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drj11 -> RE: S.E.T.I and Intelligent life outside of Earth. (5/9/2008 12:11:15 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Jhud
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Irreducible complexity: Has been shown that it wouldn't be impossible for evolution to build IC, if in fact we could actually find an IC system. It doesn't even follow that this idea is even a characteristic a designer would use. A ID theorists have failed to identify an IC system to date, to any degree of certainty.
It has never been demonstrated evolution could do this. Saying something is 'not impossible', and saying that something can happen, or exists, are vastly different things. It is not impossible that unicorns, Bigfoot (feet?), Loch Ness Monsters, etc exist – but that fact doesn’t demonstrate that they do indeed exist.
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Specified Complexity: Been reading more on this... Apparently not even Dembski has put his own formula's through rigorous tests. Thankfully, some other researches have done some of his work for him, and found his formulas to be inadequate for detecting design and throw up false positives on objects of known natural origin. Nor has Dembski bothered to test his formula's on biological systems where the origin and evolutionary path is well pretty well established, vs those that arent... to you know... make sure his formula works. Furthermore, it relies on the tornado in a junkyard assembles a 747 argument.
Specified complexity is merely the rational assertion that as a structure or systems increases in complexity and conformation to a pattern that has a purpose, the probability that intelligence was involved in it’s construction increases, and the probability that it could happen in an unguided manner decreases until it reaches approximately zero.
To understand this, consider this scenario –
You are walking along a beach and you see three sticks lying across each other so that there shape approximates the letter ‘A'. While that letter can be matched to a recognizable pattern with a purpose (in this case, an alphabet), that is it is specific, it is not particularly complex. The probability that intelligence was involved in its construction is fairly low, and the probability that the sticks washed up in that pattern is quite high.
Now, if you were walking along the same beach the next day and you saw a pile of sticks on top of each other that clearly conformed to a pattern that looked like this:
JOHN WAS HERE ON THIS BEACH YESTERDAY
The estimation would change – why? Well, because the specificity remained high, and the complexity increases considerably. So the probability that it happened as the result of unguided forces decreases, while the probability that intelligence was involved in the construction increases considerably. Eventually, the probability that a pattern with a purpose can occur without intelligence approximates zero – for example a Shakespearean sonnet composed on the beach from sticks.
So we find the same sort of patterns in nature, whether we are talking the genetic information found in DNA or the complexities of molecular machinery, or the overall organization of animal morphology – they are patterns that are high in specificity, and high in complexity – much higher than a sonnet. That means the probability of them occurring by known natural causes approximates zero.
I understand that reasoning, but Dembski's formulas have been shown to throw up false positives over even some trivial examples. At the very least, I would think, even if his formulas could throw false negatives, they would at least not throw false positives so easily to be confident that they reliably detect design.
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