“Signature in the Cell” Tampa: Part 3
Throughout the evening, Stephen Meyer kept repeating that we only know of “specified information” occurring because of an intelligent agent acting. Then, because we only know one cause in the present for “specified information”, we should accept that as the cause of “specified information” in the past.
Besides the philosophical problems with rarefied design inferences, there is the rather more simple class of empirical counterexamples. To wit, Meyer has consistently ignored available evidence that is not in accord with his outlook. What designer, for example, must be posited as acting in any of the various cases of duplicated genes that diverge and where the copies now each yield different functional protein products? Meyer has been ignoring this despite notice in 2004 of this class of evidence.
Curious, has he also been parroting Gilder’s nonsense about the “message” being independent of the medium?
It occurred to me that the most glaring (lack of) evidence for Intelligent Design Theory is a relational map of life. Stephen Meyer, for example, often talks of different “body plans” that could not have naturally evolved and thus have no common ancestors. For want of a better term, ID theory implies a “corn field” model wherein rows of organisms stand unconnected to each other. Yet Meyer, Behe, et al. have never used ID to propose an intelligently designed map of life wherein irreducibly complex structures cleave branches off of the “Tree of Life”.
If ID is to have any scientific value (humor me for a moment) then it must be capable of predicting said organization with some meaningful specificity. Scientists should demand that ID theorists produce such a model. That is, make them put their balls on the table by either submitting an easily discredited model or admitting (in public) the incoherence of their theory.
I’ll be listening to the recording they’ve made available, so I’ll be on the lookout for that. I’d like to say yes offhand based on my attendance, but I’d like to confirm it in another listen.