I got a begging email from our good friends at the Center for Science & Culture. They’re going to have to work a lot harder to persuade me.
Dear PZ:
Wait. Dear PZ? I’m having a tough time imagining any of those bozos addressing me as dear. But let us continue.
Intelligent design is a common sense idea. Research has shown that children intuitively recognize design in the world around them. You and I make design inferences every day. It has taken a long time for the scientific community to catch up with the kids. But that day is coming.
Intuitive and “common sense” assumptions are often wrong. You might enjoy these misconceptions children have about physics, for instance. I look forward to their new slogan: Intelligent Design: so simple, only a child would believe it
. Except that it’s insulting to children.
The rest of the letter is all about the crap science they’ve been dumping on the public this year, and threatening to publish more.
For over 19 years, the Research & Scholarship Initiative of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture (CSC) has worked to build the scientific case for design and to winsomely communicate their research and scholarship to a broad audience.
Heh. This is the first time I’ve every seen the adverb “winsomely” applied to what the creationists do. I had to go to the Evolution News website to see an example of their winsome articles. Here’s one: Rubik’s Cube Is a Hand-Sized Illustration of Intelligent Design.
For those interested in explaining ID to people without a lot of memory work, the Rubik’s Cube can be a useful instructional aid. You don’t have to master the art of solving it. Save your sanity; just buy two cubes, and don’t touch the solved one. Lock it into a plastic case if you have to, so that you won’t have to try all 43 quintillion combinations in front of your audience. Or, rent a kid who can fix it in a few seconds.
Explain that the cube is a search problem. Take the scrambled one, and show how you want to get from that one to the solved one. You need a search algorithm. Which approach is more likely to find the solution — intelligent causes or unguided causes? The answer is obvious, but go ahead; rub it in. A robot randomly moving the colors around could conceivably hit on the solution by chance in short order with sheer dumb luck (1 chance in 43 x 1018), but even if it did, it would most likely keep rotating the colors right back out of order again, not caring a dime. It would take an intelligent agent to recognize the solution and stop the robot when it gets the solution by chance.
More likely, it would take a long, long time. Trying all 43 x 1018 combinations at 1 per second would take 1.3 trillion years. The robot would have a 50-50 chance of getting the solution in half that time, but it would already vastly exceed the time available (about forty times the age of the universe). If a secular materialist counters that there could be trillions of robots with trillions of cubes working simultaneously throughout the cosmos, ask what the chance is of getting any two winners on the same planet at the same place and time. The one concession blocks the other. And what in the materialist’s unguided universe is going to stop any robot when it succeeds? The vast majority will never succeed during the age of the universe.
Now rub it in. It would vastly exceed the age of the known universe for a robot to solve the cube by sheer dumb luck. How fast can an intelligent cause solve it? 4.904 seconds. That’s the power of intelligent causes over unguided causes.
Now really, really rub it in. The Rubik’s cube is simple compared to a protein. Imagine solving a cube with 20 colors and 100 sides. Then imagine solving hundreds of different such cubes, each with its own solution, simultaneously in the same place at the same time. If the audience doesn’t run outside screaming, you didn’t speak slowly enough.
Oh, man. So much wrong.
One problem with ID’s argument is that they are committed to the fallacy of a specified target for an evolutionary search. So the “goal” of evolution is to produce a human being, and given the 3+ billion years of chance and variation, and the multitude of different forms produced, I’ll agree: the likelihood of our specific form arising from a sea of single-celled organisms is extremely unlikely. But evolution doesn’t care; it doesn’t have a goal; it spawns endless different forms, so we get elephants and algae at the same time that we get, in one brief and fleeting moment of geological time, anthropoids.
One problem with their Rubik’s Cube example is that it does have a known goal: you’re supposed to get each side to a different solid color. Their single enshrined cube set to a single specific solution is a good example of the poverty of Intelligent Design creationism.
