Saturday, November 26, 2011

Eric Alm: It’s A Plausible Idea

plau•si•ble  /’plôzəbəl/
1. (of an argument or statement) Seeming reasonable or probable.
2. (of a person) Skilled at producing persuasive arguments, esp. ones intended to deceive.

When one thinks of MIT one thinks of engineering and hard sciences. No nonsense academia that doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But now MIT Professor Eric Alm tells us that the spontaneous generation of a super progenitor is “plausible.” That’s an interesting choice of words because, in fact, that is precisely what evolution is not and it is difficult to imagine how Alm could have arrived at such a strange conclusion.

As we have discussed before, whereas Darwin absurdly hoped that cells could develop in a warm little pond somewhere, science had other things to say. Not only is the spontaneous generation of cellular life not plausible, so is the subsequent evolution of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

Contra evolution, what science has been indicating for decades is that any such evolutionary LUCA would have had to have been a super progenitor. If evolution is true, then this ancient progenitor of all life must have been extremely complex. As one evolutionist admitted:

We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was.

That wins the understatement of the year award. Here is how one article describes the origin of the LUCA:

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It's hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

Unfortunately science will always be vulnerable to such pseudo science. This is because science deals not only with what we do understand, but with what we do not understand as well. Science is constantly exploring and adding to our knowledge, but such explorations take it beyond the realm of the known, and into the realm of the unknown. This will always make it vulnerable to the charlatan.

And so it with sadness that we report that such academic chicanery has infected the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The evolution of the LUCA is, of course, not plausible. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and scientists are well aware of this.

We need not get philosophical about the concept of plausibility. We all know what it means. A hypothesis is plausible if it is reasonable or probable. A LUCA may have evolved, or a LUCA may not have evolved. But such an event is certainly not plausible according to our current scientific knowledge. We can argue about what happened long ago, but the state of our knowledge and its implications for the evolutionary narrative are quite clear. Which brings us to the second definition of “plausible” that unfortunately is also relevent to evolution.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

25 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. That's odd. I can't find any quotes where the term "spontaneous generation" was actually used by anyone except for Cornelius in his commentary. It seems implausible that a biologist would make such a blatant mistake about a theory that is so central to his field.

    Oh wait. Cornelius commenting on a recent hypothesis for biogenesis. And this particular hypothesis conflicts with fundamental interpretations of the Christian Bible. Furthermore, Cornelius regularly misrepresents positions that conflict with his Christian theological beliefs.

    So, what we observe is plausible after all.

    Wait. What just happened?

    At first, observations of the article's contents were implausible. But, suddenly, these very same observations became plausible. However, our observations of the contents of the article did not change. How could we explain such a complete about face in plausibility?

    It would seem that whether an idea is plausible or not isn't based on mere observations alone, but the details of the explanatory framework by which we use to extrapolate those observations.

    What are the implications of this?

    If someone want to attack a theory they personally find objectionable, they could disingenuously misrepresent the underling framework that theory presented. They could also smuggle in aspects of some other explanatory framework, while at the same time refusing to disclose them, even when directly asked to do so repeatedly.

    Furthermore, should someone lack a firm grasp of science, they might even be completely unaware of this deception and end up reaching a false conclusion as to whether a particular theory is implausible or not.

    Hum… I seem to recall this would be quite revenant to something I read recently, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I wonder what that might be?

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  3. Scott:

    That's odd. I can't find any quotes where the term "spontaneous generation" was actually used by anyone except for Cornelius in his commentary.

    If it wasn't spontaneous, how is it that LUCA is supposed to have arisen, according to evolutionists, and why is it "plausible"?

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  4. Scott: That's odd. I can't find any quotes where the term "spontaneous generation" was actually used by anyone except for Cornelius in his commentary.

    CH: If it wasn't spontaneous, how is it that LUCA is supposed to have arisen, according to evolutionists, and why is it "plausible"?

    Why do you think science isn't magic?

    Wait…You didn't expect me to actually answer your direct question, did you? It's just that, in the rare case that you actually respond, it usually consists of you asking some other question that is a misrepresentation of what I wrote. So, I figured that's what you expect to receive in return.

    No?

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  5. Scott:

    You didn't expect me to actually answer your direct question, did you?

