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.
lol..are those faked pics or did somebody hve too much time on their hands and access to a combine?
It's possible, but you need a measure that will separate the natural from the designed. The SETI researchers have identified one reasonable measure: the narrowness of the band of an electromagnetic emission. This is predicated on the observation that the signals we use to communicate are far narrower, in frequency space, than any natural emission we know about.
(I guarantee you one thing, though: if and when a narrow electromagnetic emission of extraterrestrial origin is found, scientists will fall all over themselves proposing natural mechanisms for it. These will likely be testable, however.)
The ID proponents have proposed a different measure, relevant to their assertions: complexity. Natural things, they assert, are simple; designed things are complex. It is certainly a testable approach; the problem is that the measure fails miserably on the most cursory inspection. Bricks are obviously designed, but it is the simplicity of the brick that tells you that. Cars are more complex, but they really are simple compared to, say, a cloud, or a coastline. In fact, it's easy to come up with any number of manifestly natural things that are gigantically, stupefyingly, obscenely more complicated than the most sophisticated artifact.
(ID proponents at this point typically howl that the appropriate measure is not complexity, but "specified complexity". But the key to specified complexity is, ironically, that it is never rigorously specified, so it cannot be used as a measure.)
Thus, sampling by Leftist polling agencies would not normally meet strict scientific requirements since they would not follow strict procedures.
The mark of the Designer is in the design of the elementary particle physics that could be used to build a molecule like DNA. The fact that the elementary particles could even come together in such a way is support for a Designer.
Of course if things came together in some other way that would also be support for a designer. There is no way in which things could come together that could not be construed as support for a designer.
Ever notice seti is like all the rest of the government hacks. Spend tons of money and produce nothing.
OK, thanks, I see what you guys are saying now ;-)
A few points. First, why are they looking for extra-terrestrial intelligence without any evidence that such life exists? Second, why do they think it's possible to distinguish evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence from natural signals? Third, would finding such a signal really prove the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence? Fourth, why do they choose to look for certain specific types of evidence for extra-terrestrial life?
The first answer is that they look at the vast complexity of the universe and find it improbable, given their assessment of the odds, that human beings are alone as the only intelligent life in the universe. This is very similar to ID proponents looking at life and finding it improbable that evolution alone can explain everything that we see. In both cases, it's an opinion based on a probability assessment rather than any evidence at all. For the record, I look at the odds, even assumming that the universe works via entirely natural processes and think it's entirely possible that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. At the very least, I take a look at the Fermi Paradox and apply Occam's Razor. Perhaps that's the perspective that allows me to see just how much SETI is based on faith and belief rather than evidence and why I see so much similarity between the two.
The second answer is that they believe that purposefully created things exhibit characteristics different enough from randomly generated natural effects that the artificial or created can be sorted from the natural. This is the same assumption made by ID advocates -- that biological features purposefully created can be distinguished from those biological features created as a part of a natural process. At it's core, it's an assumption that the natural can be distinguished from the artificial or created because the purpose and intelligence behind it's creation distinguish it from natural phenomena.
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. Just as the evolutionist can dismiss any example of irreducable complexity by saying that we just haven't figured out how it evolved yet, the ET skeptic could claim that any simple ET signal is the product of some natural process that we haven't discovered yet. So in both cases, even if you find the evidence, it doesn't prove the case. It simply increases or decreases the odds.
The fourth answer is that the ET signals they are looking for are based on their own human assumptions about what they'd do if they were designing such a signal and, more importantly, based on what they know natural signals look like. They are looking for signals that look "not nautral". The ID advocates are looking for biological features that are "not natural". The SETI entusiast can't tell you for certain what an ET signal would look like just as the ID advocate can't tell you for certain what a created biological feature would look like. It's the same idea. We know what natural looks like and know what some artifical or created things look like so let's find things that look "not natural" or like other things that we know are created.
Feel free to correct me if any of the above answers are straw men in your opinion.
If I want to put a real skeptic's hat on, I'd say that both are matters of faith. And by the standards of many ID critics here, SETI certainly doesn't look any more like science. 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.
ID points to complexity alone as evidence for a claim of an "artifical" source of design plan. It ignores the evidence of chemical and physical laws producing a multitude of complex systems.
That's like saying that SETI points to the vastness of the universe, alone, for a claim that extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. In many ways, they are playing the exact same odds game from the other side. The ID advocates look at the complexity of life and get a gut feeling that natural processes, alone, can't explain it. As a result of their odds assessment that errs on the side of improbability, they also have no trouble believing that ET intelligence doesn't exist and SETI is silly. Evolutionists, on the other hand, look at the complexity of life and get a gut feeling that natural processes, alone, can explain it. As a result of their odds assessment that errs on the side of possibility, they also have no trouble believing that the same thing has happened all over the universe and that ET intelligence just must exist.
Both are positions of faith. Neither position is based on any hard evidence that what's being believed in actually exists. Both sides are playing the odds as they see them.
ID simply says it is complex thus it is artifical. Why? It's artificial because it is complex. That's not science - that's fallacious logic.
