ID and Common Ancestry

For instance, Bruce Gordon posits that ID is compatible with practically any position on the natural history of life on earth, and with evolution specifically:

Practically any?

I'd like to know of any position on the natural history of life on earth that's not compatable with ID.

There is a similar thread currently on talk.origins, but I think you summed it all up quite nicely.

I think it's important to point out that when activist school board members come out in the papers declaring that they think ID should be taught in schools, that ID deserves equal treatment, and so forth, it's rather obvious that these people do not know a lot about ID. As you pointed out here, there simply is no such thing as ID. So when these school board members say that they think ID should be taught, they are exposing themselves as activists. Only an activist would want something to be taught based solely on the fact that it conforms to their ideological views, prior to even learning what it is they want to be taught.

During the testimony of ID proponents at the Kansas School Board hearings, was the reiteration over and over that there was no overt developed available curricula for teaching ID. To them it seemed like a minor matter, in that, as Ed so ablely points out, that really isn't their intent in the first place. I must say though, that if they actually had a definitive theoretical construct of ID, they would probably have already developed the associated teaching materials. They seem to live by the rule: "Don't put it on paper!"

Dembski is convinced that common descent is a reasonable inference from the evidence? Has he flip-flopped?

...If the absence of intermediate fossil forms holds as much today as it did back then, why should anyone accept evolution?

Dodge: Evolutionists have gotten quite good at sidestepping this question... Typically they'll lay out a bunch of organisms or biological structures and say, "Look at how similar these are. They've obviously descended from a common evolutionary ancestor...."

Comeback: Don't get lost in the details. Yes, the fossil record contains organisms that can be placed in a progression suggesting gradual change. But most of these progressions result from arbitrary picking and choosing among the totality of fossils. With millions of fossils to choose from, it is likely that some gradual progressions will be found.

Also, such progressions invariably come from organisms with the same basic body plan. In the "evolution" of the horse, we are always dealing with horse-like organisms.... What we don't see in the fossil record is animals with fundamentally different body plans evolving from a common ancestor. For instance, there is no fossil evidence whatsoever that insects and vertebrates share a common evolutionary ancestor....

The challenge of the fossil record that Darwin identified 150 years ago has not gone away. To his credit, the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould conceded this point: "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have
data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

The point you need to press is whether this inference is reasonable at all. [emphasis added]

(Sorry about the mynym-like extended quotation.)

Well said, Ed. Might have included mention that P. Johnson specifically developed ID as a wedge strategy, and wedge is the word he used. A rather large, ubiquitous umbrella under which creationists of all flavors could gather and coordinate their opposition to evolution.

As my colleague Howard Van Till would say, this is not only bad science it is bad theology. It presumes that God did such a poor job of creating the conditions that give rise to life that he had to continually intervene and tinker with it to get it to work right (see this article for a further explanation of his views).

That would presume that conditions that require tinkering and intervention would amount to something that is a "poor job," or it presumes that conditions that don't require intervention or tinkering would prevent "God" from tinkering and intervening as if it would be some kind of a big hassle or something. Last I heard, "God" is a tinkering and intervening kind of a guy. I don't see how affirming the consequent should be considered good theology, but I guess it's as about as good as any other.

Very interesting post. I've gotten into this topic on my blog, after surfing for information on Earth's magnetic field. Apparently, there is some published papers on the Earth's magnetic field being used to support the non-evolutionist points. It doesn't take a PhD to see their pseudo-science fall flat on its face, though. They publish to their own publications, and their papers are written to look scientific, but would never be published in any reputable journal. Anyway, I think the educated majority agree that ID is rather IDiotic... now if its stealth-like danger can be confronted head-on, maybe we can avoid it being touted as "science" to school boards.

I don't see why someone would use the fossil record to indicate common descent of all life on earth. Fossils work well for closely related organisms (e.g., vertebrates), but when you try to use them to support common descent of all animals or all life, the data falls short.

Molecular evidence, on the other hand, indicates common descent of all life on earth. Why else would bacteria, animals, plants, and fungi share similar genes? You would think that there would be multiple "designs" for molecules required in subcellular processes, but the evidence suggests homology extending all the way back to the origins of life. The data coming out of recent genome projects (and even early sequencing projects) make the theory of common descent irrefutable. The big question in biology now is not whether or not it happened, but, rather, how the radiation occurred.

But if you ask the major players in ID whether they accept the theory of evolution - which is common ancestry, the theory that all modern life forms are derived from one or a few common ancestors via descent with modification - you will get wildly differing answers.

I think that's because there's wildly differing views among IDers. It doesn't always seem easy to lump them into one category, and the views are highly diverse. As such, we should be hesitant to lump them together.

"As such, we should be hesitant to lump them together."

This is one of those statements that sounds significant upon a casual reading, but really says nothing. "Intelligent Design" is supposed to be a scientific movement. While evolutionary biologists may, for example, disagree about the existence or importance of certain mechanisms of diversification, none dispute common descent. Without the latter, there is no evolution -- it's that important.