    Well OK, I'll answer my question. It is spontaneous. Evolutionists believe that the evolutionary process is spontaneous. It happens, shall we say, "by itself." Evolutionists believe, for example, that the LUCA arose via the play of natural laws. Maybe so, but that clearly is not a fact as evolutionists claim, or probable, according to science.

    So what we need here is an honest representation of the scientific evidence. This need not be controversial, for the evidence isn't exactly ambiguous. Granted we'll always have the usual differences of opinion, but we're nowhere close to the spontaneous generation of the LUCA being probable, or to evolution being a fact, and so forth.

    I really think there is plenty of room for agreement and no need for controversy. But evolutionists won't be a part of it so long as they dogmatically mandate their extreme views.

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  6. Cornelius Hunter said...

    So what we need here is an honest representation of the scientific evidence.


    Something that we'll never get from you on this blog, that's for sure.

    Here is the NewScientist article, your link is broken:

    Life began with a planetary mega-organism

    Here is the whole piece you quote mined

    "It's a plausible idea," agrees Eric Alm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he says he "honestly can't tell" if it is true.

    Why did you chop off the last bit there CH?

    There's nothing in the article about 'spontaneous generation', or LUCA being a fact, or even probable.

    I suppose it wouldn't be a CH post without your standard equivocation over the observed fact of evolution vs. the theory of evolution that explains the observed fact. How many years have you been flogging that sad little canard?

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  7. Thorton you must be real sad and lonely after having your last sock puppet run off UD. The threads over there are so much better once they clean house. Still plenty of people arguing for darwin and LUCA. But they are smart mature people who can have a conversation.

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  8. CH: It is spontaneous. Evolutionists believe that the evolutionary process is spontaneous. It happens, shall we say, "by itself."

    That's odd. Now, you've left out the "generation" from the phrase "spontaneous generation" in your OP, which leaves us with the term "spontaneous".

    When used alone, "spontaneous" is also used to describe things such as applause, Yet it seems unlikely you think spontaneous applause is remotely the same as Aristotle's theory of life appearing from decaying organic substances.

    The fundamentally flaw in Aristotle's theory was the assumption that knowledge of how to build each species was already present in the decay of specific corresponding organic substances. However, we now know the knowledge of how to build a mouse is not found in dirty hey. Nor is the knowledge of how to build a crocodile is not found in rotting logs. Rather, this knowledge is found in the genome of each species.

    Lamarckism suffered from the same problem: How was the knowledge of how to adapt or build a species created? We lack an explanation as to how neck stretching generates the knowledge of how to build longer necks, etc. This is yet another form of spontaneous generation.

    Fundamentally, the problem in both cases is unexplained knowledge.

    So, exactly what do you mean here? From what I can gather, your use of the term "spontaneously generation" refers to something being created in the absence of an intelligent agent that exhibits intent. But this too has the same fundamental flaw.

    For example, despite being an intelligent agent that exhibits intent, magicians cannot perform a magic trick without the knowledge of how that trick is performed. If they did, it would no longer be a magic trick, but actually magic. The rabbit being pulled out of the magician's hat would have been spontaneously generated, as the magician lacks the knowledge of how to create rabbits out of thin air. This is the same as mice being generated out of dirty hey. In both cases, the knowledge of how to build that species is not present in the first place.

    So, any claim that suggests all you need is an intelligent agent that exhibits intent, Without the necessary knowledge, is a claim of spontaneous generation, or a claim of "magic."

    Furthermore, an intelligent agent that "just was" complete with the knowledge of how to build each spices, already present, serves no explanatory purpose. This is because one could more simply state that each species "just appeared", complete with this knowledge already present in it's DNA. All you've done is push the problem into some unexplainable mind the exists in some unexplainable realm.

    We're yet again left with the problem of unexplained knowledge.

    I'd also point out that evolution isn't biogenesis, so it's unclear why an "evolutionist's" explanation would be relevant here.

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  9. Thorton:

    There's nothing in the article about 'spontaneous generation', or LUCA being a fact, or even probable.

    Nothing in the article about LUCA being probable? Unfortunately this is typical. Evolutionists make silly claims and when questioned they suddenly never said any such thing. In this case Alm said that the super progenitor is "plausible." That means probable. Pick whatever number you like, 0.5 probability, 0.3, 0.1 -- it is a blatant misrepresentation of science.