If I were to use Rubik’s Cube as a demonstration of how evolution works, I’d have to do something very different. We have about 20,000 genes, so I’d have to by 20,000 Rubik’s Cubes (not on a professor’s salary), and I’d set each one to a different arrangement. Much of it would be chance, but for some, I’d make a desultory effort. Can I get this one to display mostly green squares on one side? On this one I want three adjacent squares to be red. Another one has alternating yellow squares on one face. You get the idea — I want diversity, and I don’t have to work as hard or as narrowly to get it. I’d also just stroll through the house, tripping over these stupid Rubik’s Cubes everywhere, and occasionally twisting one.
That’s closer to evolution than the DI’s vision.
They’re always making this mistake of assuming the only correct solution is one pre-specified result. I really want to play poker with them: I’d tell them first that the goal of the game is get a Royal Flush, and they’d fold at every hand and I’d clean up with every feeble deal.
One other problem with their analogy is that they’re comparing the cube to the wrong thing. The more natural comparison is not to evolution, but to protein folding. Here’s this chain of amino acids, and you have to twist it into a specific conformation that will function…why, the numbers say this is nearly impossible! And math doesn’t lie!
Here’s a 1993 paper by Fraenkel, Complexity of Protein Folding, that says this.
It is believed that the native folded three-dimensional conformation of a protein is its lowest free energy state, or one of its lowest. It is shown here that both a two- and three-dimensional mathematical model describing the folding process as a free energy minimization problem is NP-hard. This means that the problem belongs to a large set of computational problems, assumed to be very hard (“conditionally intractable”). Some of the possible ramifications of this result are speculated upon.
All the mathematicians and computer scientists out there will recognize that word, NP-hard. This represents a computationally very difficult problem that isn’t easily solved (a Rubik’s Cube is not NP-hard, I don’t think–there are relatively simple algorithms that can solve it, although getting an optimal, minimum-number-of-moves solution might be harder — I haven’t been following the math.) Fraenkel explains the problem in words that will bring joy to the heart of every IDiot, as long as they don’t read the rest.
Each amino acid in a protein can adopt, on average, eight different conformations (Privalov, 1979). A relatively small protein, consisting of 100 amino acids, can thus potentially assume 8100 conformations.
Whoa — 8100 conformations is a much bigger number than 43 x 1018 combinations of the Rubik’s Cube that so impressed the Discovery Institute. I guess we’re done here. It’s impossible for any of my proteins to fold into a functional shape before the heat death of the universe, therefore there must be trillions of invisible tiny angels flitting about winsomely in my body, lovingly crafting DNA Polymerase II for me, cunningly assembling actin monomers into fibers, shuttling electrons about in my mitochondria with focused attention to every detail. I eagerly await the moment when the Discovery Institute lifts those 2 sentences from Fraenkel in their promotional literature.
I assume they’ll conveniently ignore the existence of the next two sentences.
Yet nature attains the native conformation in about 1 sec. (Note that the claim that nature assumes the global minimum free energy conformation in 1 sec is not equivalent to saying that it explores all the 8100 potential conformations in 1 sec!)
So protein folding is a much more difficult problem than solving a Rubik’s cube. The DI is dazzled by a human solving the cube in under 5 seconds, and thinks this demonstrates the superiority of intelligence over other natural causes. Yet the much more difficult problem is solved by the cell in under a second.
Point to physics, chemistry, and biology. Magic intelligence loses again.
Hey, do you think the writers at the Center for Science & Culture have a joke dictionary that defines “winsomely” as “stupidly”? That would make sense.
A gawd that can’t set up a universe to run by itself, (and thus not need a gawd,) is pretty pitiful. He must spend all his time in the control room making sure all the things do what they appear that they would do anyway. He must spend all his time making it look like there is no need for a gawd!
One can’t have intelligent designed without a designer. ID won’t get any money from me until they provide conclusive evidence that the designer exists, and then show where the “pooferies” are that “poof” species into being. All they have is presupposition.
I once read that bees are super awesome at solving traveling salesman (a typical NP-hard problem) when planning their trips over a flower field. Thus, bees are actually angels.
Nineteen years! Shouldn’t they have more to show from nineteen years of research?
