groups are at war.  Cognitivists are often pointing out what they see as flaws in behaviorism, while behaviorists are often pointing out what they see as follies in cognitivism.  It sometimes seems to me that each side is about right in its criticism of the other side.

The terminology from psychology has been carried over into philosophy, so that some philosophers consider themselves behaviorists and others consider themselves cognitivists or mentalists.  For example, Quine is sometimes said to be a behaviorist.  The term “behaviorism” seems to be rather broader as used in philosophy than its counterpart in psychology.

James Shapiro on ID

From time to time, ID proponents mention James Shapiro as someone who offers an alternative to the Darwinism that they much ridicule.  But they have never been sure where Shapiro stands on the question of ID.  Shapiro has now given a response.  And it is the kind of response that we might expect from a scientist at University of Chicago:

These statements are confusing. Is Dembski saying that he abandons the supernatural as a component of ID? If so, then we can start a real scientific dialogue about the possible natures of intelligence, teleology and design in biology and how to investigate them both theoretically and experimentally. However, if he does not want to abandon the supernatural (as Michael Behe has repeatedly told me he does not) and if he wishes always to have recourse to a literal Deus ex Machina, then we cannot have a serious scientific discussion. Doing that requires respecting the naturalistic limits of science. I think it would be a very positive development for ID proponents to give up on all theological crutches and engage in a strictly naturalistic inquiry, independent of whatever their beliefs in final causes may be. Is Bill Dembski willing to do that?

It is worth reading the full Shapiro post.  There’s also a reaction at Uncommon Descent, though there isn’t much to the reaction yet.  Perhaps more will follow in the comments.

The hard problem; why is it hard?

In a recent column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, David Barash asks what is The Hardest Problem in Science?  Barash is, of course, talking about what Chalmers has dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness.”  Or, in the words of Barash, it is the problem of “how the brain generates awareness, thought, perceptions, emotions, and so forth.”

So why is this problem so hard?  I think it is not merely hard — it is impossible.  It’s not that there is anything mystical or magical involved.  Rather, the problem is being framed in a way that makes it unsolvable.  In discussing the problem, Barash says:

After all, it’s the brain that does the thinking and experiencing, so how difficult could it be to ask that brain simply to look at itself and report back to my mind?

Well, no, it isn’t the brain that does the thinking and experiencing.  It is the person that thinks and experience.  For sure, the brain is used in that thinking and experiencing, but it involves the whole person, not just the brain.  That probably came across as a petty quibble about the use of words.  But I think it is more than that, and I see the difference as important.

The hard problem is usually being looked at as a design problem.  We think we know how to design a robot that behaves in ways somewhat similar to humans.  So how do we design in the ability for that agent to have subjective experience?  From that design perspective, people tend to think of the brain as the component that has to solve the “experience and thought” part.   But it is that “intelligent design” way of looking at things that leads us astray.  We are not the products of intelligent design.  We are the products of evolution.  And it is unlikely that there was ever a stage in our evolutionary history where our ancestors had the behavior but not the experience.

If we want to understand human cognition, we need to drop that design perspective, and start thinking about how behavior and experience might have evolved.

Teleology and evolution

A review of James Shapiro: “Evolution: A View from the 21st Century”

I recently “purchased” a copy of the Kindle version of Shapiro’s book, at a time when the price was zero.  My interest in this book has been piqued by claims from creationists and ID proponents, that Shapiro’s work supports their views.  In my opinion, the creationists and ID proponents are mistaken about this, though Shapiro does say things that make him sound open to ID.  When mentioning this Amazon offer, Jerry Coyne said “Jim Shapiro is heterodox in his views and opposed to much of modern evolutionary theory, so this may be a strange book.  Weigh in if you’ve read it.”  This review is my weighing in.

The evolution of vision

Recently, Scientific American came out with an article on the history of the evolution of the eye.  Intelligent Design proponents have used that as the basis for renewing old creationist arguments against the idea that the eye evolved.  See here and here.

The Scientific American article is about the evolution of the physical eye, rather than about the evolution of the visual system.  The ID response, too, is about the physical eye.  But it is the usual argument about irreducible complexity.  According to that argument, a change in the physical eye would have to have a corresponding change in the entire visual processing system, before there could be any benefit.  And this is part of why ID proponents and creationists see it as irreducibly complex.