    In order for the spontaneous generation of such a super progenitor to be plausible we would need scientific justification--an explanation demonstrating such probabilities. Of course we have no such thing.

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  10. Scott:

    When used alone, "spontaneous" is also used to describe things such as applause,

    Sure, that is a colloquial usage. But in science the meaning of "spontaneous" is very different. A system moves to a new state "spontaneously" if there are no external inputs. For instance, a chemical reaction that lowers the free energy will occur "spontaneously".

    Yet it seems unlikely you think spontaneous applause is remotely the same as Aristotle's theory of life appearing from decaying organic substances.

    We're talking about evolution, not Aristotelianism. Evolution is one long theory of spontaneous generation. All of biology just happened to arise all by itself.


    The fundamentally flaw in Aristotle's theory was the assumption that knowledge of how to build each species was already present in the decay of specific corresponding organic substances.

    If that is a flaw with Aristotle then it is also a flaw with evolution. Just replace "substances" with "the world."

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  11. Cornelius Hunter said...

    In this case Alm said that the super progenitor is "plausible." That means probable.


    No CH, plausible does not mean probable. Plausible merely means reasonably possible.

    An example of usage:

    It's plausible Cornelius Hunter could suddenly start being honest about the evolutionary sciences on his blog, but given his track record it's certainly not probable.

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  12. Thorton:

    No CH, plausible does not mean probable. Plausible merely means reasonably possible.

    I was going by the definition of the word (given in the OP). But no matter, it makes no difference with your definition. You see, whether we take the professor's words to mean "probable" or "reasonably possible," or any other hair-splitting version, it is a blatant misrepresentation of science.

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  13. Cornelius Hunter said...

    You see, whether we take the professor's words to mean "probable" or "reasonably possible," or any other hair-splitting version, it is a blatant misrepresentation of science.


    No CH, a real blatant misrepresentation of science is when someone deliberately and dishonestly equivocates over the observed fact of evolution, and the theory of evolution which explains the observed fact.

    A real blatant misrepresentation of science is when the person keeps making the same disingenuous claim despite being corrected on the falsehood dozens of times over the years.

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  14. badwiring said...

    Thorton you must be real sad and lonely after having your last sock puppet run off UD. The threads over there are so much better once they clean house. Still plenty of people arguing for darwin and LUCA. But they are smart mature people who can have a conversation


    Sorry BW, but I haven't posted at UncommonlyDense in years. Everyone with the slightest bit of scientific acumen gets banned as soon as they start making the IDiots look bad. CH here isn't the most upright of blog owners, but at least he's honest enough to let dissenting views be published without censorship and banning.

    I do occasionally lurk at UD to see the cage of IDiots trying to race each other to the bottom of the stupid barrel however. From Joe G threatening to beat people up, to Kariosflatus giving people 24 hours to agree with him or be banned, to GilDo whining about what a terrible atheist person he was before he saw the light, to Nutjob77 posting his religious music, it's quite the circus. The biggest fool of them all has to be the egotistical clod Scott Andrews. The guy is completely ignorant on all things scientific and refuses to read or research anything before mouthing off. His only input is to blindly repeat "THERE'S NO EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION" despite the the mounds of technical data that are placed right under his nose, papers he refuses to even look at.

    It's amazing that clowns like those can survive in the real world for more than a week.

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  15. Thorton:

    No CH, a real blatant misrepresentation of science is when someone deliberately and dishonestly equivocates over the observed fact of evolution, and the theory of evolution which explains the observed fact.

    A real blatant misrepresentation of science is when the person keeps making the same disingenuous claim despite being corrected on the falsehood dozens of times over the years.


    Let's say we choose 0.1 probability as our definition of "plausible." That is, if event X has a probability of 0.1, then it is "plausible." This seems generous enough.

    So when Professor Alm tells the public that the evolution of a super progenitor is "plausible," that means it has a probability of at least 0.1.

    Here's the problem. There is no scientific justification or demonstration for such a probability.

    In fact, it is quite the opposite. Granted precise numbers are hard to come by, but what we are learning from science is that the evolution of such a super progenitor would be astronomically unlikely. So to say it is "plausible" is not just slightly off the mark. We're not arguing about 0.1 versus 0.2 here. This is a massive misrepresentation of science.

