By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 01 December 2005
06:37 am ET
Posted on 12/02/2005 8:35:59 AM PST by ckilmer
| SETI and Intelligent Design By Seth Shostak SETI Institute posted: 01 December 2005 06:37 am ET |
If you’re an inveterate tube-o-phile, you may remember the episode of "Cheers" in which Cliff, the postman who’s stayed by neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night from his appointed rounds of beer, exclaims to Norm that he’s found a potato that looks like Richard Nixon’s head.
This could be an astonishing attempt by taters to express their political views, but Norm is unimpressed. Finding evidence of complexity (the Nixon physiognomy) in a natural setting (the spud), and inferring some deliberate, magical mechanism behind it all, would be a leap from the doubtful to the divine, and in this case, Norm feels, unwarranted.
Cliff, however, would have some sympathizers among the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID), whose efforts to influence school science curricula continue to swill large quantities of newspaper ink. As just about everyone is aware, these folks use similar logic to infer a "designer" behind such biological constructions as DNA or the human eye. The apparent complexity of the product is offered as proof of deliberate blueprinting by an unknown creator—conscious action, presumably from outside the universe itself.
What many readers will not know is that SETI research has been offered up in support of Intelligent Design.
The way this happens is as follows. When ID advocates posit that DNA—which is a complicated, molecular blueprint—is solid evidence for a designer, most scientists are unconvinced. They counter that the structure of this biological building block is the result of self-organization via evolution, and not a proof of deliberate engineering. DNA, the researchers will protest, is no more a consciously constructed system than Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Organized complexity, in other words, is not enough to infer design.
But the adherents of Intelligent Design protest the protest. They point to SETI and say, "upon receiving a complex radio signal from space, SETI researchers will claim it as proof that intelligent life resides in the neighborhood of a distant star. Thus, isn’t their search completely analogous to our own line of reasoning—a clear case of complexity implying intelligence and deliberate design?" And SETI, they would note, enjoys widespread scientific acceptance.
If we as SETI researchers admit this is so, it sounds as if we’re guilty of promoting a logical double standard. If the ID folks aren’t allowed to claim intelligent design when pointing to DNA, how can we hope to claim intelligent design on the basis of a complex radio signal? It’s true that SETI is well regarded by the scientific community, but is that simply because we don’t suggest that the voice behind the microphone could be God?
Simple Signals
In fact, the signals actually sought by today’s SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. We’re not looking for intricately coded messages, mathematical series, or even the aliens’ version of "I Love Lucy." Our instruments are largely insensitive to the modulation—or message—that might be conveyed by an extraterrestrial broadcast. A SETI radio signal of the type we could actually find would be a persistent, narrow-band whistle. Such a simple phenomenon appears to lack just about any degree of structure, although if it originates on a planet, we should see periodic Doppler effects as the world bearing the transmitter rotates and orbits.
And yet we still advertise that, were we to find such a signal, we could reasonably conclude that there was intelligence behind it. It sounds as if this strengthens the argument made by the ID proponents. Our sought-after signal is hardly complex, and yet we’re still going to say that we’ve found extraterrestrials. If we can get away with that, why can’t they?
Well, it’s because the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal – a dead simple tone – is not complex; it’s artificial. Such a tone just doesn’t seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add – for example, DNA’s junk and redundancy.
Consider pulsars – stellar objects that flash light and radio waves into space with impressive regularity. Pulsars were briefly tagged with the moniker LGM (Little Green Men) upon their discovery in 1967. Of course, these little men didn’t have much to say. Regular pulses don’t convey any information—no more than the ticking of a clock. But the real kicker is something else: inefficiency. Pulsars flash over the entire spectrum. No matter where you tune your radio telescope, the pulsar can be heard. That’s bad design, because if the pulses were intended to convey some sort of message, it would be enormously more efficient (in terms of energy costs) to confine the signal to a very narrow band. Even the most efficient natural radio emitters, interstellar clouds of gas known as masers, are profligate. Their steady signals splash over hundreds of times more radio band than the type of transmissions sought by SETI.