If ID advocates cannot agree on such a fundamental point, that disagreement speaks volumes about the conceptual coherence of ID itself. If, as Josh suggests, there are these cardinal conceptual controversies -- and hence no conceptual "lump" -- ID cannot be called a "theory" in the scientific sense of the term.

"Differing views" in this case should, in the reasonable view, be the death of advocacy for any ID viewpoint in a science classroom.

As Ed has shown again and again, the real glue that holds ID together is the god-of-the-gaps approach to science. The impulse to theism is the common denominator by which ID advocates may be lumped together. We should be happy at that, since GOTG has not been taken very seriously since William Paley's days. Politics is a different matter, of course, but one can hope.

Scott (Eon)

Creationists of whatever stripe love to point out "gaps" in phylogenetic trees or in the fossil record. Among their favorites their claim of a lack of intermediates between primitive eyes and modern mammalian eyes. I would point to this recent article in nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7039/edsumm/e050512-01.html

If an IDer really wanted to be taken seriously from a scientific standpoint, he or she should propose a theory and provide some evidence for the theory. In the ten years or so that I've been paying attention, no body has done so. They haven't proposed a theory. And they haven't provided any evidence.

All that they have done--from what I have read--is to try to identify gaps in the evidence for Darwin's theory. Gaps in evidence for one theory is not evidence for their "proposal."

I'll merely mention one aspect from my specialty--physics. During the 1940s and 1950s, there were two competing theories of cosmology--Fred Hoyle's "steady state" theory, and the "big bang" theory (too many proponents to credit). Both were competing and both had evidence behind them. Indeed, the same evidence. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1963-64 put the death-knell to the "steady state" theory. The CMBR was a prediction of the Big Bang theory.

But at least the steady state theory had evidence behind it--which was why it was taken seriously. And it was evidence that tended to suggest that the Big Bang theory was correct, over the steady state theory.

The IDers don't even produce evidence to suggest that whatever they are saying has anything to do with reality.

Josh wrote:

I think that's because there's wildly differing views among IDers. It doesn't always seem easy to lump them into one category, and the views are highly diverse. As such, we should be hesitant to lump them together.

Well, there are obviously some differences among ID advocates. Paul Nelson and Nancy Pearsey, for instance, are young earthers while most of the others are not. But the point of my post was that there simply is no ID model or theory for the natural history of life on earth. There is only an attempt to poke holes in evolution, but even there they can't seem to agree on something as basic as whether common descent is valid or not (and as someone noted above, Dembski can't seem to decide how he feels about it himself).
I don't think this is merely a matter of disagreement, however, I think it cuts deeper to the question of why we're even discussing ID when they can't (or won't) even give us the basic framework of a model that could explain the data. You can't derive testable hypotheses from a model that does not exist. All we really have is an argument from personal incredulity (I don't see how evolution could have done X) that morphs into a God of the Gaps argument (and therefore, God must have done it).

Ed, you wrote:

I don't think this is merely a matter of disagreement, however, I think it cuts deeper to the question of why we're even discussing ID when they can't (or won't) even give us the basic framework of a model that could explain the data. You can't derive testable hypotheses from a model that does not exist.

That reminds me how I have to chuckle when ID is compared to other pseudo-sciences like Astrology. What you described actually makes ID all the worse.

In Astrology, there is a theory, say: "Our lives are influenced by the positions of the moon and planets at our birth."

Then we could form a hypothesis such as: "select a random group of people born on July 1,1950 and compare their lives with a group born on random dates that year. TofA would say that the first group's lives would be more alike than the other group.

There's no difference, of course, but at least we have a theory with testable hypotheses. So comparing ID to Astrology is giving ID far too much credit!!!

Actually, the Cambrian Explosion is a myth that's outlived it's usefullness - in other words, a non-issue. Two good sources of information are the talkorigins site:

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC300.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC301.html

And I don't have the reference handy, but the IDiots often quote-mine someone on the Cambrian, saying it is a problem for evolution. Unfortunately, they often leave out the rest of his quote (and chapter IIRC) where he explains how it is really not a problem (due to more fossil finds, etc). TO has some in their quote-mine project:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-2.html

But a quick skim didn't ring any bells as to the specific quote misuesed.

Now if ID is taught in schools one might suggestt the world was designed by the devil. Or by a minor god in the pantheon. Or perhaps by almighty Zeus himself.

Sadly the ID crowd will come back with the claim that is sacrilegious. Not the right creator, they'll say. So then there'll be an effort to 'establish' the correct religion. Sound familiar?

On Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has an odd complaint: ...

Well Krauze, you could have actually spelled out your argument here for us to discuss. Your response doesn't really fix the problem, I think. You say that there are ID creationists and ID evolutionists and that ID is just an "overall framework". This strikes me as an odd little semantic game. An overall framework of what, exactly? What common premise do ID creationists and ID evolutionists share? What does ID actually MEAN in this regard? I'm certainly interested in hearing.

Krauze's comments seem to forget about Jonathan Wells. None of his stuff actually supports intelligent design -- it's all pure invective against evolution (erroneous, but pure in its error).

If ID supports evolution, all of Wells' stuff is unnecessary, unuseful, and potentially destructive.