    Now this all may change tomorrow. Future findings may show the evolution of such a marvel is indeed plausible. But for now, that is neither here nor there.

    When we represent science to the general public, we need to present what we know from science at the current time, not what our hoped for results are.

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  16. Cornelius Hunter said...

    Here's the problem. There is no scientific justification or demonstration for such a probability.


    The whole article is an outline of the protein and enzyme research that demonstrated the feasibility of the idea. Maybe you should reread it.

    In fact, it is quite the opposite. Granted precise numbers are hard to come by, but what we are learning from science is that the evolution of such a super progenitor would be astronomically unlikely.

    Ah, you mean the blatant misrepresentation of science where you continually misuse and misrepresent the meaning and results of the Hayashi and Dryden papers and repeat your silly "1 in 10^70 / 1 in 10^43" canard.

    Don't you think it's time Creationists gave the inane "life's too improbable!" hand wave a rest?

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  17. Hunter: "Let's say we choose 0.1 probability as our definition of "plausible." That is, if event X has a probability of 0.1, then it is "plausible." This seems generous enough."

    Plausibility does not entail sufficiently high probability. If you toss a coin 10 times, a combination HTTHHTTHHT is clearly plausible. However, its probability is less that one in a thousand. With a longer sequence, the probability gets progressively lower.

    Of course no one estimates plausibility of this sequence on the basis on its probability. Yet this is exactly what you, Cornelius, typically do on your blog. You assume that evolution is a random walk that must reach a specific target. That is of course nonsense.

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  18. Thorton:

    The whole article is an outline of the protein and enzyme research that demonstrated the feasibility of the idea. Maybe you should reread it.

    No, the work does nto demonstrate the feasibility of the evolution of a super progenitor. That would have been quite a feat. The work is a comparative study of protein sequence and structure, and assuming evolution is true it concludes that the LUCA must have been a super progenitor, contradicting yet another evolutionary expectation.

    Ah, you mean the blatant misrepresentation of science where ...

    Once again, the problem is that there is no scientific demonstration of the "plausibility" of the evolution of a super progenitor LUCA.

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  19. oleg:

    Plausibility does not entail sufficiently high probability. If you toss a coin 10 times, a combination HTTHHTTHHT is clearly plausible. However, its probability is less that one in a thousand. With a longer sequence, the probability gets progressively lower.

    Of course no one estimates plausibility of this sequence on the basis on its probability. Yet this is exactly what you, Cornelius, typically do on your blog. You assume that evolution is a random walk that must reach a specific target. That is of course nonsense.


    Nonsense? What is nonsense are coin toss analogies because in coin toss experiments we are in control. Use a more realistic analogy if you are interested in understanding the problem rather than reaching a preconceived conclusion. Take SETI for example. You analyze a signal to see if it is noise or some such versus a signal generated from a distant civilization. You analyze the signal and it spells out PI: 3.14159 ... to a hundred digits. Your graduate student thinks it is just noise. After all, plausibility does not entail sufficiently high probability, all signals are equiprobable, there are millions of important numbers like PI, blah, blah, blah.

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  20. Hunter: "What is nonsense are coin toss analogies because in coin toss experiments we are in control."

    What? We don't control the outcome of a coin toss. It's a random variable.

    And the SETI example is beside the point. Try again?

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  21. oleg:

    What? We don't control the outcome of a coin toss. It's a random variable.

    You control the experiment, not the outcome. Therefore you know the process. We're talking about problems where you don't know the process.

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  22. CH: Sure, that is a colloquial usage. But in science the meaning of "spontaneous" is very different.

    And "spontaneous generation" has a very specific meaning in the history of science, which is the term you used in your OP. Yet, for some reason, you omitted the term "generation" in your comment. Why is this?

    Last time I checked, when one attempts to subtly alter the meaning of a term mid argument, this is known as equivocation.

    CH: A system moves to a new state "spontaneously" if there are no external inputs. For instance, a chemical reaction that lowers the free energy will occur "spontaneously".

    You're merely moving from one misrepresentation to another. One which is quite commonly used by creationists, I might add. Input comes in the form of energy from the sun, which is part of the local thermodynamic system.