Imagine bright reflections of the Sun flashing off Lake Victoria, and seen from great distance. These would be similar to pulsar signals: highly regular (once ever 24 hours), and visible in preferred directions, but occupying a wide chunk of the optical spectrum. It’s not a very good hailing-signal or communications device. Lightning bolts are another example. They produce pulses of both light and radio, but the broadcast extends over just about the whole electromagnetic spectrum. That sort of bad engineering is easily recognized and laid at nature’s door. Nature, for its part, seems unoffended.
Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated. They also resemble lots of other things that may be either contemporaries or historical precedents.
So that’s one point: the signals SETI seeks are really not like other examples drawn from the bestiary of complex astrophysical phenomena. That speaks to their artificiality.
The Importance of Setting
There’s another hallmark of artificiality we consider in SETI, and it’s context. Where is the signal found? Our searches often concentrate on nearby Sun-like star systems – the very type of astronomical locale we believe most likely to harbor Earth-size planets awash in liquid water. That’s where we hope to find a signal. The physics of solar systems is that of hot plasmas (stars), cool hydrocarbon gasses (big planets), and cold rock (small planets). These do not produce, so far as we can either theorize or observe, monochromatic radio signals belched into space with powers of ten billion watts or more—the type of signal we look for in SETI experiments. It’s hard to imagine how they would do this, and observations confirm that it just doesn’t seem to be their thing.
Context is important, crucially important. Imagine that we should espy a giant, green square in one of these neighboring solar systems. That would surely meet our criteria for artificiality. But a square is not overly complex. Only in the context of finding it in someone’s solar system does its minimum complexity become indicative of intelligence.
In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors. It is the context of the cave that makes this assumption far more likely then an alternative scenario in which I assume that the random grinding and splitting of rock has resulted in this useful geometry.
In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.
I confess to not knowing exactly what that might mean. I'm OK, at this point, with "lack of predetermined purpose, plan or pattern."
Oh yeah. Or "predictability" now as well.
If you change the ratios between the physical constants of gravity, electomagnetism, the weak and strong forces, you get situations where nuclei greater than helium aren't stable, etc.
That's what I mean - the basic properties and relationships of elementary particles.
YEC INTREP
Cheez, I was just trying to figure out the male/female brain thing and now you're making me think! ;)
For the record, I'm not specifically an advocate of Behe, Dembski, or the Discovery Institute and will happily acknowledge that plenty of what passes for "Creation Science" isn't. That said, I think that the core idea that we can differentiate the created from the natural is science and is a legitimately scientific way to approach the question of whether life is natural or created, even if a particular line of reasoning or study fails to be fully scientific. I think that's the mistake a lot of ID critics are making here. They are attacking specific and often questionable ID claims rather than the core point, which is entirely valid. If life weren't natural, how might we figure that out? And just as we learn things about natural electromagnetic signals via SETI, we can learn about natural evolution via ID. Don't you find it useful for evolutionists to propose natural explanations for complex biological features in response to ID challenges?
I understand your distinction but the only reason why SETI investigators are looking for "designed emissions" rather than the "incidental emissions of designed things" is that they expect them to be more distinct. Going back to your example from Blade Runner, it's like looking for a serial number on the scale of a snake. It's the low hanging fruit that's easy to differentiate.
But failing to find designed emissions, there is no reason why SETI couldn't look for incidental emissions from created things, where they can be differentiated from natural emissions. If SETI can't find the walkie-talkie or TV transmissions, could they start looking for the parts of a vacuum cleaner's emissions that are distinctive as opposed to a natural source, much as those Fermilab researches can pick a few top quarks out of the background noise? I think they could.
SETI is still looking for the serial number on the snake scale to prove intelligence, despite not having found any. It's pretty clear that ID has moved past the serial number phase, not finding any, and has moved into the realm of picking out a top quark or vacuum cleaner buzz from the background noise. SETI is looking for a needle on a white sheet. ID didn't find their needle on a white sheet so they've moved on to looking in the haystack.
If SETI fails to find it's needle on a white sheet or it's serial number on a snake scale, should it abandon the search to find ET intelligence? Would it be irrational for them to shift to looking for more subtle clues such as possible incidental emissions of technology in the absence of more obvious evidence? Would it still be science? I think it would be, and what it would share with ID is a belief, without any hard evidence, that something is out there worth looking for. A fool's errand? Maybe. Irrational or unscientific? I don't think so.
