Posted on 02/07/2005 8:16:39 AM PST by metacognative
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Design for Living By MICHAEL J. BEHE
Published: February 7, 2005
ethlehem, Pa. — IN the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design. As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not. Advertisement
First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.
Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.
Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.
For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not really.")
The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.
In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs and Things." Referring to his student days in the 1960's, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered." In fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was meant literally.
The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.
Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.
The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.
The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.
Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.
Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, is the author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
>> If this is what ID amounts to, one wonders what its proponents do to occupy their time.<<Instead of wasting their lives trying to figure out what made the legos, they spend their time making things with the legos. 8^>
First, the essence of the scientific enterprise is to figure out how things work and how they came to be. Second, what has any ID'er made (aside from a few headlines)?
" Design is against my religion. I want to believe in dumb luck only!"
8^>
What have the scientists trying to figure out how the legos came to exist "made."
I leave it to the reader to determine for themself, via a library or Google, what practical results have availed themselves from scientists studying creation and whether or not those scientists believed in ID or not.
Meanwhile, my post was a response to a hypothetical question, to which I thought I gave a more than ample hypothetical answer in the form of an analogy.
js1138...at least you THINK about your replies.
I can imagine an intelligently designed object which we do not know the history of....the slab in 2001.
I'm sure you've got a point. Well, pretty sure.
"Then why do the ID'ers complain so much when it's pointed out that the designer did a lousy job in many cases; and that any designer would have needed another designer to design her. She seems rather cruel to have designed tsunamis and Huntington's corea."
I guess you are suggesting that all ID'ers believe that a master plan perfectly accounts for everything in the world. I'm not so sure that needs to be the case and I think there are many ID'ers who take a more scientific approach to this and accept things as they are and not force what they see into a religious context. I know of many scientists with a view that something made the universe what it is, but don't ascribe to any specific religion.
There is no need to mix up any religion whatsoever into the concept of a master plan. One could just as easily suppose that the master plan was simply to "flip a switch" and thereby create a universe of matter and energy with specific properties. How it evolved beyond that was a matter of chance. Of course, it begs the question as to where the so-called designer of matter/energy came from, but that is true for all theories of the origin of the universe, both religious and scientific.
True, but Inteligent Design and Science are mutually exclusive.
So9
That narrow view of science would kinda throw archaeology out the window, wouldn't it? Obviously, we can and do evaluate designed structures scientifically all the time, so the whole "positing an intellegent designer as the cause of life is by definition unscientific" argument is fallacious from the get-go.
The watchmaker argument was published in 1800. There is nothing further to be resolved. The evolution of the species does nothing more than ID, but it organizes the bewildering array of lifeforms in a taxonomic order that allows much easier comprehension of the whole. It is simpler and more powerful, that's why it is useful. ID is not useful.
I find Paley's argument convincing. I wouldn't refuse to admit that a watch had a maker.
Can Intelligent Design explain nipples on male humans?
Rev Paley made excellent points. We could still go with ID except that we have a more powerful system in evolution. Evolution also does nothing but allow for presentation of observation results in neat tables and charts. ID lacks that organization, unless evolution is counted as an extension of ID. There wouldn't be a problem with that, even if invoking the anthropic principle in our particular universe.
I know darwinists would explain male nipples as common descent. Think about that!
Cosmic balance requires that we accept where the evidence leads...not stretch for so-called 'explanations' like Deleterious mutations can make an ape into a man
If the Designer thought that the male humans were only a tiny reflection of Her own glory.
We did not descend from apes. Apes are just as modern as we are. Common ancestor? They use dashed lines toward the base of the tree. A guess for the purpose of cataloging observations. Who knows what happened way back then? We may never know, it may be impossible to know since life tends to eat everything and there may be nothing left of the origins. We {life} ate it all.
I don't think so.
Starting with the hypothesis that (for example) Stonehenge is not a naturally occuring rock formation, we can look at the stone pillars and trace where they could have been quarried from, carbon-date organic material found buried on the site, examine the types of tools and materials known to exist in prehistoric Britain, and develop some reasonable descriptions as to how it was built and when.
In 1700, the state of archaeolgical scholarship would not have permitted us to arrive at those descriptions - today it does.
A "design oriented" approach to biological structures would have to do something similar, rather than just saying that the designer automagically willed those structures into existence.
In other words I am willing to accept the possibility that a "designer" was able to produce biological structures using principles of nature which we do not yet understand. I can't accept a designer who stands entirely outside our current -or our potential- knowledge of nature.
Let me say in addition that I have the greatest respect for the Christian faith in general (particularly where it stands in opposition to the bureaucratic state), however, I just can't personally accept the supernatural in any way.
Not at all - we evaluate human-designed structures all the time, which we can do because we have some idea of how human designers work, what their methods are, and what their artifacts tend to look like. We have no such thing at all for the natural world - no idea what designed versus undesigned objects look like, no idea what the tools or methods of a non-human designer might be, and no way to gain such knowledge, particularly when it's repeatedly hinted that the designer is somehow ineffable.
The only reason we can evaluate designed artifacts is because of our experience with human designers. There exists no such pool of prior knowledge for non-human-designed biological "artifacts", and hence no means whatsoever of evaluating design in biological structures.
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