Posted on 01/30/2006 9:40:22 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Intelligent design is not creationism
By Stephen C Meyer (Filed: 28/01/2006)
In 2004, the distinguished philosopher Antony Flew of the University of Reading made worldwide news when he repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism and affirmed the reality of some kind of a creator. Flew cited evidence of intelligent design in DNA and the arguments of "American [intelligent] design theorists" as important reasons for this shift.
Since then, British readers have learnt about the theory of intelligent design (ID) mainly from media reports about United States court battles over the legality of teaching students about it. According to most reports, ID is a "faith-based" alternative to evolution based solely on religion.
But is this accurate? As one of the architects of the theory, I know it isn't.
Contrary to media reports, ID is not a religious-based idea, but an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins. According to Darwinian biologists such as Oxford University's Richard Dawkins, living systems "give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose".
But, for modern Darwinists, that appearance of design is illusory, because the purely undirected process of natural selection acting on random mutations is entirely sufficient to produce the intricate designed-like structures found in living organisms.
By contrast, ID holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by a designing intelligence. The theory does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over time, or even common ancestry, but it disputes Darwin's idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected.
What signs of intelligence do design advocates see?
In recent years, biologists have discovered an exquisite world of nanotechnology within living cells - complex circuits, sliding clamps, energy-generating turbines and miniature machines. For example, bacterial cells are propelled by rotary engines called flagellar motors that rotate at 100,000rpm. These engines look like they were designed by engineers, with many distinct mechanical parts (made of proteins), including rotors, stators, O-rings, bushings, U-joints and drive shafts.
The biochemist Michael Behe points out that the flagellar motor depends on the co-ordinated function of 30 protein parts. Remove one of these proteins and the rotary motor doesn't work. The motor is, in Behe's words, "irreducibly complex".
This creates a problem for the Darwinian mechanism. Natural selection preserves or "selects" functional advantages as they arise by random mutation. Yet the flagellar motor does not function unless all its 30 parts are present. Thus, natural selection can "select" the motor once it has arisen as a functioning whole, but it cannot produce the motor in a step-by-step Darwinian fashion.
Natural selection purportedly builds complex systems from simpler structures by preserving a series of intermediates, each of which must perform some function. With the flagellar motor, most of the critical intermediate structures perform no function for selection to preserve. This leaves the origin of the flagellar motor unexplained by the mechanism - natural selection - that Darwin specifically proposed to replace the design hypothesis.
Is there a better explanation? Based on our uniform experience, we know of only one type of cause that produces irreducibly complex systems: intelligence. Whenever we encounter complex systems - whether integrated circuits or internal combustion engines - and we know how they arose, invariably a designing intelligence played a role.
Consider an even more fundamental argument for design. In 1953, when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotides in DNA store and transmit the assembly instructions - the information - in a four-character digital code for building the protein molecules the cell needs to survive. Crick then developed his "sequence hypothesis", in which the chemical bases in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. As Dawkins has noted, "the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like".
The informational features of the cell at least appear designed. Yet, to date, no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information needed to build the first living cell. Why? There is simply too much information in the cell to be explained by chance alone.
The information in DNA (and RNA) has also been shown to defy explanation by forces of chemical necessity. Saying otherwise would be like saying a headline arose as the result of chemical attraction between ink and paper. Clearly, something else is at work.
DNA functions like a software program. We know from experience that software comes from programmers. We know that information - whether, say, in hieroglyphics or radio signals - always arises from an intelligent source. As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler observed: "Information habitually arises from conscious activity." So the discovery of digital information in DNA provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a causal role in its origin.
Thus, ID is not based on religion, but on scientific discoveries and our experience of cause and effect, the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. Unlike creationism, ID is an inference from biological data.
Even so, ID may provide support for theistic belief. But that is not grounds for dismissing it. Those who do confuse the evidence for the theory with its possible implications. Many astrophysicists initially rejected the Big Bang theory because it seemed to point to the need for a transcendent cause of matter, space and time. But science eventually accepted it because the evidence strongly supported it.
Today, a similar prejudice confronts ID. Nevertheless, this new theory must also be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not philosophical preferences. As Professor Flew advises: "We must follow the evidence, wherever it leads."