You said it, right there. The ID proponents are looking for such an effect. But the entire claim of the ID sales force is that such an effect manifestly exists, and they are proposing ID as a candidate explanation! They couch it in terms of "here we have a mystery...oh, look! an explanation!", when in reality it's an age-old supposition in search of some type of evidence that might someday lend it credence. ID has no phenomena, no way to distinguish such phenomena, and gives no reason to expect that such phenomena exist.
I think that, ultimately, both SETI and ID are driven by the same thing -- a gut assessment of odds with respect to a situation with a lot of undefined variables. In the case of SETI, it's the Drake Equation. A lot of the variables are guesses but given certain guesses, it seems highly probable that ET intelligence exists (depite the Fermi Paradox) thus they are looking at it. In the case of ID, it's developing an assessment that chance mutations and natural selection and so on could produce the complexity we see in human beings. In many cases, this is probably colored by a personal experience of God or the divine. But in both cases, the default assumtion depends on one being an optimist or a pessimist, not on any particular evidence. It's a matter of speculation and faith that both God or ET intelligence exists, not evidence. And in the case of ID, at least some ID critics seem to cite this problem as a reason to call ID "not science".
Don't keep on insisting that SETI is the same thing, though. It's different on two key counts. First, SETI has unambiguous examples of both designed and natural signals. Both definitely exist in the universe. By contrast, ID--proposed as an explanation of the origin of life--only has one sort of life to ponder, and it's either all designed, or all natural (except for a growing handful of uninstructive exceptions, easily identified by their patents).
To start with your characterizatoin of ID, outside of Biblical literalists, there are certainly people who believe that life could be a combination of evolution and creation (i.e., "guided evolution"). There are also those who believe that God set the universe in motion from a beginning point with a specific end point in mind, much as we might launch a ballistic projectile at a specific target, confident that it will reach a certain destination even though we exert no control after the launch. My point is that I think the range of opinions about the hand of God in the creation of humans is much broader than it's being characterized as by ID critics. Just because some of the noisiest ID proponents may be loons does not mean that those are the only opinions on the subject. As for your other point...
SETI has potentially unambiguous examples of both designed and natural signals. It would be difficult to argue that their sample size isn't limited and not exhaustive. That known created signals and known natural signals behave in certain ways does not mean that any or all such signals will be created or natural if detected. How such a signal is interpreted will depend on whether one starts out as a skeptic or true believer, a point made pretty strongly in the Contact movie.
ID proposes that if we can find a complex system that can't be explained via gradual evolution because the component parts have no reason to evolve unless all of the components are present, we should consider that evidence of God. SETI proposes that if we find a narrow band EM emission that has no natural explanation, we should consider that evidence of ET intelligence. The ID skeptic assumes that we simply haven't figure out the evolutionary precursors yet. The SETI skeptic assumes that we simply haven't figured out how such a signal could be naturally produced yet. If naturalistic skepticism is demanded of both ID and SETI, both will fail because, ultimately, naturalistic skepticism is asking both to prove a negative -- that the observed "evidence" has no natural explanation.
Second, SETI has a quantitative, testable method of separating the natural from the designed. ID has only subjectivity: "this looks designed to me" and "I don't see how this could have happened naturally" and finally "OK, it could have happened in one of those several ways, but you can't prove that it actually did, and besides, here's this other thing I don't understand..."
This is another example of a favorable characterization and a straw man. SETI doesn't really have a quantitative, testable method of separating the natural from the designed. It has a quantitative, testable method of separating narrow band signals from broad band signals. What they don't have is a way of proving that narrow band signals are created and not natural if one applies the same sort of natural cause skepticism that ID critics apply to ID. Even if SETI finds a narrow-band transmission, it doesn't prove ET intelligence. It simply proves that they've found a narrow band transmission. And why is SETI even looking for ET intelligence? Because their gut assessment of the odds suggests to them that ET intelligence is probable.
