As I noted in a previous post, Tech Central Station has an interesting article which is critical of intelligent design. The author recycles some standard evolutionist points (like ID == religion, ID's simplicity would stifle the scientific quest, etc.) and then presents what he calls "Scientific Intelligent Design," which he defines as the process of intelligently creating artificial life (using robotics, AI, etc) or augmenting existing life (transhumanism). The article concludes by saying that humans are really the intelligent designers. Let me point out a few things I liked and disliked.

No serious scientist believes the literal Biblical creation account, but many earnest and well-credentialed scientists do believe in Intelligent Design (ID), as a perspective on evolution. And ID, of course, is religiously inspired.

The author begins with an inaccurate overgeneralization of all those who believe in Genesis (for counterexamples, see people like Damadian, Carson, or the late Wilder-Smith). However, the author makes up lost ground with his honest acknowledgement that many scientists hold to ID. There are probably more ID sympathizers in the universities than we will ever know about. If we took a random poll of university professors, I estimate that 20% would at least give ID a fair hearing. The article then makes the inaccurate mapping of evolution => science and ID => religion. Actually, evolutionism (more broadly, naturalism) and ID are two interpretations of the same scientific evidence and both have metaphysical implications. It is simply not good science to automatically rule out design as a possible explanation for life's origin and diversity.

But it's a fallacy to argue that just because one person -- or even all the people of an era -- can't figure out how something works, therefore such mysterious workings are beyond any human comprehension, ever.

So the author is arguing that just because we can't figure out how some evolutionary processes work, that doesn't mean that we will never figure it out; thus, we should never resort to design as an explanation. However, this is a non-sequitur, since design is automatically ruled out from the beginning. An analogy might help. Right next to my computer is a TI-89 calculator. The TI-89 is probably one of the most useful computational tools that a student can have. Suppose I tried to detail the very origin of this calculator, and I constrained myself to non-design explanations. Is it a fallacy to state that a non-design explanation for the origin of a TI-89 is beyond human comprehension, ever? No. Now think of all the biological structures that are more complex and more elegant than a calculator. If after millions of dollars of research money and thousands of GSMM (graduate student man-months), we still cannot figure out the evolutionary pathway to complex biological structures, maybe we should reconsider the framework altogether. By the way, a "man-month" is the amount of work done by one person in one month.

And that's the problem with ID: it's simplistic. To argue that complex biological phenomena are "irreducibly complex" is to abandon the scientific quest.

Actually, many fields implicitly assume design without giving attribution. For example, artificial neural networks are based on a biological proof-of-concept: the brain. One of my professors, who is a evolutionist, once commented about how God must know linear algebra, since the networks in the brain can be modeled with matrix calculations. If some part of a biological structure is mysterious, an implicit assumption in biology is that there is some hidden purpose or functionality in that biological part that is waiting to be discovered. Design assumptions are implicitly made on a daily basis in biology. Thus, design actually furthers the scientific quest.

But whatever the motivations, from all directions, SID ["Scientific Intelligent Design"] is coming. In hardware, it's coming. In software, it's coming. And in wetware -- including the hot-button issue of stem cells from -- it's coming.

So he states that a revolution is coming in areas like AI and cloning. Here is where this article makes an unintended argument for intelligent design. The article acknowledges that human intelligence is used to design artificial life. But artificial life, a term that I am using loosely, is nowhere close to the complexity, power, and efficiency of real life. Robots cannot match the dexterity of your hands or your eyes or your feet.

Recently, I finished a small Matlab project on face recognition for one of my classes. I tried to get Matlab to classify different facial expressions. The project caused me to realize that humans have the innate ability to pick up the slightest facial cues to detect emotions. To test this out, go to a mirror and make a sad face. Then make a neutral face. There is very little difference in those two expressions, yet most humans can discriminate between the two. It is very hard for a computer to have this sort of discriminatory power.

So in remarkably similar fashion to my duck argument, I present another intuitive argument:
1. Actual life (including bugs, ducks, and humans) is currently more efficient, powerful, and complex than artificial life (robots, AI, etc).
2. If X is more efficient, powerful, and complex than Y,then probably more intelligent input went into the formation of X than Y.
3. A significant amount of intelligent input is needed to make artificial life.
4. A more significant amount of intelligent input is needed to make actual life.