Engineer: "Cells are so weird!"
Seriously, though, about cells . . . they are not little perfect machines in any way.
If a cell can do something the easy way or the hard way, it probably does both, plus three ways you haven't even thought of yet. Even the old DNA-->RNA-->protein "central dogma" is not, as it turns out, the whole story. Every step can be (and usually is) another level of regulation. There's mRNA localization. There's RNA interference. There are micro RNAs. There are noncoding RNA sequences that regulate protein translation. There's DNA methylation, histone methylation/acetylation, chromatin remodeling. (Genetics joke: What the hell happened to my gene expression? Oh, it's chromatin remodeling.) Proteins flop back and forth between conformations and the cell exploits the differences. Feedback loops and threshold effects are the rule, rather than linear pathways - there's noise in the system - a cell is not like any kind of machine that we are familiar with in the macro world. We are only beginning to formulate the mathematical tools to be able to describe biological systems.
We have way too much to do before we can understand cells as they are, without turning them into little catechisms. As much as I love the extended cell-based metaphor, and I really do, I think it cripples one to project one's expectations or prejudices onto biology - that this or that is "purposeful" or "perfect"; it narrows one's scope for creative thinking. ID person might say, "Well, but you are projecting evolutionary assumptions onto your biology all the time!" And while on one hand they would be correct, this is because there has not been any better explanation that describes what we see better than natural selection. The theory has been fine-tuned since Darwin and since the first geneticists - some things that were not thought possible have been reexamined. But these are technical issues rather than wholesale paradigm shifts.
Becoming dogmatic is a problem any time a field establishes itself, and it's sometimes hard to swim against the dominant paradigms. I am almost willing to concede something to the ID folks, like Ben who comments below, in that perhaps there is some order, some something, that we simply don't know how to study yet . . . germ theory of disease would have been impossible to observe directly before microscopes (although it could be indirectly tested by experiment).
But then I think - no, we are not able to go beyond materialist methodology, at least at this time. And the supernatural is not falsifiable!
Finally, I must stress again: ID is not about science. It is about God.
If a cell can do something the easy way or the hard way, it probably does both, plus three ways you haven't even thought of yet. Even the old DNA-->RNA-->protein "central dogma" is not, as it turns out, the whole story. Every step can be (and usually is) another level of regulation. There's mRNA localization. There's RNA interference. There are micro RNAs. There are noncoding RNA sequences that regulate protein translation. There's DNA methylation, histone methylation/acetylation, chromatin remodeling. (Genetics joke: What the hell happened to my gene expression? Oh, it's chromatin remodeling.) Proteins flop back and forth between conformations and the cell exploits the differences. Feedback loops and threshold effects are the rule, rather than linear pathways - there's noise in the system - a cell is not like any kind of machine that we are familiar with in the macro world. We are only beginning to formulate the mathematical tools to be able to describe biological systems.
We have way too much to do before we can understand cells as they are, without turning them into little catechisms. As much as I love the extended cell-based metaphor, and I really do, I think it cripples one to project one's expectations or prejudices onto biology - that this or that is "purposeful" or "perfect"; it narrows one's scope for creative thinking. ID person might say, "Well, but you are projecting evolutionary assumptions onto your biology all the time!" And while on one hand they would be correct, this is because there has not been any better explanation that describes what we see better than natural selection. The theory has been fine-tuned since Darwin and since the first geneticists - some things that were not thought possible have been reexamined. But these are technical issues rather than wholesale paradigm shifts.
Becoming dogmatic is a problem any time a field establishes itself, and it's sometimes hard to swim against the dominant paradigms. I am almost willing to concede something to the ID folks, like Ben who comments below, in that perhaps there is some order, some something, that we simply don't know how to study yet . . . germ theory of disease would have been impossible to observe directly before microscopes (although it could be indirectly tested by experiment).
But then I think - no, we are not able to go beyond materialist methodology, at least at this time. And the supernatural is not falsifiable!
Finally, I must stress again: ID is not about science. It is about God.
posted by Joolya at
9:47 AM
5 Comments:
The thrust of ID is mathematic and based on information theory. I think it has lots to add to our understanding of cellular systems. William Dembski has a PhD in mathematics and if you want a technical examination of ID from that perspective you should pick up "The Design Inference." And I think Dembski would say to you that we don't have a mathematical basis for understanding cellular systems like the ones you are describing because of evolutionary dogma. I think he would say it's blinding the scientific community to the possibilities.
Warning: I've heard from people who've read "The Design Inference" that it is basically a textbook and fairly complicated. Which makes me want to read it. And I believe even if you don't agree, it may expand your understanding of mathematical ways of looking at this issue.
The mathematics of complexity and emergent behavior goes a long way towards explaining how complex systems can arise from a few simple rules. This comes under the general heading of systems biology. The math is held up by our lack of biological data, but maybe not for much longer. I will look into both things further.
Dembski is very familiar with those ideas. He doesn't think much of them. But I suppose he wouldn't be expected to. Thank you for your interest. I am only an undergrad so I'm sure you know much more about it than I do. Hopefully in the next few years I'll be in grad school. Again, thank you for hearing me out. I have nothing more to say, but others do.
Joolya, from an earlier post: "Anyone who studies biology - especially cell biology - can tell you: it's a complete mess. If this shit was designed by a designer, the designer was on acid at the time. And yet, out of this jerry-rigged hodgepodge it is still possible to decipher some interesting fundamental mechanisms, to make incrimental (and the occasional huge) steps toward understanding how things work."
Truer words was never spoke.
Seriously, I STILL want to see -- I mean really want to see -- any ID rationale for the Wnt signalling pathways. They are a particular bugbear.