In fact, SETI, just like ID, does say the same sorts of subjective things when they say, "I don't believe we are alone in the universe" or "the universe is so big that intelligenct life must have evolved elsewhere". Ultimately this does tie back to the evolution vs. creation debate because the belief that life is a lucky coincidence on Earth makes one assess the odds of such a lucky coincidence having happened as being high enough to have happened elsewhere while the belief that life on Earth isn't a lucky coincidence doesn't oblige someone to believe such a lucky coincidence had to happen anywhere else. When SETI advocates toss out the Drake equation, they are doing the exact same thing that ID advocates are doing when they point to complexity. They are looking at an big equation with a lot of unknown variables and saying "Look at the odds!" That's the only evidence that either one has.
One of the great success stories of science. When the only evidence was "the continents look like they fit together", it was ignored. When the hard evidence came in, it was embraced. It would have been irresponsible to embrace it any sooner than it was. I say the same thing about ID that I say about free energy schemes: get back to me after you make it work.
The problem is that the skepticism not only produced the wrong answer before all the facts where known but it also made people unreasonably skeptical of the correct answer long after they should have been persuaded. My point was that skepticism doesn't always produce the right answer, nor does Occam's Razor. They may be decent default positions but they are often wrong. And ultimately it's the dreamers and those who pose challenges to the established scientific orthodoxy that find the truth. And even when such dreamers and challengers fail, we inevitably learn more about the established theories in the process.
The entire impetus behind ID is that the designer's hand is so obvious, one must willfully avert his gaze not to see it. But no matter: if the designer truly is a deity (as essentially all ID marketeers believe) AND he wishes his seams not to be visible, we don't have a prayer of ever finding them.
And that's certainly a fair criticism. But there are other alternatives between "God wants you to find Him" and "God doesn't want to be found." Among them are "God want's people to struggle to find Him." There is also a matter of default assumptions at work here.
And if the aliens are really tech-savvy and intent on hiding, we won't ever find them, either.
Not everyone who doesn't want to be found can't be found. And, yes, I know that raises all sorts of thorny theological issues with respect to ID even though it should be fairly obvious with respect to SETI.
First thing, SETI is privately funded. Secondly, in projects like the Kepler Mission and others, SETI has made great strides in astronomy (infrared, radio, etc.) discovering and aiding understanding cosmic structures and finding other planets.
First thing, let me say thanks for your posts. They're a breath of fresh air. Philosophically, I would disagree that the Lord wants to remain ambiguous. It is just that science isn't going to reveal the Creator's purpose. To be clear, the fool's errand is to try to use science when the search for the Creator's purpose involves intangibles such as faith. I'm not saying looking for meaning is a fool's errand, and I'm not saying that proving to one's self that the Creator exists is a fool's errand. It is just that science is the *wrong tool* for the job.
Hypothesis - life exists on one planet thus it may exist on another.
Support - An advanced technological life form exists on Earth, preliminary data requiring more research indicates the possibility that life has or does exist on other planets (Mars, Jupiter and Saturn moons - Titan, Io, Europa, certain meteorites) Study aims - if life exists on another planet and has advanced to a broadcasting technology, it may broadcast signals in a type similar to Earth - powerful, narrow band transmissions that DO NOT exist in nature. Therefore, scanning frequencies may produce a record of such signals.
Second, why do they think it's possible to distinguish evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence from natural signals?
As stated in the article and explicitly at the SETI site, the requirements for artificial signals are specific to narrow band, high energy signals that do not occur in nature.
Third, would finding such a signal really prove the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence?
It would give evidence to an artificial signal source. That would support the hypothesis.
Fourth, why do they choose to look for certain specific types of evidence for extra-terrestrial life?
It's called science - you make a specific prediction and a use very specific conditions for experimentation and data. Otherwise, it becomes unsubstantiated anything goes wishful thinking - like ID.
This is very similar to ID proponents looking at life and finding it improbable that evolution alone can explain everything that we see.
Wrong - as another poster stated, it's like painting a bullseye and firing a bullet at it (scientific research) and firing a bullet and then painting a bullseye around it.
The third answer is that it wouldn't "prove" anything to scientific skeptic. Any signal of the sort being mentioned here could always be the product of some unexplained natural process
It could, which is why there are other projects that take possible artificial signals and do further study. That;s another major difference between science and ID - critical study.