I’m still stuck on their use of the word winsome. They’re proud of the fact that they’re communicating their arguments in a childlike or naive way? I think it’s obvious that someone over there plugged a word into their spell checker and one of the thesaurus options was winsome. This is a common beginning writer’s mistake. Take the simple sentence The man ran at full speed across the field. Check for alternatives to the word run. You might come up with The man gamboled at full speed across the field. It changes the whole thing, and not in a good way.
Bob Foster @ 4:
I prefer The man scampered at full speed across the field. Seems to suit DI more. I believe it was Twain who noted that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.
Of course, because it is all about explaining why humans are here, and any explanation that doesn’t make us the most special won’t fly.
NP and similar descriptions (like PSpace and dozens of others) cannot be applied correctly to a single problem; they apply to (infinite) classes of problems. In particular, it makes no sense to say that the problem “given a configuration of the 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube, determine either that it cannot be changed to an all-sides-monochrome configuration by a sequence of legal moves, or find a sequence of legal moves that change it to an all-sides-monochrome configuration” is or isn’t NP-hard. (Though I suppose that, strictly, it is trivially NOT in NP, or NP-hard, or any of many other classes.) On the other hand, if we generalize the Rubik’s cube problem to nxnxn cubes (and some definition of “legal moves”) for all natural numbers n, then we can ask whether that problem is NP (or NP-hard, etc., etc.) I’m fairly sure it’s not unless P=NP (because I think that it’s obviously in P…). For that matter, I think that folding a single, given protein is also obviously in P (and thus “computationally tractible” with enough computational resources). But I’m no longer across the hall from a computational complexity theorist, nor still co-writing papers about the use of robotics algorithms in protein-folding, so I can’t readily check that I’m not just confused on these last few points. I know I’m not confused on the main point (about 3x3x3 cubes).
I get mails to. You are lucky, as I got it from AiG… yes that AiG.
Last year I was involved in a tomfool caper at that place.
Now I am the butt of the “December Fool’s Joke”.
Seems kids know more than anybody from birth and get stupider as they get older. (according to DI)
since every scientist disagrees with them, they seem to be clinging to straws of faux.
.
In response to their Rubix kube analoggy, I’d like to counter with my ‘cupcake analogy’:
“Is there only one specific way to make an edible cupcake, sweetums? Could some attempts result in a muffin, or a cookie, or a cake, or a pie, eh? I’ll bet given a pantry full of many random ingredients and many amateur cooks, tasty cupcakes could be produced in not much time. along with occasionally a muffin, or a cookie, or etc. Edibility is all that is required for this analogy.”
Something like this almost demands that I link to one of those pages where kids say adorably heterodox things about theology*, and demand that the Discovery Institute catch their ‘ personal religious beliefs’ up to the kids’.
* A friend of mine likes to tell the story about how her kid supported reincarnation, for instance.
Heh, winsome. Is Zooey Deschanel working for them now?
#5
Considering who their target audience is, it isn’t so strange.
Hmm… Given the following assumptions:
1. Each pair of humans produces 10 offspring in 30 years
2. There are 3.5 billion pairs of humans now
3. Every child is born with a normal head and normal appendages
4. ID analogies continue advancing at a constant rate
Then how long will it be until there are enough faces and enough palms to meet the need?
So they’re actually resting their whole agenda on the “Argument from ‘Who Made the Moon?'” Small children around the world spontaneously assume that everything works in ways they’re familiar with and ask questions like “Who made the moon?” or assume causal connections like “tigers are for going in zoos.” Ooh, magic. They instinctively know that the moon is for making a pretty light for them, because mommy and daddy gave them a night light! Nothing narcissistic about that. Trust your instincts. Believe in yourself. Children know more than adults, because the rational world corrupts our purity. Etc, etc.
No. Our “folk” intuitions are not reliable. I find it laughable that the Discovery Institute is being so so blatant about their irrational roots — as well as their resemblance to New Age spirituality.
