[Avodah] intelligent design

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 07:08:31PM +0200, Arie Folger wrote:
: My US$0.02: What people usually think of when debating intelligent
: design is not whether or not creation was done by G"d, but rather,
: whether there is incontrovertible scientific evidence that the world
: could not have developed to the present stage barring the invisible
: guiding hand of the Designer / Intelligence. Basically, these are
: people who argue that organisms dsplay irreducible complexity, etc.
: That is a branch of science that is controversial, and there is less
: evidence for that then some want to believe. I understood that it is
: that train of thought the conference speakers rejected.

FWIW, I think that using Information and Autamata Theory, we could get
a rigorous definition of complexity, one in which Von Neumann's lemmas
about automata would apply to life.

So perhaps we couldn't say that there are automata in living beings
that are literally irreducible. However, we can say they are negligably
unlikely.

To translate... 

Irreducible complexity: This is the idea you likely enountered in some
Jewish book about the eye or photosynthesis. Systems that need multiple
parts to work, where any one missing part would render the whole system
usesless. Michael Behe, the microbiologist who coined the term in
question, used similar claims but on the protein level.

He also uses a mousetrap as an example. Mousetraps have 5 parts: the
wooden base, the spring, the loop, the catch, and the bar that holds
the loop down. If any one of those parts doesn't work, it won't catch
mice.

Since there is no such thing as a useful 80% of a mousetrap, how could
it have evolved?

The problem, as described by Kenneth Miller ("Only a Theory"):
    [An old friend] struck upon the brilliant idea of using an old, broken
    mousetrap as a spitball catapult, and it worked brilliantly... It
    had worked perfectly as something other than a mousetrap... my rowdy
    friend had pulled a couple of parts -- probably the hold-down bar and
    catch -- off the trap to make it easier to conceal and more effective
    as a catapult... [leaving] the base, the spring, and the hammer. Not
    much of a mousetrap, but a helluva spitball launcher... I realized
    why [Behe's] mousetrap analogy had bothered me. It was wrong. The
    mousetrap is not irreducibly complex after all.

IOW, it is possible for a creature to have the equivalent of a spitball
catapult that chases away mice. Once it evolved into a trap, it no
longer needed the catapult anyway.

There are middle steps, because the pieces of the eye or components that
do photosynthesis could have been repurposed.

Where I think work could be done is that if I understand Von Neumann's
lectures correctly, there is a ceiling to the probability of such simpler
systems that use similar parts existing. The odds of an eye evolving all
at once is negligably small. But I think he shows that the probability
of there being a usefull "spitball launcher", that it (or any other
middle step) were to evolve, and then evolve from that to the eye MUST
be smaller than the probability of that one time event.

John Von Neumann is one of the fathers of Computer Science. He gave a
series of lectures on Automata Theory in 1966. I found a text version of
the 4th lecture at http://cba.mit.edu/events/03.11.ASE/docs/VonNeumann.pdf

In short: The information contained in an automaton is the minimum
number of bits required to describe how to construct it from its
components. Any more information than necessary for the automaton to
function is not counted.

So, you might think that a tricycle is more complex than a bicycle. But
if it would take more bits to describe a bicycle that balances than a
working tricycle, it contains more information.

The result is a measure of relative complexity -- of two systems made of
the same components, we can speak of which is more complex and how much
more.

In lectures 2 and 3 he discusses how systems that do not reach a certain
complexity threshold are bound to produce systems less complex than
themselves. Lectures 4 and 5 are aimed at showing that evolution could
still be possible. However, he notably does not apply what he wrote
elsewhere about probabilities.

This also only discusses evolution. What about design in the universe as
a whole -- the fact that the laws of physics are such that we could have
evolved to begin with? This touches on the "anthropic principle".

By definition, the big bang ending with the universe in a low
entropy state is highly improbable. (That's translating the words "low
entropy".) The precision at which the fundamental constants have to be
at or close to current values would require many bits of precision just
for any form of atom, molecule and chemistry to be possible. Etc...

And it does bother physicists. To the point that many string theorists
now posit an unseen multiverse, in which an infinity of universes exist,
and therefore the presence of a universe in which thinking beings is
possible is unsurprising. We would only be around in those universes
which could produce us in order to ask "why here, where everything is
conducive to life?".

John Wheeler suggested that universes that don'e produce observers
aren't stable from a quantum mechanical point of view. Thus, QM has an
infinite number of possible universes, but it could only collapse into a
state where there are conscious observers. Thus explaining why the
universe "just happens" to be right for us".

In short, to eliminate G-d from their explanation, many physicists posit
their own scientifically indetectible infinities.

The construction of scientific theories to account for it makes it very
hard to say that the evidence for design isn't scientific in nature.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Today is the 8th day, which is
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