Re: The status of ID and a personal reflection

On 3/7/2025 4:50 PM, Ernest Major wrote:

On 23/02/2025 21:52, MarkE wrote:

On 24/02/2025 6:10 am, Ernest Major wrote:

On 23/02/2025 11:43, MarkE wrote:

ID is described as "a pseudoscientific argument" on Wikipedia [1], there's clearly no love for it here, and as far as I know ID has limited recognition within mainstream science. The general public's awareness and support of ID I believe is higher but still constrained.
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ID has been accused of being a creationism Trojan Horse, and at times it seems to have pursued a political agenda, especially with education.  From to time to time, the Discovery Institute and Evolution News promote a misplaced right-wing perspective.

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In principle Intelligent Design could have been a legitimate scientific research program, albeit one that I would not expect to be productive. In practice it's a religiously motivated political movement.
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ID's studied agnosticism (when not addressing a friendly audience) about the identity and nature of the designer or designers is what makes it clear that it's not a scientific research program. A scientific research program would asking be who, what, why, when, where and how, or at the least how to investigate who, what, why, when, where and how.
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The aim of science is to explain (if you're a philosophical realist) or model (if you're a philosophical anti-realist) the world. By eschewing questions of who, what, when, why, where and how, what ID does is explain away observations, not explain them.

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Noooooooooooo. You're ignoring the asymmetry I describe below. With respect to a scientifically inferred designer, questions of who, what, when, why, where and how are the province of theology, philosophy, experience etc. In this context, science functions as a prompt and pointer to other epistemological domains.

 The Intelligent Design Movement didn't have to eschew questions about the identity and properties of the design; that was a deliberate choice made for political reasons.
 Arguably they've slipped up on occasion, and let their unstated assumptions leak into their arguments. They can't disprove evolution by the absence of junk DNA anymore than they can disprove evolution by its presence. I'm not old enough to remember the change, but as I understand the history the existence of DNA was rather a surprise; it had been naively assumed that natural selection would eliminate it. There remains a widespread reluctance to accept its existence among biologists; few would still defend an absolute panadaptationism, but panfunctionalism doesn't seem to have received the same critical scrutiny.

Where the populations are large enough with a high reproduction rate bacteria have been able to limit the amount of junk DNA.  They still have to deal with some transposable elements and provirus inserted into their genomes, but compared to eukaryotes they do a far better job at dealing with transposons and viral sequences in their genomes.  40% of the human genome was found to be due to interspersed repetitive elements (transposon sequences and retroviral sequences) by the old DNA hybridization tech, but this old technology could only match sequences with at least a 75% sequence similarity.  Probably at least an equal amount of genome sequence is ancient transposon sequence that has mutated to the extent that they no longer cross hybridize.  Birds have genomes only around 40%% the size of humans and have around the same number of functional genes, but they have a lot fewer transposon sequences.  They have been able to better control transposon numbers than mammals, and it may not be due to flight.  Dinos and other reptiles may have had genomes as small.  Fish like fugu have had the most luck at controling transposon sequences and have only a 0.4 Gb genome while humans with about the same number of genes has a 3.0 Gb genome.
The ENCODE conclusion about having 80% of the genome as functional sequence was stupid because they understood that they were counting transposon sequence that have their own transcriptional regulatory sequences, and transposons are mainly just DNA parasites.  Like any other mutation most of the time a transposon jumps to a new position in the genome not much happens to the organism, but sometimes something bad happens (a lot of the dominant spontaneous deleterious mutations identified in humans are due to transposons), and there can be rare occasions where something interesting might happen and the event is selected for.

 This leads me to suspect that the ID movements beliefs about the nature of the designer have led to their rejection of junk DNA, accidentally making a testable prediction in the process. By rejecting junk DNA they are implicitly assuming a designer that has the knowledge, capability and intent to produce organisms that lack wasteful features (at least this one). They may also be implicitly assuming recent design of organisms; otherwise what has prevented junk DNA accumulating since the organisms were created?
 

The ID perps could never make the prediction that a designer would not allow a lot of junk DNA because they have always acknowledged that their god could do anything.  Behe and Denton even believe that biological evolution is a fact of nature that their god either allowed to happen, or helped along by tweeking every once in a while.
Ron Okimoto