Science is uncommon sense. It cuts the connection between the world and our own preoccupations, assumptions, desires, and goals. When we really don’t like that, we call it “arrogant.”
The mildly deranged penguin, of course. Or at least she had it made. The current incarnation’s proper name is Orbital Cheese Vault MMCCCIV (I think that’s the correct serial number, I’ve lost track), which rather hints at its purpose, and is, of course, probably the origin of the “Moon is Made of Green Cheese”. Why Green, and for that matter, why Moon, is not really known (or at least she isn’t telling…).
He shows himself how he’s wrong:
“Or, rent a kid who can fix it in a few seconds. […] It would take an intelligent agent to recognize the solution and stop the robot when it gets the solution by chance.”
If he stopped to think just for a minute, he’d realize that those kids who “fix it in a few seconds” aren’t “recognizing the solution” and stopping there. They can’t be, they’re moving too fast. My brother, for instance, mastered the parlor trick of solving a Rubik’s Cube in less than a minute while holding it behind his back. There is a sequence of moves that will solve any cube configuration. You don’t have to watch it and look for the right answer, you just have to do the steps.
Even with their own “logic” and restrictions, they’re wrong.
by that sentence they reveal themselves.
they worship the secure ignorance of the child in the mothers arms. They want the world to remain as they saw it as a child a safe playable space but it is not. They brand as evil anything and everyone that shakes that illusion. They dread their mortality and imagine an other level another place we go with a loving parent to care for us.
They want existence to be as a simple tune played on a toy piano when reason and science show us it is a vast symphony with instruments and electronics and effects and lights and dancers and numberless voices.
make no mistake because fear drives them in their struggle with what is and what they want it to be they can be mean and cruel and are not to be trusted.
uncle frogy
carlie:
Well, the assumption is that a “robot” wouldn’t stop, apparently because visual recognition that it is “the solution” requires an intelligent agent. The robot may hold it behind its back and find the “correct” configuration, using the same mechanical procedures a kid would use, but the claim is that it would keep going unlike the kid. Because robots are stupid or don’t know how to look at things. So, you need the kid there, who’s analogous to an intelligent deity, to stop the robot at the “right” time. There can’t be another better reason why the thing stops at that particular place or time.
Like they claimed in the previous sentence:
In other words, the “problem” is essentially that robots don’t care. (They also apparently have some kind of a problem with probabilities or probability theory.) They want the universe itself, not just us when we make our theories about it, to care that folded proteins will be at something close to a minimum energy state, to use the other example. Being in that kind of a state (or going through whatever that process actually is) isn’t sufficient as an explanation, because somebody has to want that, to exercise their intelligence or freedom in choosing that goal or the manner in which it will be achieved. Therefore, Jesus.
Why don’t they find themselves at the maximum or at the “average,” or anywhere else in possibility space for that matter? It couldn’t just be an empirical fact; there has to be an extra reason underlying it which is also the case, concerning why things are that way, and they think that means somebody (their favorite deity) must have intelligently decided on it. Then why was that decision made rather than another … well, sorry, no, you don’t get to apply the principle anymore. Jesus just does what he does, for any reason or no reason, and you shouldn’t question him.
Of course, this isn’t very consistent with their claim that it would take a great deal of time for “the robot” (i.e., the physical universe), or that it should be surprising to us that “the robot” does it as quickly as it does, since they’re not actually talking about how fast “robots” can or cannot move. That would be a statement about the rate at which certain processes happen, which they’re not interested in describing or explaining. They’re talking about a “non-robot” wanting things to be a certain way, or designing them that way initially, since they think an adequate explanation must ultimately come in that form. Why must that be so? No idea. Because they say so.
To be clear, “they” refers to some creationists, not all robots.
There’s a whole ‘nother mathematical gem in there. They say 1.3 trillion years is 40 times the age of the universe. That puts the universe at 32.5 billion years old (“Happy birthday to you…” Spike Milligan would sing at this point). Even if we ignore the factor-of-three error from the real value… aren’t these people supposed to be Young Earth Creationists?