What I think that really is is a straw man. What ID claims is that there are types of complexity that can't be explained naturally. They cite not simply complexity but irreducable complexity, and that's important. Evolution suggests a process by which we get from there to here via evolutionary steps. The reason why ID looks for evidence in complexity is that a complex process that cannot be explained as resulting from evolutionary steps would be evidence for intelligent design. It's the flip side of what SETI people are doing. They see the random complexity of signals as being natural and thus see a pure and simple signal as signs of artificial intelligence. But in both cases, skeptics can site a natural process we just haven't discovered yet and, in both cases, it's fundamentally a matter of looking for something that wouldn't be explained by existing natural theories. Whether it's a search for simplicity or complexity is irrelevant and a red herring.
Reduced to the same sort of straw man, I could claim, "SETI simply says it is simple thus it is artificial. Why? It's artificial because it's simple. That's not science - that's fallacious logic." Would that be a fair assessment of SETI in your opinion?
"Random" and "un-planned" are two different concepts. An avalanche may be unplanned, but it is definitely not random -- the debris heads in pretty much the same direction. Throwing a die generates a random number, but the act of throwing it makes it "planned."
Well just as the planned throwing of the die produced a random number, so to could a random event have set off the avalanche, which would then follow a fairly specific pattern.
The difference is that SETI has a hypothesis, a set of assumptions about possible intelligent beings. It makes testable predictions.
ID has no such hypothesis and makes no predictions.
"Any worthwhile engineer could design a better system."
Be sure and let us know when one of your "worthwhile engineers" comes up with a better system. I'm getting along in years now and might need some improvement before too long:)
Can you explain how it has come to be that in a working Krebs cycle all of the necessary enzymes just happen to be being produced in just the correct quantities, yet if they are not there no energy is produced? How did that evolve? seems like to me the poor cell without the correct protein to produce the correct enzyme would just starve before it could reproduce. 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.
OK, so the sample would be random, but the mixture specific.
I do not remember anyone saying, nor even implying, they were. Patterns are found in nature all the time.
ID also makes advance predictions about the sort of as-yet-undetected biological features might reflect intelligent creation ratheer than natural origin (e.g., complex chemical processes that don't provide any benefit if even a single component isn't present would be unlikely to develop as a gradual process). SETI has made a number of guesses based on little or no evidence (e.g., the claim that the probability of intelligent life naturally evolving is high enough, and the number of suitable planets is large enough, that intelligent life must be out there somewhere).
The difference is equivalent to that between painting a target on a wall and shooting a bullet through the bulls-eye and shooting a bullet through a wall and painting a bulls-eye around the hole.
In both cases, we have people trying to paint a target around a wall they can't see or prove exists. In the case of ID, they are trying to define a target called "evidence of non-natural design in life" and in the case of SETI, they are trying to define a target called "evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence". Neither really knows what for sure what the evidence really looks like because neither of them have any hard evidence, so they are left to guess at what the evidence would look like. Both, ultimately, are looking for evidence of intelligence. As such, both have come to the same conclusion. The best way to look for evidence of intelligence is to look for things that can't be explained by a natural process alone. And in both cases, even if they were to find such evidence, a skeptic could claim that their supposed evidence of intelligence is simply evidence of some unexplained natural phenomena.
Even if the SETI people found a narrow-band signal of the kind described, would it prove extra-terrestrial intelligence to a skeptic? I doubt it. They could simply argue that it was produced by some yet-unexplained natural process. And would they be wrong to do so?
What is their hypothesis? What are their testable predictions? And if they apply those tests, what do they prove?
This turns out not to be the case.
And I think that's a straw man. That's as much of a straw man as reducing SETI to, "Natural things are complex and designed things are simple." and then rattling off some natural things that are simple to prove how silly they are.
It is certainly a testable approach; the problem is that the measure fails miserably on the most cursory inspection. Bricks are obviously designed, but it is the simplicity of the brick that tells you that. Cars are more complex, but they really are simple compared to, say, a cloud, or a coastline. In fact, it's easy to come up with any number of manifestly natural things that are gigantically, stupefyingly, obscenely more complicated than the most sophisticated artifact.
ID is looking for a specific type of complexity just as SETI looks for a specific type of simplicity -- one that seem clearly "not natural". But at their core, it's not complexity or simplicity that they are looking for. It's "not-natural" and thus "created by an intelligence".
Since you seem to accept the basic idea that searching for the created among the natural is possible, let me toss this back at you. If you wanted to look for some evidence of intelligent design in life, what kind of evidence do you think intelligent design might leave that could be identified? What non-obvious things might you look for?
It turns out to not be the case depending on your assumptions. Apply the same argument to SETI. Finding a narrow band transmission, for example, does not prove that it can't have a natural explanation. In both cases, if you pre-suppose that (A) an intelligent source does not exist and (B) that there is always a natural explanation, even if we haven't found it yet, then no electromagnetic signal of the sort being looked for will prove anything.
All right, square watermelons. Where can I get one? Certinly a lot easier to get in the fridge or cooler.
Because this group has the same goals and ideals and methods as the PostModernDeconstructionistTextualAnalyzers, to wit: the destruction of scientific inquiry as a method of investigation. Not to mention Harun Yahya.
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