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 eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites.
No, there aren't. Because the vast majority of those combinations simply won't work.... and they won't work at very much smaller gene sizes. Successful small genes build up bits at a time, not suddenly fall together.
What you've quoted is another example of lying through statistics.
What you've quoted is another example of lying through statistics."
The author did not assert that there are 20 to the power of 130 possible workable combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites, just that there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites.
I see you've lowered yourself to irrational name-calling already. Perhaps you should take a break and cool off before you tackle the other items from post #33.
I see your point.
But that 'something' CANNOT make the NEXT hand dealt be like itself!
The Dawkins program to produce the string "Methinks it is like a weasel" involves three processes: 1. Random variation -- on each "generation", 1/8th of the character strings in the "population" (size selected by user) have one of their text characters completely randomized to some other character. 2. Selection -- the character string which has the most "correct" characters (or if more than one such string exists, the most recent such) is flagged, and a) will be "bred", and b) won't itself be mutated or replaced by one of its own "offspring". 3. Reproduction -- the current "most fit" character string undergoes "sexual reproduction' with randomly chosen other strings, and the resulting offspring replace the "mates". (This is actually more akin to biological lateral gene transfer.) So all three of the processes necessary for evolution to take place are in the Dawkins program. And, as predicted by "evolutionists", the results are swift and sure -- the mutating, reproducing, subject-to-selection population very quickly (within seconds) produces a Shakespeare text string which the creationist "pure random" methods would not have produced before the Earth permanently froze over. |
> Methinks there is a PROBLEM with this example.
It doesn't support your preferred conclusion.
Well, then how would you distinguish scientific reasoning from philosophical reasoning? I see I.D. as more philosophical than scientific, but if you care to distinguish the two and explain why I.D. belongs in the science and not the philosophic camp, I'm happy to hear what you have to say - and maybe I'll even change my mind!
As an aside, it is curious that you have chosen an example that might link ID with creationism. Sure, for many people their stance on ID is a veiled creationism, but that is not a fair charge against the major proponents, Dembski, Behe, et al.
I did state that my example was not "directly related to I.D." and so my intent was not to link I.D. with creationism; but rather it was to show that once you put what I consider to be an unscientific assumption into a scientific discussion, you can allow anything.
I cannot imagine Michael Behe ever saying 'I'm done.' When evidence can be brought forward that will demonstrate that those things he considers irreducibly complex are not in fact, I would expect him to be quite open to rethinking. The leading ID scientists are no more (and in many cases are less) married to their conclusions than evolutionists.
I disagree. Once you postulate I.D. as an explanation for an unexplained phenomenom, you are unlikely to look for other explanations. Now, someone else may find that explanation for you (as you indicated yourself "evidence is brought forward" - but it won't be by Michael Behe.)
Think of it this way. The planets take a wandering path through the nighttime sky. For thousands of years, western scientists attempted to find a natural explanation for these paths. The first attempts involved "wheels within wheels" which provided a complicated and crude estimate of the paths. The real answer wasn't discovered until Kepler postulated ellipitical orbits for the planets and Newton laid down the foundation for those orbits with gravitation theory.
Now imagine instead that those scientist belong to a tradition that rejected a natural explanation and instead embraced the idea that planets wandered as they did because they were really Gods and thus there was no point in explaining planetary movements because they went where Gods wished to go. Don't scoff because some cultures did explain things in that way and they did not have the scientific traditions handed down by the Greeks. Once they have that as their working model, they did not seek to replace it with a scientific model.
That to me is the basic problem with I.D. It assumes that such natural explanations for biological forms do not and cannot exist and from that point on, you have ruled out scientific progress. Now progress may come and people like Michael Behe may be forced to retreat on one point or another, but they won't be ones making those discoveries.
Why don't you just say that you don't know?
There may well be hundreds of small problems with the program. But the biggest one is that the results don't produce evidence to support your prejudice.
Ok: I'll accept that you don't know.
If only you'd accept the fact that YOU don't know....
Ah...
...but I do!
That certainly does not seem to be the case based upon the available evidence.
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