Posted on 04/11/2005 10:25:55 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
"Intelligent design." It's been in the news a lot lately. Lawsuits over textbook stickers, the presentation of evolution and the legality of presenting alternatives, have thrust the term into public awareness.
But just what is intelligent design? To hear some folks talk, you'd think it's a scam to sneak Genesis into science classrooms. Yet intelligent design has nothing to do with the six days of creation and everything to do with hard evidence and logic.
Intelligent design (ID) is grounded on the ancient observation that the world looks very much as if it had an intelligent source. Indeed, as early as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher and astronomer Anaxagoras concluded, "Mind set in order … all that ever was … and all that is now or ever will be."
After 2400 years, the appearance of design is as powerful as ever. That is especially true of the living world. Advances in biology have revealed that world to be one staggering complexity.
For example, consider the cell. Even the simplest cells bristle with high-tech machinery. On the outside, their surfaces are studded with sensors, gates, pumps and identification markers. Some bacteria even sport rotary outboard motors that they use to navigate their environment.
Inside, cells are jam-packed with power plants, assembly lines, recycling units and more. Miniature monorails whisk materials from one part of the cell to another.
Such sophistication has led even the most hard-bitten atheists to remark on the apparent design in living organisms. The late Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's structure and an outspoken critic of religion, has nonetheless remarked, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved."
Clearly, Crick (and others like him) considers the appearance of design to be strictly an illusion, created by naturalistic evolution. Yet it's also clear that this impression is so compelling that an atheistic biologist must warn his colleagues against it.
In contrast, ID theorists contend that living organisms appear designed because they are designed. And unlike the design thinkers whom Darwin deposed, they've developed rigorous new concepts to test their idea.
In the past, detecting design was hampered by vague and subjective criteria, such as discerning an object's purpose. Moreover, design was entangled with natural theology--which seeks, in part, to infer God's character by studying nature rather than revelation. Natural theologians often painted such a rosy view of nature that they became an easy mark for Darwin when he proposed his theory of evolution. Where they saw a finely-balanced world attesting to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed to nature’s imperfections and brutishness.
Since the 1980s, however, developments in several fields have made it possible to rigorously distinguish between things that "just happen" and those that happen "on purpose." This has helped design theory emerge as a distinct enterprise, aimed at detecting intelligence rather than speculating about God's character.
Dubbed "intelligent design" to distinguish it from old-school thinking, this new view is detailed in The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998), a peer-reviewed work by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski.
In contrast to what is called creation science, which parallels Biblical theology, ID rests on two basic assumptions: namely, that intelligent agents exist and that their effects are empirically detectable.
Its chief tool is specified complexity. That's a mouthful, and the math behind it is forbidding, but the basic idea is simple: An object displays specified complexity when it has lots of parts (is complex) arranged in a recognizable, delimited pattern (is specified).
For example, the article you're now reading has thousands of characters, which could have been arranged in zillions of ways. Yet it fits a recognizable pattern: It's not just a jumble of letters (which is also complex), but a magazine article written in English. Any rational person would conclude that it was designed.
The effectiveness of such thinking is confirmed by massive experience. As Dembski points out, "In every instance where we find specified complexity, and where [its] history is known, it turns out that design actually is present."
Thus, if we could trace the creation of a book, our investigation would lead us to the author. You could say, then, that specified complexity is a signature of design.
To see how this applies to biology, consider the little consider the outboard motor that bacteria such as E. coli use to navigate their environment. This water-cooled contraption, called a flagellum, comes equipped with a reversible engine, drive shaft, U-joint and a long whip-like propeller. It hums along at a cool 17,000 rpm.
Decades of research indicate that its complexity is enormous. It takes about 50 genes to create a working flagellum. Each of those genes is as complex as a sentence with hundreds of letters.
Moreover, the pattern--a working flagellum--is highly specified. Deviate from that pattern, knock out a single gene, and our bug is dead in the water (or whatever).
Such highly specified complexity, which demands the presence of every part, indicates an intelligent origin. It's also defies any explanation, such as contemporary Darwinism, that relies on the stepwise accumulation of random genetic change.
In fact, if you want to run the numbers, as Dembski does in his book No Free Lunch, it boils down to the following: If every elementary particle in the observed universe (about 1080) were cranking out mutation events at the cosmic speed limit (about 1045 times per second) for a billion times the estimated age of the universe, they still could not produce the genes for a working flagellum.
And that's just one system within multiple layers of systems. Thus the flagellum is integrated into a sensory/guidance system that maneuvers the bacterium toward nutrients and away from noxious chemicals--a system so complex that computer simulation is required to understand it in its entirety. That system is meshed with other systems. And so on.
