I asked this question in one of my classes today:

"How can nature's laws explain the origin of nature?"

This quarter, we will have meetings at Humanities Hall 242 at 6:00 P.M. every other Thursday (4th, 6th, 8th, & 10th weeks). Everyone is invited!

Send me an email at "idesignclub at gmail dot com" if you are planning to come, because there could be a week where the meeting may be cancelled (due to exams, etc).

Kurt Vonnegut is a well-known writer and a secular humanist. He has recently made some interesting comments about intelligent design in an NPR interview (HT: Uncommon Descent). Here is part of the interview, with Vonnegut in red and the interviewer in gray:

"Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class, and intelligent design. Look, scientists themselves are behaving tribally."

"How are the scientists behaving tribally?"

"They say, you know about evolution, that it surely happened, that the fossil record shows that. But look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending to have the answers [about] how we got this way, when natural selection couldn't have possibly have produced such machines."

"Does that mean that you would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom?"

"Look, its what we're thinking about all the time. If I were a physics teacher or science teacher, it would be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought."

That's the title of an opinion piece in the December 2005 Irvine Progressive, a student-run campus publication at UCI. I applaud the publication's willingness to give air time to this vitally important issue of origins. And I applaud the author for making a valiant effort to logically show why he thinks ID is bogus. For this post, I would like to quickly critique some of the points in the article:

Point 1:

"Robertson’s recent remarks may finally have done what scientists have so far failed to do: expose intelligent design as a religious-based scientific fraud."

Pat Robertson does not speak for the intelligent design movement. Since he sometimes makes weird comments, he is an easy straw-man.

Regarding the claim that ID is basically religious in nature, it is true that there is a pretty strong correlation between theists and ID supporters. However, this does not mean that the concept of ID is itself religious. Correlation does not imply causation.

In fact, ID actually abstracts out religion from the picture by simply trying to answer, "Are there tangible artifacts of design in nature?" This question is solidly in the natural realm and can be subjected to scientific analysis.

Point 2:

"Yet intelligent design has been roundly and nearly universally criticized by scientists and education professionals as failing to meet even the most basic criteria for scientific theories."

It is true that there are many more scientists that support Darwinism than support ID (yet, here is a poll where 60% of medical doctors support some form of intelligent design in nature). However, just because consensus supports Darwinism, this does not mean that evidence for ID should not be taken seriously. The evidence should be evaluated on its own merits.

The fact that there are some scientists who are willing go against consensus and put their academic careers in jeopardy to advance this notion of ID suggests that there may be significant merit to ID. Here are some prominent scientists who have supported some form of ID:

• Nobel Laureate Charles Townes
• Turing Award Winner Frederick Brooks
• The late Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley

Point 3:

"What looks designed to one viewer may look perfectly un-designed to another, and there’s no clear way to decide who’s right. Furthermore, it seems very clear that those with background religious commitments are more apt to see “design” all over the place, whether it’s there or not."

The author makes a very good criticism here. What objective measures can we use to empirically evaluate the level of design in any object? More fundamentally, what is design? What is intelligence? Can design ever arise from a non-intelligent agency?

This is where we can apply statistical tests and probability theory. The act of designing can be viewed as a process that minimizes or contains chance activities in order to arrive at some sort of goal or purpose. Designs may also be characterized by patterns. If we see something in the world that exhibits patterns that are not explainable by natural stochastic processes, we can reliably infer design. The practice of design detection can be structured in an objective and mathematically rigorous manner. Design detection does not necessarily need to depend on a person's prior belief.

Point 4:

"For IDers to go further and claim evolution can’t possibly explain these systems—which is what intelligent design requires to get a foothold—is intellectually dishonest and defeatist. It’s impossible to know what we will and won’t be able to explain through evolutionary theory."

Showing the limitations of a branch of science is neither intellectually dishonest nor defeatist. Let me give an example. In computer science, there are a set of problems known as "Non-deterministic Polynomial time" (or NP for short). Nobody has found any general polynomial-time solution for these NP problems. The general intuition is that there is no solution, although nobody has been able to prove this one way or the other.

If a graduate student spent a significant amount of time trying to find the optimal solution for the Traveling Salesman Problem (which is NP), that student's advisor would probably be very angry at the student for wasting time on the problem. In this situation, would it be fair to suggest that the advisor is being defeatist for suggesting that working on an NP problem is a waste of time? No. Instead, this intuition that there is no solution to the NP problem allows the graduate student to work on more tractable problems.

