Being Smart About Intelligent Design

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Being Smart About Intelligent Design

• David Banach
• Department of Philosophy
• St. Anselm College

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What is Intelligent Design?
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Central Works and Figures

• Behe, Michael J. Darwin's Black Box. Simon
  Schuster 1996
• Dembski, William. Intelligent Design The Bridge
  Between Science and Theology. InterVarsity Press,
  1999.
• William S. Harris and John H. Calvert.
  Intelligent Design The Scientific Alternative
  to Evolution (National Catholic Bioethics
  Quarterly, Autumn 2003) .

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Intelligent Design in the News

• Kansas
•    Discovery Institute 1999 and 2005 State
  Science Standards
• Pennsylvania Thomas More Law CenterDiscovery
  Institute.Pandas and People. Edited Creationist
  text.

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The WedgeThe 1998 manifesto of the Discovery
Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and
Culture

• Governing Goals
• To defeat scientific materialism and its
  destructive moral, cultural and political
  legacies.
• To replace materialistic explanations with the
  theistic understanding that nature and human
  beings are created by God.
• Five Year Goals
• To see intelligent design theory as an accepted
  alternative in the sciences and scientific
  research being done from the perspective of
  design theory.
• To see the beginning of the influence of design
  theory in spheres other than natural science.
• To see major new debates in education, life
  issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed
  to the front of the national agenda.
• Twenty Year Goals
• To see intelligent design theory as the dominant
  perspective in science.
• To see design theory application in specific
  fields, including molecular biology,
  biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology
  in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics,
  politics, theology and philosophy in the
  humanities to see its influence in the fine
  arts.
• To see design theory permeate our religious,
  cultural, moral and political life.

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Lesson 1

• Stick to the Science and not the Politics.
• Much of the debate on ID is a reflection of the
  larger Postmodern debate about the roles of
  reason and power in determining the True and the
  Good.

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Is it Science?

• Is it Scientific Discourse?YES. It makes
  statements of fact and reason that can be
  verified or falsified.
• Is it a Scientific Theory?NO. It does not
  provide a systematic matrix of theoretical
  statements that allow useful predictions in a
  wide range of cases.
• Is it Good Science?NO. Its main arguments do
  not establish their claims.

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Lesson 2

• ID should be refuted as Scientific Discourse,
  using the facts and argument.
• It should not be dismissed as non-science. This
  has the appearance of a institutional power play,
  and invites response in kind.

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Key ArgumentsLife cannot be the result of
random physical forces. Evolution is random.

• Specified Complexity (Dembski).
• Irreducible Complexity (Behe)
• Darwins Black Box Newly discovered bio-chemical
  complexity.
• The Origin of Life.

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Lesson 3

• Understand how Evolution Works.

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Evolution is NOT Random

• Systems involving1. Inheritance2. Variation
• 3. Differential Survival (Selection)
• function as algorithms that naturally act in
  very non-random ways, tending inexorably towards
  higher fitness.
• Evolution agrees that complex objects could not
  have arisen randomly.
• The source of variation is normally thought to be
  random, or undirected, mutations, but this is not
  the essential feature of Evolution.
• Not all natural activity that is undirected or
  non-intelligent is random. Undirected?Random.

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Adaptive Landscapes and Evolutionary Algorithms
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The Argument from Probability

• Complex objects have1. Many Parts, with many,
  many possible combinations.2. One of which,
  specifiable in advance, is the right or
  functional one.
• It is vastly improbable, then, that complex
  objects arise from a random combination from
  their parts.

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Specified Complexity

• An event exhibits specified complexity if it is
  contingent and therefore not necessary if it is
  complex and therefore not readily repeatable by
  chance and if it is specified in the sense of
  exhibiting an independently given pattern." (p.
  4)
• (Dembski, William A. (2003). Gauging Intelligent
  Design?
• Equivalent to Dawkins definition of complex.

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Complex
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Not Complex
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Irreducible Complexity

• Irreducible Complexity (Behe)By irreducibly
  complex I mean a single system composed of
  several well-matched, interacting parts that
  contribute to the basic function, wherein the
  removal of any one of the parts causes the system
  to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly
  complex system cannot be produced directly (that
  is, by continuously improving the initial
  function, which continues to work by the same
  mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of
  a precursor system, because any precursor to an
  irreducibly complex system that is missing a part
  is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly
  complex biological system, if there is such a
  thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian
  evolution. (p. 39)

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E. Coli Flagellum
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Darwins Black Box

• Newly discovered bio-chemical complexity.
  Explanations of the evolution of gross anatomical
  features leave out explanations of the even more
  complex microscopic mechanisms that lie hidden
  within them.

