Debating Design : From Darwin to DNA

Rating:
Summary: Not much of a debate
Review: Another long review: Select see all my reviews link above to see the full text of my review.

While the title suggests that there would be a balance in arguments the anti-Darwinian arguments totally lose out against an overwhelming team of experts. Ruse, Ayala, Sober, Pennock and Miller methodically address the flaws in the scientific and philosophical arguments presented by the ID proponents. The ID proponents such as Dembski, Behe and Meyer mostly seem to be repeating old arguments while ignoring the main criticisms against their ideas.

John Haught's "Darwin, Design and Divine Providence", explains the main reason why Intelligent Design proponents so strongly oppose Darwinism and why they are wrong. Surprisingly it is based on the same argument that some evolutionists use to 'disprove' religion. Namely the idea that "Darwinism renders the notion of a divine Providence implausible". This is an interesting observation which may help explain the strong anti-Darwinism found in ID proponents. While many admit that God (oops, the designer) could have used Darwinian evolution, most seem to reject this based on theological grounds. In other words, rather than being a scientific movement, ID is far more a theological movement. This helps one to understand why ID was quickly to abandon the efforts of teaching of intelligent design in favor of the teachings of 'the controversy'. While little real controversy exists, this allows for a 'wedge' for ID to get its message across. Haught's contribution offers a refreshening insight into why Darwinism can be theologically acceptable. In "God after Darwin" Haught observed that "A God whose very essence is to be the world's open future is not a planner or a designer but an infinitely liberating source of new possibilities and new life. It seems to me that neo-Darwinian biology can live and thrive quite comfortably within the horizon of such a vision of ultimate reality."
Haught shows convincingly how Darwinian evolution does not inevitably entail a materialistic philosophy and that the theological notion of Providence is different from the idea of Intelligent Design. Haught thus argues that evolution and divine Providence are compatible. In fact the ultimate love (God's Providence) can only be found in the contingency of life, free of ant predestination or rigidities. Haught's chapter is a must read for scientists and Christians.

Ayala's argument in "Design without Designer: Darwin's Greatest Discovery" is very similar to Ruse's namely that teleology in nature is the expected outcome of the processes of evolution which include natural selection. Thus the appearance of teleology by itself is not sufficient to infer intelligent design. In other words, even if we can infer design, we cannot exclude "natural selection" as its designer. One of the earliest people to point out this limitation in Dembski's argument was Wesley Elsberry.

In "DNA by Design? Stephen Meyer and the Return of the God Hypothesis " Pennock addresses many of the claims by Meyer and shows why they are without much merrit. Pennock points out the 'cut and paste' approach of Meyer in which old arguments, even after been shown to be erroneous, end up in later publications (especially in publications that are not peer reviewed such as newspapers). Pennock not only shows that the anti-Darwinian implications of the Cambrian explosion are mostly "blown out of proportion" (pardon the pun), but also that ID proponents fail to present much of a scientific argument in favor of their own claims. Questions which remain unanswered inclide "what about phyla which arose after the Cambrian? Where they also 'designed'?", "what about the species that arose since the explosion such as us humans?"

Elliot Sober in "The Design Argument" shows what is wrong with the philosophical and logical foundations of the "intelligent design" argument as proposed by Dembski. By showing that there is no probabilistic equivalent to the "modus tollens" argument, Sober shows how the fundation of the design argument is fundamentally and irrepairably flawed. Modus tollens is the argument that "if P then Q", followed by the observation that "Q" is false, hence P is false. But when dealing with probabilistic arguments, such as found in the intelligent design approach, modus tollens does not hold anymore. In other words, if a hypothesis states that an observation is very unlikely, it does not mean that the hypothesis is unlikely. Probabilistic arguments to show "intelligent design" are quite common and all suffer from the above flaw. Because of this "Intelligent Design" has to show that the probability of a particular observation or event "E" is more probable given the intelligent design hypothesis than a naturalistic hypothesis. But this means that "intelligent design" has to be formulated in a positive rather than its usual negative (eliminative) form. Intelligent Design inferences are typically stated as not(chance and/or regularity) thus intelligent design. This argument, also known as "argument from ignorance" forms a poor logical and scientific foundation for science. Hence we have to reject the "intelligent design" claims based on such an approach. That the "intelligent design" approach is indeed unsuitable for scientific inquiry can be observed in a total absence of "intelligent design" hypotheses relevant to science. As Del Ratzsch has stated (I paraphrase), in order for intelligent design to be relevant it has to show that it can give better 'non ad hoc' explanations of the observations. An "intelligent designer" did it fails that requirement.

Kenneth Miller in the chapter "The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of "Irreducible Complexity", shows in intricate detail how the homology between type III secretory apparatus and the bacterial flagellum gives us a fascinating insight into the likely evolutionary pathways where the two share a common ancestor. In "Why intelligent design fails Young and Edis (ed)", Ian Musgrave shows in even more detail how science is unraveling much of the mystery behind the bacterial flagellum, leaving little room for an intelligent designer to hide. Miller also addresses the 'probability calculations' by Dembski in his book "No Free Lunch" to show how Dembski's model has little similarity to reality.