Stephen C Meyer edited 'Darwinism, Design and Public Education' (Michigan State University Press). He has a PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge University and is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle
I can't believe Meyer doesn't know that, but he doesn't mention it. Very like a creationist, I'd say.
Why does it matter what Flew or Darwin "believed" anyway? Science is not about who believes something. It's about who can prove something. Why would scientists be interested in someone's beliefs? Either there is evidence or there isn't.
My problems with ID is not so much that it "is" creationism as that it's argued the same way as creationism, by lying about the evidence.
Thank you Dread, I'll pass these along to him tonight when I get home. He and his partner are preparing for State finals this week. They have been debating this topic for about 2 months now.
Actually, he's still a Deist. He still likes anthropic principle arguments. He's no longer impressed with arguments from biological complexity.
> You don't think that a theory that DNA is coded similarly to computer language is worth discussing in a science classroom ...
And what theory is that? Computer code is binary. DNA is not.
> my kids are going to find these things and other theories very exciting when they are old enough to study them.
I'm sure they will. They'll also be terribly excited about the theory that the Pyramids were built by aliens.
I never see an ID-er anticipate the argument that evolution can originate structures which appear irreducibly complex. Never. They always show up chanting the mantra that this is a thing evolution cannot do. Someone else always has to show that simple scenarios involving deletion and scaffolding effects will get you there. Then the dummy demands eyewitness accounts, or some other evasion. Etc. Repeat indefinitely.
This is not stupidity. This is dishonesty, practiced by stupid people.
It's not a lapse in reasoning. He bases his argument on the reasoning that migrating the structure from one function to another eliminates selection pressure (bias in the probabilities) and you start dealing with random chance.
I'm pleased to hear biologists are looking to see if there is a selection pathway for the flagella to migrate. If nothing else, Behe is forcing some people to think.
It's probable that there's equivocation going on about the meaning of "strictly random", but putting that aside I'd like to see the quote from Dawkins.
The entire theme of the Blind Watchmaker is that directed chance is what drives evolution. He admits in the book that without direction evolution fails. Don't confuse the word direction with intelligence. What Dawkins is actually describing is bias (in mathematical terms) that skews a random process in a specific direction. The bias can be completely non-intelligent in source (such as the temperature of a mixture of NO2 and NO3), but the presence of the bias changes the outcome of a random process (in the case of NO2 and NO3, the ratio of one gas to the other through random collisions.)
As I amended later, Flew was initially persuaded in part by arguments from biological complexity. He has been dissuaded that there is any such argument to be made. He is still vaguely Deistic, seeing an impersonal, non-anthropomorphic God. The result sounds to me something like Einstein's near-metaphorical Deism.
But Meyer not knowing that Flew has moved away from ID is not good.
And then folks like me have to come along and constantly restate that deletion and scaffolding models eliminate the bias pressure of natural selection and leave you to deal with random probabilities and monkeys typing complete plays of shakespeare. Even Dawkins admits that the bias of natural selection is THE pillar upon which evolution rests.
So you think those who believe in creation demand an eyewitness account of evolution?
LOL - I missed that thread I guess.
All threads are like the first time for every creatinist or ID-er. As I say, that makes it hard to tell them apart.
You are so quick to point out other's nonsense yet don't seem to post anything that is actually scientific to defend evolution.
You're kind of like the Howard Dean of TOE.
Unfortunately, that's a meaningless statement. Selective pressure doesn't have a sense of direction; it's opportunistic. A perfectly functioning excretory organ can develop under selective pressure, and if it happens to provide locomotion, and locomotion happens to be helpful, then selective pressure will reinforce a new use for an old organ.
The entire theme of the Blind Watchmaker is that directed chance is what drives evolution. He admits in the book that without direction evolution fails.
Like I said, you'll need to supply a specific quote. "Direction" is essentially synonymous with "selection"; it weeds out the bad ideas. However, selection is only "directional" in a local sense. It defines a notion of fitness at any given time, but it doesn't proceed toward a particular ultimate destination.
What Dawkins is actually describing is bias (in mathematical terms) that skews a random process in a specific direction. The bias can be completely non-intelligent in source
In other words, selection is synonymous with direction. It is a source of bias.
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