Ben: I'm going to introduce myself and weigh in, here. I'm a bioinformatics grad student -- programming for molecular biology, that is -- changing careers midlife, as I have been a professional programmer for years, but I got bored and restless and I love biology and am fascinated by it. And incidentally, yes, I do actually understand most of "the relevant math" which Dembski loves to invoke, even though I do not find it easy or intuitive or anything less than bloody labor to work through. But frankly, Dembski really is, from a scientific standpoint, full of it. I have been priviledged to attand some fascinating lectures by Celso Grebogi and did some subsequent reading to understand nonlinear feedback and chaotic dynamical systems, and I find it fascinating just how much Dembski ignores about what is not only known, but used to good effect, in the fields of pure and applied mathematics.
Now, I'm going to point out a dark-and-dirty little secret of science: you can get just about anything published. The top-flight journals like Science, Nature Group stuff, and Cell can pick and choose what they want, and they have a reputation to maintain, so they have stringent requirements and strict guidelines and frankly don't have to take anything they don't want to. However, if you move down the food chain a few notches you find that there are hundreds, literally hundreds, of journals trying to fill their pages every week or every month, and you can get by with less than earthshaking researcha and only be subject to cursory peer-review, and you really, honestly can get just about anything published. If those journals actually have a chance to publish something really interesting first, which might bump up the number of citations aimed at them, then no matter how silly or heretical you can get in.
Incidentally, one of the not-so-dark-and-dirty secrets of science publishing is, you also do NOT have to be associated with a university or research institute to publish research. You can literally be anybody, as long as you can provide your data and an adequate writeup. Graphic evidence of this exists in the person of Emily Rosa, who published an analysis of underlying assumptions to the practice of "therapeutic touch" in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998 -- at the age of nine. Her mother had helped her write up the results of a fourth grade science project that she did and sent it in to JAMA, and it was deemed of sufficient quality to publish (after they ran it through a professional statistician, anyway).
Against this background, one must look for publications supporting ID.
I found, um...two; one of which was a poster presented at an AGU seminar and later criticised as misleading, leading to a revision of how the AGU reviews proposed posters.
There are supposed to be "professional" IDers, such as Dembski, out there; why no publications?
Please do not quote to me any grand conspiracy to silence their research. Here is another dark-and-dirty secret of science -- many people in science exist to one-up their colleagues, and if you can overturn a paradigm and see your name in lights, whether in professional journals or in the mainstream media, then there is considerable motivation to do so. Look at the "cold fusion" debacle (in fact there are certain similarities between "cold fusion" and ID) -- Pons and Fleischmann went about their announcements of result in precisely the wrong way, breaking every rule of good science practice -- going to the popular press before their work was released into the science community. Despite or because of this bad start, other scientists were intrigued, angry, defensive, eager...whatever the motivation, dozens of teams across the US immediately tried to start duplicating their supposed results, and even in the face of failure, some few of those teams jumped wholeheartedly onto the bandwagon and are *still* trying. AND THEY HAVE PUBLICATIONS, even though it draws a great deal of ridicule from mainstream physics.
Against this background, let us again look at research and publications for ID. Whoops....
The simple fact is, there is no supporting research; the publications aren't there because there literally is no work which supports the idea. They are trying to "sell" a philosophically appealing idea which has less actual evidence going for it than for the big bang, by a long shot. In addition, they have *never*, and I mean that quite literally, in the full sense of never, demonstrated how exactly the idea can contribute to a research program.
If every molecular device and mechanism were elegant, efficient, and optimal for what it did, one would actually have an argument for design there. The fact is, the vast majority of molecular mechanisms are visibly "kludged together"; saying "it could still be design, because the designer can make it look and work any way he wants" is a form of special pleading which has no real explanatory power and contributes nothing.
On the other hand, "descent with modification from a common ancestor" has proven to have amazing explanatory power, and suggests multiple, very fruitful lines of research. I suggest a visit to a decent sized university or hospital library and a quick leaf through however-many-dozen journal titles you can find involving life sciences, and see how many papers use evolutionary assumptions and get results.
The fact is, if you are making your decision about the scientific legitimacy of ID without actually knowing the facts of the subject, how is this any more legitimate than making decisions about the motivations and ideas of the American Founding Fathers without having ever read the multiple letters and papers that they, themselves, wrote on the subjects? How is it any more legitimate than declaring black holes to be a myth without understanding any astrophysics? How is it any more legitimate than declaring King Louis XIV of France to be the world's most enlightened monarch without knowing any history other than just the names? How is it any more legitimate than declaring your car's engine trouble could not possibly be the carbuerator without knowing how it works and what various sounds and symptoms actually indicate? Get the drift?
If you say you don't understand the relevant math, or don't know the details of the subject, but you are willing to ignore the opinions of thousands of people who do in order to declare the legitimacy of an idea, on the basis of one or two people....how exactly does this make it a legitimate idea?
Before ID gets taught to kids who by definition do not know enough science to judge legitimate vs. non-legitimate, since they are in the process of being taught the basics which would allow them to do so -- shouldn't ID actually demonstrate that it has something in the physical world to support it?
And, when the vast majority of life scientists out there make the flat statement that they have not done so, why are you so willing to ignore them?
"If you say you don't understand the relevant math, or don't know the details of the subject, but you are willing to ignore the opinions of thousands of people who do in order to declare the legitimacy of an idea, on the basis of one or two people....how exactly does this make it a legitimate idea?"
"And, when the vast majority of life scientists out there make the flat statement that they have not done so, why are you so willing to ignore them?"
Because that's how all new ideas start, by ignoring the current paradigm for whatever reason and trying a different route.
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