One Astronomer's Noise

My inbox exploded last week due to two things: a good discussion on editing and publishing our research group’s paper and a debate on Intelligent Design. Luckily, I have my Thunderbird inbox set to view as threaded, so it wasn’t that much of a mess. My paper comments will stay with the PAPER group, but since the ID email thread died before I got my lazy butt around to reading it, I’ll comment here, and link on the VAA blog.

The thread started in response to a Virginia Atheists & Agnostics discussion on intelligent design, which I unfortunately missed. A member of the group who appears to be in favor of ID wrote to the list recommending William Dembski’s 1988 The Design Inference. Dembski is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, the organization that advocates for the teaching of intelligent design, but as far as I can tell, doesn’t actually produce any science. Some of the other list members took the original poster to task with several rebuttals. Although I’m much less familiar with information theory than I am with actual evolutionary biology, I can’t justify finding the time to actually read through Dembksi’s book or the long rebuttals. I’m sure someone can point me to a more succinct discussion of the issues raised, so please do! I haven’t been convinced by an ID argument yet, but I still learn a lot about critical thinking from them.

When asked to summarize the point of the book, the original poster wrote:

As a science, intelligent design cannot identify ALL things designed, nor confirm with certainty that a particular thing is not designed. But, it does seek to identify SOME things that are designed. The argument to design is essentially an inference based on probabilities. As a result, there is a continuum ranging from the likelihood of non-design to the likelihood of design. At a certain point the probability of non-design nears zero and the probability of design nears one. At that point we can say with as much certainty as any other scientific fact that the thing in question was designed. It is in this area that the theory of intelligent design operates.

Criteria for detecting intelligent design are employed in SETI, cryptology, forensic science, etc. The claim is made that these criteria can also be applied to biological systems.

First of all, I’ve been completely unable to accept intelligent design as science. Science must make predictive hypotheses, devise ways to test these hypotheses, and incorporate all new data to modify these hypotheses. Science then produces fairly accurate models of how the universe works, and the ones that are so well supported by evidence as to be regarded as “the way stuff works” are designated “theories.” The very best that I’ve seen intelligent design do is provide very poor and whimsical alternatives to evolution and natural selection which may or may not apply within certain limited circumstances. For example, the flagella of bacteria are deemed “irreducibly complex” and machine-like. However, this, like many many other examples, has been thoroughly debunked. So, the writer of the quote above first of all misunderstands the definition of science by saying that ID may or may not apply to some circumstances. Secondly, he gives ID too much credit, since it hasn’t provided any proof of, evidence for, or serious predictions of intelligence in biological systems!

Next, in talking about probabilities, it is interesting to see how ID proponents assign probabilities to the “designedness” (my word, I’m cool like that) of biological functions and structures. My favorite arguments are that such complex structures, such as DNA, cannot arise from randomness. It’s so ridiculously mathematically improbable! With that, I agree. However, the process of evolution is not random, but guided and shaped by natural selection such that those few out of the many random mutations that benefit an individual propagate throughout the gene pool. And we see it in the lab AND in the fossil record AND right in front of our faces. The evidence is there whether you like it or not. Taking into account that we know that natural selection works and produces such a stunning array of biological specimens, well, the probability of design drops to nil. Unlike in the case of forensic science, where we have evidence of intelligent intent, there is no evidence of intelligent intent in biology. The evidence swings the other way, towards the “blind watchmaker” that IS natural selection.

I get generally annoyed at distortions of science and at blatant anti-science, like that which is spouted by so many IDers. Science is a laborious, winding, grueling process undertaken by legions of workaday scientists and students that do it for various reasons, but never for money or fame. (It’s not that we wouldn’t like it… it’s just not there!) And after slaving over data and simulations and results, their work then has to endure the skeptical shakedown of journal editors and academic audiences and then, finally, they can be assured that they have made some small contribution to science. Unless results are overturned by later evidence. This is serious stuff! So when a theory has undergone all of this for decades through various generations of scientists to finally be accepted as the best model to explain what we see in nature… that is when people with an ideological problem with the conclusions or implications of a theory come out and make all kinds of claims to try and topple well-established science. Is it so surprising, then, when scientists have little patience for such shenanigans? However, scientists still have a duty, in my opinion, to teach about the facts and evidence to the vast majority of people who haven’t made up their minds in ideological disgust.

You know your car wants one.