[extropy-chat] Re: Intelligent Design and Irriducible Complexity

[Christian Weisgerber]

The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>      Actually this argument over ultimate cause also
> plagues evolutionary theory. Natural selection and
> mutation are obviously the forces that allow life
> forms to diverge and adapt to changing environments
> but they give no explanation for the origin of the
> "progenote" - the first life-form.

Every schoolbook (in this part of the world) will tell you about
replicators arising from an organic soup.  While this _is_ wild
handwaving, it is not implausible.

> Evolution shows how over time, one life-form can
> transform into another, it does not show how non-life
> can become life.

Mysticism alert!  There is no border between "life" and "non-life".
They're aspects of the same thing.  In fact, we don't have a rigid
definition of "life".

>      The alternative hypothesis to ID I call
> "will-independent stochastic process" (WISP) assumes
> that life on Earth is the result of a spontaneous
> random process with no aid from any intelligence that
> "willed" life to be here, which is what the
> evolutionists would have one believe. There are
> several lines of evidence that such an occurance would
> be a very rare event.
> 
>      1. It has not been witnessed by anyone in nature
> or in the laboratory.

Absence of proof does not equal proof of absence...

>      2. Louis Pasteur performed a series of
> experiments in the 19th century demonstrating that it
> does not occur at even the microbial level in anything
> close to modern earth conditions.

As it happens, we are very confident that early earth conditions
weren't anything close to modern earth conditions, which have been
extensively shaped by microbial life.

>      3. Considering our solar system as a statistical
> sample, a rough guess at the upper bound of the
> frequency of WISP-born life is about 1 planet with
> life in 9 or 1/9. 

Huh?  There is exactly one planet in the solar system which had
proto-earth conditions.  (An argument can be made that Mars was
sufficiently similar, but we don't really know, and in particular
the jury's still out on whether early Mars developed life.)

>      Now, let us assume complete ignorance on the
> matter. That is to say that we set the prior
> probabilities equal to one another 
> 
> 2. P(ID) = P(WISP) = 0.5

Wow, hold it there.  _Unknown_ probabilities are not the same as
equal likelihoods.  My not knowing that the coin is biased will not
influence the actual probabilities of the outcome of the throw.

>      We can now use our dataset of a solar system of
> nine planets only one of which harbors life that we
> know of to estimate our posterior probability that
> life on Earth was intelligently designed. Since WISP
> would be a physical process it should operate anywhere
> the conditions are correct. Because of this
> probability of life on a planet in our solar system
> has is approximately 1/9. That is P(L|WISP) ~ 1/9. 

Except that the other planets (and moons, which you neglected) did
not offer the "correct" conditions, i.e. proto-earth ones, so you
can't deduce anything about the likelihood of WISP.  The only sample
is Earth itself.

> So put that into your skeptic pipe and smoke it.

You are arbitrarily assigning three probabilities.
That's the GIGO principle at work.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de