Dembski in "The Logical Underpinnings of Intelligent Design" continues to argue his fallacious claim that his explanatory filter has no 'false positives' despite the fact that such false positives are unavoidable. Failing to address the criticisms by his opponents and even fellow ID proponents such as Del Ratzsch, Dembski still argues the logically impossible namely that his filter does not suffer from false positives. In fact Dembski more recently has accepted false positives as an inevitable risk of doing science but he also maintains that false positives would render the explanatory filter useless. Seems to me that the only logical conclusion thus is that the explanatory filter (which is used to infer intelligent design) is useless. A conclusion already reached by intelligent design proponents such as Del Ratzsch who stated

"So typically, patterns that are likely candidates for design are first identified as such by some unspecified ("mysterious") means, then with the pattern in hand S picks out side information identified (by unspecified means) as releavant to the particular pattern, then sees whether the pattern in question is among the various patterns that could have been constructed from that side information. What this means, of course, is that Dembski's design inference will not be particularly useful either in initial recognition or identification of design."

From page 159 of Del Ratzsch's "Nature design and science: The Status of Design in Natural Science", Suny Series in Philosophy and Biology, State University of New York Press (April 1, 2001) which is an excellent book by an intelligent design proponent who often takes an unpopular stance within the ID movement.

Behe, in "Irreducible Complexity: Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution ", focuses on the concept of irreduble complexity as a reliable indicator of intelligent design but irreducible complexity has been shown to be able to arise under fully natural processes thus it is not a very reliable indicator of design. In fact the argument from IC (irreducible complexity) mostly centers around our ignorance of the actual details. While the bacterial flagellum may have appeared to be IC, more and more research provides us with fascinating insights as to how it may have evolved (Musgrave, Matzke). See also Kenneth Miller in this volume.

Finally, Meyer, in "The Cambrian Information Explosion: Evidence for Intelligent Design" raises the old canard (can we say Icon of Intelligent Design) of the Cambrian explosion much of the arguments seem to be contrary to (again) recent scientific findings making the Cambrian explosion as an argument for design one based on our ignorance more than on a positive contribution to our scientific understanding. Contrary to what ID proponents seem to suggest, the Cambrian explosion was not the origin of complex life although it was a period of rapid divergence. Multicellular life can be traced back to the pre-cambrian and bacteria to more than 3.5 billion years ago. Beautiful transitional fossil evidence and evidence of phyla level evolution can be found. The Cambrian explosion is hardly the enigma Meyer seems to want it to be. In other words, the Cambrian explosion, as described by Meyer mostly is a strawman argument, or in simpler terms an argument at odds with both the evidence and the scientific understanding of this event. But even ignoring these shortcomings, Meyer does not present any scientific evidence why the Cambrian explosion should be seen as 'evidence of intelligent design'. Kenneth Miller raised a good question: If all these organisms were designed by an intelligent design during the Cambrian why did most of them go extinct?

Rating:
Summary: Turtles upon turtles
Review: Intelligent Design proponents don't seem to be able to get past the oxymoron imbedded in their premise. If life, the earth, the universe, etc. is so complex that it must have been designed by a vast intelligence... think how complex that designing intelligence must be... so complex that it also must have been designed by an even more superior intelligence... and that one by one even more advanced... and so on, ad infinitum.

Put another way, if we need a god, then so does god, and so does god's god and god's god's god, and so on.

Once we decide that it is necessary for there to exist something causeless and uncreated, it becomes unnecessary to bring god into the equation at all.

Intelligent design is a comical effort to teach religion in science class. The act of seriously considering such oxymoronic nonsense can only be the result of intellectual limitations caused by the betrayal of reason to mysticism, fear, and cultural retardation.

However, a million years from now, if we are still here, our schools will be able to honestly teach intelligent design... because instead of allowing the chance mechanism of evolution to dictate the future of mankind, we are now designing that fate for ourselves.

Rating:
Summary: A closed debate?
Review: This is a very useful collection of essays on the design debate, with a good mix of viewpoints. But, unfortunately, a strange thing has happened, Darwinists and Intelligent Design proponents have learned to coexist and remain deaf, caught up in their separate agendas. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that the field of debate has been monopolized by the two parties that have social clout, with little chance of really breaking the deadlock with fresh ideas. It is not hard to clarify the issue of evolution, but the people with the means to do this don't have ad budgets. So we are stuck with the dreary Darwin boilerplate and now the legerdemain of the ID faction. The Darwinists are frozen, and the ID people, after a burst of useful criticisms of Darwinism, have also become fronzen.
One part of the problem is that ID folk have gone a bridge too far. As a critique of natural selection, Darwin doubt is one thing. But to go over the threshold to a new and complex metaphysics in disguise via the rehashed hopes for the argument by design simply drives the dialectic in reverse gear. That gives Darwinists their excuse to not listen to criticisms of their position. It is getting very tiresome to hear still the useless claims that Darwin's theory resolves issues of complexity, teleology, and the rest. Will they never learn?

We need a third new perspective, not connected with theology in the background, and capable of both using the insights of the new complexity sciences, without their hype, to produce a self-critique of natural selection. Once that's accomplished, then perhaps a new methodology can be devised. The essays of Davies and Kaufmann show hints in that direction, but are still stuck in the wrong science mindset.
A ways to go here. The Darwin defenders are notably without insight into the weaknesses of their position, and the fixation on Darwin's theory goes on and on.