Discovery Institute Claims Victory

The Discovery Institute is claiming victory in the recent symposium at Biola on May 14, in which Stephen Meyer faced his critics. In a post on Evolution News & Views, Rob Crowther writes:

The critics were Steve Matheson, a theistic evolutionist from Calvin College, and Arthur Hunt a Darwinist and biologist from the University of Kentucky. Both have written critically of SITC and intelligent design and were clearly not very enamored of the thesis of Meyer’s book, that the best explanation for the origins of biological information is that it comes from an intelligent source, a mind.

At least they started out seemingly unimpressed. I am certain Hunt remained so, but I’m not so sure about Matheson. He was critical to be sure, but in an amazingly candid and very revealing moment, he exposed his own presupposition that keeps him from accepting intelligent design theory.

Matheson basically conceded that ID is the best explanation currently on the table, but not one that he likes. Yes, he agreed, codes are produced by minds. Yes, there is digital code in DNA. Yes, design is a good explanation for that code. So, Meyer responded, you are admitting that the explanation I’ve offered, intelligent design, is currently best? The point wasn’t lost on the audience, or on Matheson I suspect.

Steve has not responded to this post—yet. Without the entire context, it is difficult to determine whether or not this is a fair representation of what Steve meant. It certainly puts the ball in his court.

Arthur Hunt, on the other hand, has written a somewhat technical response to the meeting here in which he suggests that Stephen Meyer conceded some very important points regarding specified information in proteins:

...if some protein functions do not require lots of specified information, then these should be quite accessible to what ID proponents would call “Darwinian mechanisms”. This concession has lots of ramifications – it renders Doug Axe’s suggestions about the isolation of functional proteins in sequence space somewhat less relevant, and it weakens the case (I suspect an important aspect of “Darwin’s Dilemma”) that a supposed requirement for new proteins during evolution (such as occurred in the Cambrian Explosion) makes such evolution improbable or impossible, at least without intelligent design. More generally, while it may be that absolute statements are not made by ID proponents, I think it important to have ID advocates backing down from claims or even hints that all (or even most) proteins have high specified information contents.

It has been a hall mark of William Dembski's research (if I am characterizing it correctly) that proteins have high levels of specified complexity and that evolutionary mechanisms cannot attain that level of complexity. Aside from the fact that in every instance, Dembski's modeling fails to duplicate real biotic environments, Hunt is correct that this is a major concession.

More Problems for the Dembski/Marks Paper

The Metropolis Sample takes the most recent swipe at the Dembski/Marks paper here. The paper is extraordinarily mathematical (imagine that!) and way over my pay grade, but the conclusions are clear:

The fundamental lesson here is that the Dembski-Marks approach to evaluating model assumptions is both arbitrary and a poor reflection of scientific reasoning. Model assumptions are not accepted or rejected based on a numerical measure of how many logical possibilities that are ruled out or how far probability distributions deviate from uniform measures. Rather, model assumptions are accepted or rejected based on predictive and descriptive accuracy, domain of applicability, ability to unify existing models and empirical knowledge, and so on. Merely talking about target sets requires assumptions that impose structure on the search space and processes related to it. Dembski and Marks (2009a) mention “a simple self-replicating molecule, an autocatalytic set, or a lipid membrane” as examples of biological targets. However, these chemical concepts presuppose model assumptions from physics, chemistry and biochemistry and they could hardly be independent of the chemical processes by which they are thought to arise.

As others have stated, Dembski and Marks do not understand how biological systems operate and how selection operates. This hampers their ability to correctly model a biosphere.

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