Similarly, intelligent design does not need to be classified as defeatist for suggesting that there are fundamental limitations to Darwinian evolution. Instead, the intuition that drives intelligent design might allow scientists to work on more biologically tractable problems.

Furthermore, intelligent design could potentially enhance current scientific endeavors by providing a more cohesive underlying model. One example is the area of biomimetics, which is the practice of extracting useful design patterns from biology.

Conclusion:

I commend the Irvine Progressive for running a piece on intelligent design. I would encourage readers to compare that piece with an article that I wrote for the Irvine Review, titled "Darwin or Design?" It is important that one be familiarized with both sides of the debate so that one can make an informed decision about this important issue of origins.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7072/full/439010a.html

Unfortunately, you need to be at UCI or on some other network that has access to the full text of Nature to view this article. It's an interesting examination of the current state of attempts to explain the physical makeup of the universe in purely naturalistic terms. If you ask me, the reasons for excluding intelligent causation from the list of possible explanations for the universal constants is becomming more and more tenuous.

This post deals with two rather light-weight objections to ID which weren't worth their own posts.

1) The Flying Spaghetti Monster reductio
The Flying Spaghetti Monster historically arose as a reductio ad absurdum argument against teaching ID in schools. If ID can be taught in schools, the argument goes, then the equally scientific notion that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world must also be taught.

It should be obvious that this does not reduce ID to an absurdity at all. If anything it is aimed more at young-earth-creationism than at ID. ID is agnostic about the identity of the designer - all it claims is that the designer was "intelligent". So insisting that a particular theory about who the designer might have been is clearly outside the bounds of what ID is proposing.

2) Who Designed the Designer?
Another common argument against design is "Who designed the designer"? Since the designer that ID posits must have been really smart and really powerful, he was presumably also very complex. But if he was complex then he requires a designer, which results in an infinite regress.

Many things could be said about this. Interestingly enough, according to the Christian doctrine of divine simplicity God is not "complex", and thus wouldn't necessarily warrant a design inference. But completely aside from that, ID is an empirical science, and as such is only interested in drawing inferences based on observable data. No design theorist would suggest that it is valid to infer design for something that had not been observed.

In a previous post, I demonstrated how Bayes formula can be used to show the decomposition of a posterior into a likelihood and a prior. By thinking of a probability as the strength of a belief, we can use this formulation in a loose, non-rigorous sense to describe how a person forms an opinion about intelligent design, creationism, or Darwinism.

Initially, a person has some set of prior deep-seated beliefs. These beliefs can be altered once that person encounters new evidence; in essence, the prior belief evolves to the posterior belief. However, the level of alteration depends on the two factors that we see in the formula: 1) the strength of person's prior belief; 2) the likelihood of the new evidence (which measures how probable the new evidence is, given the person's set of beliefs).

For this post, let me give some examples of prior beliefs.

Creationism:

Christian creationists hold the prior belief that the Bible is true. The strength of this prior belief can depend on how this belief was established (note that even a prior can be decomposed into a previous likelihood and a previous prior). Maybe the belief in the Bible was formed during childhood in Sunday School. A stronger prior belief could be formed by studying Biblical apologetics. Creationists generally also have a respect for science, and they hold a prior belief that science and the Bible can be tightly harmonized.

Darwinism:

Evolutionists hold the prior belief that the origin of life should be explained naturalistically. This prior belief may have been instilled from youth by well-intentioned parents, or it may have been developed in high school or in the university. For instance, Dr. Behe in Darwin's Black Box states:

"Many students learn from their textbooks how to view the world through the evolutionary lens. However, they do not learn how Darwinian evolution might have produced any of the remarkably intricate biochemical systems that those texts describe" (183).

Evolutionists generally believe that any sort of higher power is superfluous to the origin and diversification of life. Some evolutionists also have the prior belief that science and theology should always be separate.

Intelligent Design:

What prior beliefs does an intelligent designist (and one that is not a creationist) bring? The ideal design-theorist should probably have an uninformative prior. In other words, the designist is open to ideas from both Darwinism and creationism. An uninformative prior belief does not prejudge or put prior weight on any position; rather, the evidence leads where it may. Consequently, this position does not rule out the possibility of design in nature. In reality, the typical intelligent design theorist probably has a prior belief that includes a notion of a Designer, but this prior belief is not as strong or as far-reaching as the prior beliefs of creationists.