The ID advocates are looking for biological features that are "not natural".
Absolutely wrong - ID assumes that naturally occurring structures are too complex to be natural simply because they are complex. SETI at least compares known artificial signals to natural ones and makes distinction on verifiable and repeatable studies - ID can not claim that. If supporters do - they lie.
So why does SETI get considered science and ID doesn't? Because while SETI involves faith and/or wishful thinking, it doesn't involve God.
No, because SETI uses scientific method. ID does not.
What ID claims is that there are types of complexity that can't be explained naturally.
Every claim by ID can and has been explained by natural causes.ID supporters refuse to acknowledge the mountains of evidence provided by molecular biology, organic chemistry, and physics. Nature continually produces complex forms through the interaction of many natural laws.
Whether it's a search for simplicity or complexity is irrelevant and a red herring.
Not if the "search for simplicity" has explicit requirements formulated before the experiment and before any conclusions are made. ID fails utterly in that the conclusion is made first and the search is non-specific and changing - completely failing any objectivity or reproducibility.
Would that be a fair assessment of SETI in your opinion?
Absolutely not - as stated in many posts and articles, SETI uses the scientific method. ID does not - it has nothing of science to it. It paints a bullseye around it's conclusion. It uses a fallacious method and a fallacious non-conclusion.
They are not produced in "just the correct quantities." Sometimes too much is produced and others, not enough. There is a feedback system of controlling the amount of enzymes and another on their activity that modulates activity within an oscillating range of function. There is no steady state.
Evolution would require that magically just the right mix of proteins and enzymes had to wait to be found in the same location before this could produce energy so it could reproduce. The chances of that happening are so extremely small as to be non existant. The universe hasn't been here long enough for such a remote occurance to have happened in a random fashion
Thinking like this results from a lack of knowledge and a lack of perspective. There are many versions of the cycle existing in nature. Many are not as efficient. This article is one of many investigating the origin of the Krebs cycle. Important is the statement:
Our analysis demonstrates that although there are several different chemical solutions to this problem, the design of this metabolic pathway as it occurs in living cells is the best chemical solution: It has the least possible number of steps and it also has the greatest ATP yielding. Study of the evolutionary possibilities of each one-taking the available material to build new pathways-demonstrates that the emergence of the Krebs cycle has been a typical case of opportunism in molecular evolution. Our analysis proves, therefore, that the role of opportunism in evolution has converted a problem of several possible chemical solutions into a single-solution problem, with the actual Krebs cycle demonstrated to be the best possible chemical design.
Many solutions to the production of ATP (energy for the cell) have been tried and are tried by various organisms. The Krebs cycle is prevalent as it provided an evolutionary advantage in efficiency over others. Key point - many solutions to the problem arose. Krebs isn't even the best - although it saved time by using existing mechanisms in protein production. Organisms using Krebs simply had enough of an advantage to reproduce and survive at a higher rate.
Do you find it odd, considering the brutal damage of the anti-science Dark Ages, that such a destructive fanaticism would arise again?
"Likewise, an English actuary can predict how many people will die during the next year, but not which ones; that would take a Sicilian actuary."
Very funny.
Don Corleone Inc.
General Insurance and Disposal.
Consider a sphere with a radius of about 80 light years. That would place many thousands of stars in such a sphere. We've been broadcasting for quite a while.
As detection became more sensitive and was combined with spectrographic analysis, reflections from small, rocky planets have been detected.
Cut and paste links for the latest:
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/large_rocky_planet.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/08/26/new.planet/
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104243&org=NSF&from=news
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1031
lol..hmmm...probably not.
Never? Big word.
There have been 1000-1400 candidate signals already found. However, those analyzed further have yet to meet the stringent requirements on reproducibility and verification.
Yet another reason why SETI is a scientific endeavor and ID fails utterly to any claim of science.
lol..no, the crop 'circles' post. (combine - a machine for harvesting crops from a large field - like a really big mower)
The square watermelons I've seen.
Did you have even a basic course in chemistry, molecular biology or organic chemistry, and physics?
If so, you would understand that the essential governing forces, bond formation, secondary and tertiary structure of compounds naturally resulted in the shape and structure of DNA.
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