Hey, no one ever said it’s easy to come up with winsome analogies to fallaciously argue for a foregone conclusion! Remember, this is some serious cargo-cult science we’re talking about here. What else would you expect them to do while they wait for the magical scientific data proving ID to just drop down from the sky and into their lap? Do actual science or something? Bah, I say!
etfb
aren’t these people supposed to be Young Earth Creationists?
Cdesign proponentsists are typically “Old Earth” Creationists. They try to limit their breathtaking inanity to biology, and leave geology and astronomy (mostly) alone. (“Mostly” because they do also love some fine-tuning arguments, which tend to run afoul of geology and/or astronomy at certain points, but it’s a little more arguable.)
etfb @21: They’re saying that half of 1.3e12 y is about forty times the age of the universe. It’s actually 47 times, so that’s not too bad.
CJO @23: I like Stenger‘s
That amounts to a pithy corollary to the weak anthropic principle, which has always seemed sufficient to me to render fine-tuning arguments frivolous.
Royal or not, ID could certainly use a flush…
That, and the lack of a creator they can evidence. The WAP is only one stop on the cycle of theistic creationists for why they believe in an imaginary deity. Every argument of which fails unless unless you presuppose that deity.
There’s not even a serious attempt to specify what would or wouldn’t count as fine-tuning for life (or humans, creationists, Earth-like planets, whatever). Anything might be an argument for or against, as long as that’s the case. So, I don’t know… if you’re going to play that game, I guess it’s just as warranted to make up sciencey-sounding bullshit which contradicts creationist bullshit. But either way, it’s not easy to figure out what it’s supposed to mean.
Childlike, yes. Pleasing and engaging? Nuh uh.
Rubik’s NxNxN cube can be solved in quadratic time. Finding the shortest sequence of moves is hard, but finding a sequence is merely tedious.
http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2010/06/complexity-of-rubiks-cube.html
A genetic algorithm with a fitness function that’s the number of errors might do OK. Just set up the system then let evolution take its course. That parallelizes well, so you could search a wide set of solutions quite quickly if you had a few million or billion computers. You might get stuck in local maxima is the only problem — kind of like having knees that point the wrong way.
I have to wonder if “winsome” might be a hidden reference to (wait for it. . . )
Darwin-some/Darlose-some,
perhaps indicating stealth facetiousness.
(T-shirt here)
I am no computer/math/programming wizzard, but even I know that evolutionary algorithms are used for finding good (even though not necessarily ideal) solutions for many problems. Like finding the solutions in Excel – it inserts numbers at random and then approximates to the result.
And – and that is the real kick – these algorithms are used by our “intelligent” brains. Solutions to problems do not poof in our heads out of nowhere or due to some innate intelligent substance that is independent tha materia of our brain. Our brains search for them througth a set of approximations and comparisons that involves a lot of try and error through inserting random variables. There is a lot of random firign up of synapsies etc. And during development our brains create much more synapsies than needed , most of which are later disconnected.
It could be even argued that the whole scientific process runs in evolution-like-fashion, because science proceeds through trying things out at random (what happens when I poke this, what happens when I poke that, what happens when I do not poke at all) and keeping what works whilst discarding what does not and thus increasing our understanding of the world by increments. It actually does involve trying out a lot of solutions that do not work because you cannot know what works or not without trying it.
IDiots really suck at understanding and at analogies.
So speak even slower! Exaggerate your pronunciation and make big hand gestures! Act as insufferably smug and superior as possible! Remember, any signs of doubt or disbelief in your audience mean that they’re just too dumb to comprehend the brilliance of your argument!
I love how the folks at the DI interact with the
common rabblepublic. They don’t have a tenth of the average YEC preacher’s ability to connect with their audience.Okay, but what if I have 10 billion robots with 10 billion Rubik’s Cubes, each making a move every 1/4 second ?
(hm. . . that sounds a bit like “but what if there were two swallows, they could carry it on a line strung between them”)
And, as long as we’re doing winsome : https://youtu.be/lWMqeHGgcRI