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Are there any new ID arguments?
<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html lang="en-US"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8" /> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1" /> <title>Are there any new ID arguments?</title> <meta property="og:site_name" content="The Panda's Thumb" /> <meta property="og:type" content="article" /> <meta property="og:title" content="Are there any new ID arguments?" /> <meta property="og:url" content="https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2020/12/Any-new-arguments.html" /> <meta property="og:image" content="https://pandasthumb.org/media/roar.jpg" /> <meta property="article:author" content="Joe Felsenstein" /> <meta property="article:published_time" content="2020-12-01T20:00:00-07:00" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type='text/css' href="/css/normalize.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type='text/css' href="//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:300,400,600,700,400italic,700italic|Source+Code+Pro:400,700" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type='text/css' href="/css/gridism.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type='text/css' href="/css/style.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type='text/css' href="/css/github.css" /> <link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.1.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://use.fontawesome.com/e6a24c6dde.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" async src='https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.1/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML'></script> <script src="/js/local.js"></script> </head> <body class="wrap"> <div class="grid page-fill"><div></div></div> <header class="topbar"> <div class="grid no-gutters"> <div class="banner unit whole"> <img src="/media/banner.jpg" alt="The Panda's Thumb" /> </div> <nav class="main-nav unit whole align-center"> <ul> <li><a href="/" title="Main Page"><i class="fa fa-home" aria-hidden="true"></i> Main</a></li> <li><a href="/archives/index.html" title="Archives"><i class="fa fa-book" aria-hidden="true"></i> Archives</a></li> <li><a href="/search.html" title="Searching Panda's Thumb"><i class="fa fa-book" aria-hidden="true"></i> Search</a></li> </ul> </nav> </div> </header> <section class="blog"> <div class="grid"> <div class="unit whole"> <article class="blogpost"> <header> <h1><a href="/archives/2020/12/Any-new-arguments.html">Are there any new ID arguments?</a></h1> <div class="byline"><i class="fa fa-user-circle" aria-hidden="true"></i> By Joe Felsenstein</div> <div class="attrline"><i class="fa fa-clock-o" aria-hidden="true"></i> <span><time pubdate="pubdate" datetime="2020-12-01T20:00:00-07:00">December 1, 2020 20:00 MST</time></span> </div> </header> <p>In a discussion of the future of arguments with creationists and/or ID advocates, someone said there were no new arguments from them. Here is my response, from an email. It is mostly about the sort of ID arguments that I have paid most attention to.</p> <p> There have been attempts to come up with new versions of Dembski's arguments, from the Marks-Ewert-Holloway "Design Inference" axis.聽 But they are all somewhat vague and cannot be made explicit without it becoming clear how weak the arguments are.聽 Marks and Dembski have had an argument that on average "evolutionary searches" do no better than random guessing.聽 But they could do that only by including among the "evolutionary" searches as many that actively tried to get a bad result as there were ones that tried to get a good result.聽 Holloway and others also put forward arguments that Algorithmic Specified Complexity that is high because things are unusually non-complex (huh?) would be very rare among all possible bitstrings.聽 But they left it unclear why evolution should in some sense be trying to achieve that, and they made no argument about what natural selection would do with that measure.聽 There is also some rigorous math from George Montañez of that group on how to unify a whole bunch of measures of specified complexity -- without ever exploring whether any of them help make an argument against the effectiveness of evolutionary processes.聽 There are also works by Marks and co. on "active information", which is, however, information that can be put into the genome by natural selection, so not at all a refutation of its involvement. <p> So ... <a class="anchor" id="more"></a> they're trying, and doing lots of very mathy things, and these can get cited by creationists and other ID advocates as powerful mathy disproofs of the effectiveness of evolutionary processes, as long as no one really looks inside the argument to see what it actually shows.聽 And so far they have not dotted the i's and crossed the t's in any way that actually argues against natural selection being able to result in adaptation. <p> For posts here at PT on the Dembski/Marks/Ewert "evolutionary algorithms" argument, and on the relevance of the ASC measure of (non-)complexity see <a href="https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2015/03/fitness-surface.html"><strong>here</strong></a> and <a href="https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2019/12/Is-Algorithmic-Specified-Complexity-Useless-for-Analyzing-Evolution.html"><strong>here</strong></a>. <p> There's also <a href="https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/intelligent-design-1-0-2-0-3-0-and-beyond/12588"><strong>a recent discussion</strong></a> at Josh Swamidass's site Peaceful Science of a video in which Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe present "ID 3.0". Many of the commenters conclude that it is vaporware. I must have missed 2.0 as well. <p> What do people see out there that would qualify as a new, and possibly even valid, ID argument? </p></p></p></p></p> </article> </div> <div id="disqus_thread" class="unit whole"></div> <script> var disqus_config = function () { this.page.url = 'https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2020/12/Any-new-arguments.html'; this.page.identifier = '/archives/2020/12/Any-new-arguments'; }; (function() { // DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE var d = document, s = d.createElement('script'); s.src = '//the-pandas-thumb.disqus.com/embed.js'; s.setAttribute('data-timestamp', +new Date()); (d.head || d.body).appendChild(s); })(); </script> <noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="https://disqus.com/?ref_noscript">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript> </div> </section> <footer> <div class="grid"> <table bgcolor="204517"> <tr><td> </td><td> <div align="left"> <p> To see earlier posts, select the Archives at the top of this page</p> <p></p> </div> <div id="RecentComments" class="dsq-widget"> <div align="center"> <h2>Recent Comments</h2> <P> To see the comment in context of the discussion click on the text that indicates how long ago the comment was posted, such as "2 hours ago". 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