    With energy out of the equation, what lack of external input might you be referring to?

    Again, this seems to suggest your objection is a lack of external input from a intelligent being that exhibits intent. However, as I've already illustrated, mere intelligence and intent is not sufficient.

    CH: We're talking about evolution, not Aristotelianism. Evolution is one long theory of spontaneous generation. All of biology just happened to arise all by itself.

    The subject of the article is abiogenesis, which is a separate field from evolution. As a biologist, this should be entry level material.

    Furthermore, evolution does provide an explanation for the creation of knowledge as found in the genome. Genetic variation and natural selection. So, It's not spontaneous generation, as described by Aristotle or Lamarck.

    Scott: The fundamentally flaw in Aristotle's theory was the assumption that knowledge of how to build each species was already present in the decay of specific corresponding organic substances.

    CH: If that is a flaw with Aristotle then it is also a flaw with evolution. Just replace "substances" with "the world."

    First, I'm refereeing to Aristotle's theory, not Aristotle himself. Why do you continually misrepresent what I write?

    Second, I'd again point out that evolutionary theory does NOT assume that the knowledge of how to build each species was always present or that organisms were generated spontaneously in the absence of said knowledge. Rather, the knowledge of how to build subsequent species was created by genetic variation and natural selection.

    For example, if the knowledge of how to create all organisms already existed, we'd lack an explanation as to why they appear from the least complex to the most over several billion years of years, with significantly more complex life appearing only towards the 500 million years. That's what the designer must have wanted is a bad expansion for reasons I've illustrated elsewhere. On the other hand, you cannot create something until you've created to knowledge to do so. As such, evolutionary theory does provide an explanation for these observations.

    Again, It's unclear how you've concluded a theory has been falsified when you continually misrepresent it.

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  23. CH: We need not get philosophical about the concept of plausibility. We all know what it means.

    We do? And do we all agree what role plausibility plays in justifying conclusions?

    What we prefer is the least probable theory that has yet to be falsified. Specifically, the theory with the highest explanatory content and is most open to future falsification.

    From the Wikipedia entry on Critical Rationalism….

    Critical rationalists hold that scientific theories, and any other claims to knowledge, can and should be rationally criticized, and (if they have empirical content) can and should be subjected to tests which may falsify them. Thus claims to knowledge may be contrastively, normatively evaluated. They are either falsifiable and thus empirical (in a very broad sense), or not falsifiable and thus non-empirical. Those claims to knowledge that are potentially falsifiable can then be admitted to the body of empirical science, and then further differentiated according to whether they are (so far) retained or indeed are actually falsified. If retained, yet further differentiation may be made on the basis of how much subjection to criticism they have received, how severe such criticism has been, and how probable the theory is, with the least[1] probable theory that still withstands attempts to falsify it being the one to be preferred. (The least probable theory is the one with the highest information content and most open to future falsification.)

    But we can be even more specific than this. What we prefer are long chains of hard to vary explanations.

    Also...

    … this contrastive, critical approach to objective knowledge is quite different from more traditional views that also hold knowledge to be objective. (These include the strong rationalism of the Enlightenment, the verificationism of the logical positivists, or approaches to science based on induction, a supposed form of logical inference which critical rationalists reject, in line with David Hume.) For criticism is all that can be done when attempting to differentiate claims to knowledge, according to the critical rationalist. Reason is the organon of criticism, not of support; of tentative refutation, not of proof.

    Of course, if you'd like to enlighten us how it's possible to go beyond criticism, then be my guest. However, this would require a solution to the problem of induction, which is a question I've directly asked you multiple times without a response.

    Let me guess. you solve the problem by placing divine revelation above the traditional hierarchy of deduction, induction and philosophy?

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  24. In order for the spontaneous generation and/or existence of a supernatural progenitor god to be plausible, probable, or even possible we would need scientific justification--an explanation and evidence demonstrating such plausibilities, probabilities, or possibilities. Of course we have no such thing.

    When we represent science to the general public, we need to present what we know from science at the current time, not what your hoped for results are.

    ftfy

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  25. Speaking of prior metaphysical commitments, there certainly seems to be a political subtext here, with the biologists rejoicing in the competition-free state of primordial genetic socialism. Not that that in itself makes the theory wrong, of course.

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