Problem is that unpredictability does not mean randomness. The economy is unpredictable because there are 6 billion people trying to find a better way to make money, a better way to save money, a better way to make a living and so forth. It is unpredictable because there are so many people looking for ways to better their economic lives that it is impossible to make a model of it. The unpredictability is therefore the result of intelligence, not randomness.
Yes, but the intelligence of the actors just tells us why the evolution of the marketplace happens in years instead of millions of years. Ironically, intelligence itself is something of a Darwinian process! We are constantly coming up with scenarios at random, and testing them out in our own simulation of the real world before deciding on which course to choose. This activity comes so naturally to us we hardly even notice when we're doing it. And of course this makes for a vastly faster evolutionary process than if we had to act out each one of our tentative ideas in strictly Darwinian fashion out in the real world.Even with all the intelligence of people individually, the economy as a whole goes along & evolves beyond our ability to design it or predict where it's going!
Problem is that unpredictability does not mean randomness. The economy is unpredictable because there are 6 billion people trying to find a better way to make money, a better way to save money, a better way to make a living and so forth. It is unpredictable because there are so many people looking for ways to better their economic lives that it is impossible to make a model of it. The unpredictability is therefore the result of intelligence, not randomness.
But this means that if Dembski's Explanatory Filter does turn out to be valid, it would merely be a valid Darwin Detector!
Just for reference, I've typed in a passage from Robert Pennock's Tower of Babel, which helps illuminate the trap that IDists have set for themselves:
Randomness & Creativity
Contrary to what one might expect, the introduction of randomness into a system is one of the most important engines of creativity. Faced with a blank canvas, painters often spur their creative thoughts by splashing a bit of paint at random on the canvas. Jean Arp dropped shapes randomly as the basis for some of his sculptural pieces. The lyrical tunes of George Gershwin's musical play Porgy and Bess were written using random elements. [So did Mozart - jp] People who have investigated the nature of creativity have discovered that this is surprisingly important in creative thinking and is by no means restricted to art.Edward de Bono was one pioneer in the practical study of creativity. Paul MacCready, who designed the Gossamer Condor, the first significant human-powered airplane, credited de Bono's methods for helping his team come up with creative solutions to design problems. MacCready had taken on the challenge of human-powered flight, a challenge that had inspired but eluded our species since the mythical Icarus strapped feather-coated wax wings to his arms and flapped madly towards the sun, only to plunge immediately back to earth. Among other problems, MacCready's engineering team had to figure out a wing design that could maintain lift for a craft that would only move at the very slow speed that a cyclist turning a propeller with pedal power would be able to sustain. The team succeeded where all before them had failed, and the Gossamer Condor now proudly hangs suspended in perpetual flight within the airspace of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, together with the Wright Brothers' 1903 Flyer, Lindbergh's Lockheed 8 Sirius, and the Apollo 11 Command Module. I had the pleasure of hearing MacCready speak a couple of years after the first successful flight of the Gossamer Condor, about how his team overcame the difficult design problems they faced, and his recommendation led me to seek out de Bono's work on creativity.
Edward de Bono was primarily interested in creative reasoning — what he termed "lateral thinking"59 — and in developing practical techniques to improve creative thinking. Reading through his suggestions for stimulating new ideas or creative problem solutions one soon notices that chance appears again and again in a variety of ways. According to de Bono, introducing randomness is a prominent factor in creative processes. Lateral thinking, he writes, is concerned with changing patterns (arrangements of information), and it deliberately seeks out apparently irrelevant information and chance intrusions as a way to generate new patterns. Again and again he mentions the utility of exposure to random stimulation or attending to random inputs. This is the same notion of randomness that appears in evolutionary theory — it is not that mutation has no cause (deterministic or indeterministic) but that the cause is not aimed at producing a particular desirable or advantageous result. De Bono says that the main point is that one is not looking for anything, but is just wandering aimlessly with a blank mind until something just pops out. He often suggests some formal method to generate a random input, such as a routine to select a chance object from the surroundings (e.g., nearest red object) or using the dictionary to provide a random word.
The idea that the introduction of randomness is an important creative force is not idiosyncratic to de Bono; one finds this point reiterated by others who have studied creativity. James Adams, director of the Design division at Stanford's School of Engineering and member of the design team for Mariner IV, the first Venus spacecraft, writes about creativity in terms of what he calls "conceptual blockbusting" noting that one mental blockage to creative design is having "no appetite for chaos."60 Koberg and Bagnall describe a procedure they call "morphological forced connections" (whereby one assembles the result of random runs through alternative variations) as being a "foolproof invention-finding scheme."61 More interesting still is the earlier work of Alex Osborn, originator of the concept of the process of (and coiner of the term) "brainstorming," who was interested in creative imagination.62 Like the others, he drew no connections to biology but his observations about creative processes have surprising natural counterparts in the biological world. This is particularly striking in his lists of procedures for coming up with new ideas. I'll mention just a sample:
- New ways to use it?
- Other uses if modified?
- New twist?
- Change meaning, color, motion, sound, odor, form, shape?
It is fascinating to read through Osborn's lists and realize just how many of the processes he recommends for generating useful, novel ideas are used regularly by evolution to produce useful new biological structures and functions. For example, he writes of random recombinations, permutations, reversals, multiplications, transpositions, substitutions, and so on. It would be interesting to go through the lists in detail to show how evolutionary processes follow the same patterns, but many of the parallels should be obvious from our earlier brief introduction to molecular mechanisms of DNA replication.
Can chance create useful novelties? You bet. Random mutations and recombinations are the very springs of creative variation, and as genetic replicators, biological organisms are equipped with both.
Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel, pp 92-94