Of course, what's important here is not what we conclude about the flagellum or the cell, but how we study it. Design theorists don't derive their conclusions from revelation, but by looking for reliable, rigorously defined indicators of design and by ruling out alternative explanations, such as Darwinism.
Calling their work religious is just a cheap way to dodge the issues. The public--and our students--deserve better than that.
Mark Hartwig has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in statistics and research design.
The flagellum: nature's prime number.
????
9 days late???
Isn't THIS a bit arbitrary?
Unlike the BigBang where Astronomers said.....
I could care less what program YOU run: ANY 'program' that makes the bold claim that it represents a model of what 'Evolution' does, is a LIE!
OOOps!
So it's another "don't ask, don't tell" thing?
Yep. LOL
You'd better check with your gurus. Free will is not consistent with materialism.
The philosophical implications of naturalism are troubling both to naturalists and non naturalists. One of the more absurd implications is the absence of free will:
Don't forget that Dawkins calls us survival machines and sophisticated robots.
Nature Magazine (May 8,2003), in an article entitled, The Buck Stops Here claims that free will is a subjective illusion.
Daniel Dennett claims that humans are zombies without consciousness (Consciousness Explained, 1992).
It is also worth noting that any worldview that puts more effort into denying reality than explaining it really isn't something to take seriously.
And here's one compliments of Gary:
He writes in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis:
Crick, Francis Harry Compton
> ANY 'program' that makes the bold claim that it represents a model of what 'Evolution' does, is a LIE!
Ah, you mean like the overly simplistic programs showing that the chances of a functional bacterium evolving are in in 10^120? I would agree that THOSE are lies.
The problem is, the see the "sickness" as biological and not spiritual sickness.
Even worse is, the flip side, being those who think they are, "ok".
What is the purpose of doing such calculations? What do they tell us? You're here. I'm here. Each moment in the world is a blindingly complicated mix of factors. We can't compute all the variables, yet from our knowledge of physics and chemistry, as we look around we can be fairly confident that each moment of the day things are functioning in accordance with their nature. We don't see impossible things happening all around us. It's true (trivially true) that the hypothetical "odds" against things being the way they are today are astronomically high. But so what? Today is obviously not impossible.
So here's the bottom line: long chains of natural causes and consequences happen all the time. In fact, that's what reality is made of. Except for the simplest systems (like the movement of the planets), from any arbitrarily selected starting point (like 10 generations ago) the future cannot be predicted because it's just too complicated. But that doesn't justify anyone in looking back over 10 generations and claiming that it was all an impossible miracle. Thus we have PatrickHenry's law of reality: If each momentary event is natural, the historical totality is natural.
I have discussed this silly business of "calculating the odds" here from time to time, and I've even given it a name: the fallacy of retrospective astonishment. I've also discussed it with logicians and academic philosophers. It seems to be a genuine fallacy. It goes like this:
How could I exist? The odds against it are so amazingly huge!!!
The fallacy involves looking back to some earlier and arbitrarily chosen initial state, then speculating on all the nearly infinite events that might have happened (but which didn't happen), and concluding that the present state has such a low degree of probability that it must have been impossible to achieve by natural means. This "reasoning" makes literally everything impossible (and thus miraculous), and it is therefore an absurdity.
Through this simple approach, attaining 2,000 different functioning enzymes is a matter of time, not a matter of cosmic unlikelihood.
The author asserts:
"If every elementary particle in the observed universe (about 1080) were cranking out mutation events at the cosmic speed limit (about 1045 times per second) for a billion times the estimated age of the universe, they still could not produce the genes for a working flagellum."
G Schroeder
1)Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin's oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory.
2)The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, "Did Darwin get it all right?" And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments. The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical (illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics, including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.
3)The British Natural History Museum in London has an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies; small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive. Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution. This magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example of one phylum evolving into another. It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution, the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called into question by these data.
4)The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined."
> The author asserts...
Incorrectly.
Here's a simple thought experiemnt, one I've used before. Take a standard deck of 52 cards. Shuffle, and lay them out randomly. The likelihood of any particular hand of 52 is 8.06581752 × 10^67. This is a number far beyond human comprehension...for all intents and purposes, it is impossible. And yet... nothing stops you from laying out those random cards. You could do this impossible thing twenty times an hour, every day of the week. Even though the chances of *that* hand are nil, the chances of *some* hand are effectively unity.
So the next time someone tells you that it's statistically impossible for some biological structure to evolve... keep in mind that it's also virtually impossible to get a particular order of cards. But *something* is clearly virtually inevitable.
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