Other Prior Beliefs:

There are also some unfortunate prior beliefs that are shared by some creationists, IDists, and evolutionists alike. Some are conditioned by popularizers to believe that the other side is always either ignorant, closed-minded, or mendacious. Thus, even before any evidence is presented, a person's mind is already closed. Sometimes, certain labels, like "Young Earth Creationist" or "Atheist," convey connotations that conjure up these unfortunate prior beliefs. Consider a famous saying by Richard Dawkins:

"It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."

In order to have a meaningful dialogue, it is important to remove these unfortunate prior beliefs.

A prior belief that would probably enhance and civilize this dialogue is a belief in fairness and open-mindedness to new ideas. This prior belief essentially undergirds the fundamental purpose of virtually every university. People should be able to present new evidence in a fair environment.

Conclusion

A glance at the formula reveals that the prior holds considerable weight over the strength of the posterior. And it certainly seems like prior beliefs are formed at a young age. Thus, the political controversy between ID and evolution mostly centers around the curriculum in the public school, which is probably the child's primary agent of influence on this issue of origins. The side that is able to most influence the curriculum will probably be the side that wins over the generation. Note that, in one iteration of the formula, the prior has equal weight to the likelihood.

But what if the prior beliefs of a person are already formed and hardened? What can be done to reverse it? In an upcoming post, I will try to look at likelihoods as a way to erode a prior. Of course, this analysis is strictly analogical and non-rigorous.

The Sub-optimality argument against design points to certain apparently sub-optimal features of biological life (such as the Panda's Thumb) as evidence that ID is false. It is usually framed something like this: "look at biological features a, b, and c. These are obviously poorly designed, for reasons d, e, and f. Doesn't sound very 'intelligent' to me."

There are a few problems with this argument. First of all, it is not always obvious that the supposed sub-optimality really exists. All computer scientists and engineers know that good design involves balancing trade-offs. An immediate corollary is that designs are never optimized for everything. They are always optimized for something. So, the fact that pandas are not optimized for eating bamboo does not immediately imply that their design is sub-optimal. For example, über-pandas with opposable thumbs might deforest central China of bamboo, causing widespread ecological disaster.

Secondly, ID theorists (unlike most Creationists) are not committed to the proposition that absolutely everything is designed. There is lots of room within ID for the power of natural selection. In that sense ID supervenes on evolutionary theory: it is not a replacement, it just provides an additional mode of explanation that current evolutionary theory does not.

Last of all, this argument against design relies on an equivocation on the word "intelligent". Take Joe, a high-school drop-out who couldn't multiply fractions if his life depended on it. Is Joe "intelligent"? Well, not in one sense. He is certainly not smart. But he is intelligent in the sense important for ID, that he is an agent capable of purposeful action aimed at an end, and furthermore that these actions are distinguishable from chance and necessity. This is why an archaeologist's ability to distinguish rocks from tools used by ancient man has nothing to do with the optimality of the tool. sub-optimality arguments do present interesting challenges for certain brands of theism (i.e., Christianity), but not for ID per se.

Read about it here.

This is mistaken on so many levels (the ID part, not the bee part) that I don't know where to start.

I would like to start a series of posts examining some of the most common objections to ID. It is hard for ID to get a fair hearing, particularly in the wake of the Dover debacle[1]. But that is what I am going to try to do: present, as I understand them, the merits of ID and the challenges facing it. Doing this solely by examining objections is not the most systematic approach, but it will suffice to sketch the landscape and I think the format is more engaging.

Many arguments against ID are horribly bad, suggesting no effort whatsoever to honestly engage the claims ID is making. I am tempted to simply ignore these, since the principle of charity requires interacting with the best arguments of one's opponents. I hear them too often to let them pass without comment, however, and the principle of charity will not be violated so long as I don't ignore the substantive arguments.

I don't know how big the hostile readership of this blog is, but I welcome critiques of my critiques. We aren't all religious nutjobs, whatever you may have read on the Panda's Thumb. We're searching for the truth and following the arguments where they lead us.

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[1] I call Dover a debacle not because it represents a defeat for the principles of ID, but because it was a PR nightmare. It was reported as a plot by the insidious creationists to corrupt the minds of high schoolers. But in reality most everyone in the ID camp thought the Dover school board's decision was a bad one. The Discovery Institute even counseled them against it.