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Blood Coagulation Cascade (Behe)
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The Evolution of the Eye
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Our Intuitions are Bad Judges

• Given the lengths of time and the probabilities
  involved, our intuitions mislead us about what is
  or is not possible.
• We would not say it was impossible to fit all of
  the information in the bible into a square
  centimeter, even though we cannot imagine it.

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100 to 99 80 in 1000 generations100 to 95
80 in 200, 98 in 1000 generations(Mark
Ridley, Evolution, p. 95)
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Self-Organization.5 .48
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Self-Organization.6 1.2
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Self-OrganizationVarious Ratios near .6
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Self-OrganizationBenard Convection Patterns
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The Eye Without Intelligence
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Lesson 3

• Genes evolve, not gross anatomical structures. We
  should ask how the genes that give rise to
  complex structures can evolve, not the parts of
  the structures themselves.
• Mechanical processes with no intelligence give
  rise to complex structures in development.

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The Problem of the Origin of Life

• Since the conditions that allow natural selection
  require Self-Replicating molecules, Natural
  Selection cannot explain the origin of these
  molecules.
• Fred Hoyle compared the probability of a protein
  forming randomly from amino acids to the chances
  of a tornado assembling the parts of a 747
  passing through a junkyard.

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Time Scale of Lifes Evolution
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Time Scale of Lifes Evolution

• If the age of the earth (4.6 billion years) were
  condensed into one year ...
• Jan. 1 -- Earth was born Early Feb. -- Oldest
  known rocks formed Late Mar. -- First primitive
  life formed Mid Nov.-- First complex life with
  shells or skeletons formed Late Nov. -- First
  land animals Dec. 25 -- Extinction of the
  dinosaurs Dec. 31 -- Humans evolved in the
  evening Dec. 31 -- one second before midnight,
  humans first set foot on the Moon
• From Davidson et al., 2002

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The Vicious Circle

• DNA requires a number of complex enzymes to
  replicate and to maintain its integrity. But
  these enzymes, being complex, could not have
  evolved without natural selection and some system
  of replication.

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DNA Replication(The Way Life Works, M. Hoagland,
Bert Dodson)
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Lesson 4

• Be careful what you ask for.
• The type of design envisioned by ID is not
  intelligent.

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What is Design?

• Design directly manipulates and uses the natural
  properties of objects to serve a novel purpose.
• No manipulation, no design. Throwing a log on the
  fire or bringing into existence a pre-existing
  form is not design.
• No direct manipulation, no design. The manager
  who puts the engineers together on a project is
  not the designer.

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Problems with Design Envisioned by ID

• Must have occurred at many different times during
  the history of life.
• Requires the direct intervention into naturally
  evolving system.
• Requires design of genes not structures.
• Can be altered by subsequent evolution.
• Frequent intervention in natural processes is
  incompatible with omniscient, omnipotent
  designer.

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2 Designs

• One works without intelligent intervention based
  only on the natural properties of the mechanism.
• The other cannot perform its function through its
  natural properties alone, and requires the
  intervention of intelligence.
• Which is the better design?

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Lessons for the ScientistBeing Smart about
Intelligent Design

• ID should be refuted as Scientific Discourse,
  using the facts and argument.
• It should not be dismissed as non-science. This
  has the appearance of a institutional power play,
  and invites response in kind.
• Scientists should be state clearly the scientific
  consensus about what we know and dont know about
  the history of life. They should be clear both
  about what ID concedes and about what problems
  evolutionary theory faces and their best probable
  solutions.
• Scientists should be smart (and not glib) about
  the problems posed for human value and meaning by
  a world devoid of purpose and plan. The problems
  of the meaning of Life are no more trivial than
  those of the meaning of (biological) life.

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Lessons for the Religious Person Being Smart
about Intelligent Design

• Be clear about how natural selection works as
  well as the different meanings of random and
  purposive.
• Dont trust your intuitions about what natural
  selection can and cant do.
• Dont put too much hope in a set of speculations
  that may be empirically disproved.
• In attempting to gain the authority that comes
  with scientific method, do not forget the
  underlying differences between what the methods
  of science and religion reveal about the world.
  If you want to attack mechanism, you cant do it
  through science.
• Be Clear about what kind of design you are
  envisioning and whether it is appropriate to the
  God you believe in.