Ever more involutions

I have been looking into "intelligent design". It's the latest fraudulent attempt by creationists to make their beliefs, which are entirely metaphysical, look scientific. Their leading light is a guy called Dembski (I know, one letter away, surely someone designed his name to look so much like Dumbski!). He suggests ten questions that chldren could ask their biology teachers -- as if the poor buggers didn't have enough to deal with.

I don't mind giving them a go myself. Here we go:

1. If nature, or some aspect of it, is intelligently designed, how can we tell?

Quite simply, we can't. Unless the designer tells us there is no way to tell by principle. Dembski tries to get round this by suggesting that we can tell because of "specified complexity" (which rather begs the question, because immediately one asks who does the specifying). He says it is contingent because there are several live possibilities (don't ask me what that means -- I've read his shit and I still can't get anything more out of this than that it is possible that it is designed because it looks like it might be. This isn't what contingent means by the broadest stretch of the word); complex because it allows many alternatives and is not easily repeatable by chance (he doesn't trouble himself to define "easily" or give a clear idea of what "chance" does or doesn't include); specified in that it exhibits an "independently given" pattern (IOW, if it looks like a pattern, someone made the pattern.

The clearest answer is that a thing would look the same whether made by chance or designed. Without criteria to judge, you cannot judge. "It just looks like it"

2. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific research program that searches for signs of intelligence from distant space. Should biologists likewise search for signs of intelligence in biological systems? Why or why not?

Biologists are welcome to search for whatever they like. SETI is a programme with clear objectives and a structured approach to a simple goal. Write the objectives for biologists, give them the approach and see whether they are interested.

Dembski would be better asking why they don't do so.

Something Dembski ignores, as an aside, is that SETI searches for intelligence like ours. They are searching for signs that someone signals the way we do. God's intelligence, I have to say, we'd expect to differ from ours somewhat.

3. How do we account for the complex information-rich patterns in biological systems? Where did they originate?

The complexity of biological systems arose by evolution. There is nothing too mysterious about it. It can be modelled fairly easily (not by me but by a scientist with the correct tools -- however, the equations are not actually all that difficult unless you are, like me, a Bear With No Head for Maths).

Why is Dembski asking this? Well, he thinks that you cannot introduce information into a system, because it cannot be created out of nothing (he is invoking the second law of thermodynamics, insisting that order should diminish). But biological systems are not isolates, but interact with other systems around them. The laws of thermodynamics only work in closed systems, like the universe. We might be universes in grains of rice in a metaphor, but we are not in reality.

4. Do any structures in the cell resemble machines designed by humans? How do we account for such structures?

Some structures in cells faintly resemble machines designed by humans. Some machines designed by humans work on mechanical principles that demand they are a certain way. That nature must obey the same principles should not astonish us.

A raindrop in space would be perfectly spherical. Does that mean it is made by people who make ballbearings?

It would make just as much, or as little sense, to ask the question the other way round: some structures designed by humans look like structures in cells. Were they designed by God?

5. What are irreducibly complex systems? Do such systems exist in biology? If so, are those systems evidence for design? If not, why not?

Irreducibly complex systems are combinations of simple systems, whose parts creationists lack the imagination to work out the function of. Nature adapts what there is. It uses what is available, what is used in other contexts to do other things, what isn't currently being used. Your earbones were jawbones. It's true.

This is recognisably another stab at the "no intermediate forms" argument -- if we evolved in x number of steps, animals with steps 1 to x should still exist. There are no animals with steps 1 to x, so there was no evolution. It's utter bollocks. In many cases, the intermediate stages are visible. Different reptiles have different jawbones for example. This argument has always ignored two facts: one, that mutations do not always have clear expressions in the phenotype, but they do have linkages in the genome (IOW, they work in groups not in single correspondences), so that cumulative mutations can work what look like overnight changes; two, the acceptance, if we can call it that, and spread of beneficial alleles can be quite rapid (even though evolution is on the whole a slow process, genes can and do change quickly).

6. Human designers reuse designs that work well. Life forms also repeat the use of certain structures (the camera eye, for example). Is this evidence for common descent, evolutionary convergence, common design, or a combination of these?

Why wouldn't nature use the same plan twice? On the other hand, if the design is so damned good, why doesn't it use it every time?

There are relatively few ways to see in the animal world (let's accept that plants don't as such, although they do react to light -- which is all that "seeing" is, remember). Dembski hopes that the unthinking evolutionist will say "well, it's common descent", because he knows that the "camera eye" evolved separately in different lineages at different times. But why wouldn't it? What other type of eyes would the animals that have them have? Faceted eyes would not be a good adaptation for human beings (it's great for flies because of the different demands their environment makes on them).

The answer is that "camera eyes" exist because of common descent and evolutionary convergence.

So do wings. Bird wings and bat wings are very different. You don't catch too many bats with feathers. But why not? If the design is so good -- and it is good, arguably better than the leather a bat has to use -- why didn't God use it for bats as well as birds?

Dembski chooses only to discuss the example that he thinks causes difficulty for evolution -- but science doesn't work like that. He must explain why the intelligent designer used two designs for wings. Did God not like the bat wing and decide to go with feathers next time around?

7. In trying to understand biological systems, molecular biologists often need to “reverse engineer” them. Is this evidence that the systems were engineered to begin with?

It's evidence that scientists use analogy and metaphor. Besides, biological systems are engineered. They are put together by proteins using a blueprint called genes.

8. Do intelligent design theory and neo-Darwinian theory make different predictions? Take, for instance, junk DNA. For which of the two theories would the idea that large stretches of DNA are junk be more plausible?

So far as I know, intelligent design "theory" doesn't make any predictions at all. Evolutionary theory can clearly explain junk DNA. It's the detritus of a process that has no purpose and operates by chance. That some scientist has found that it's not all complete junk does not show a thing about intelligent design. It simply shows that as the evolutionists insist, nature will occasionally pick up and use the junk in a new context (as their theory predicts). Dembski refers to the appendix, which was thought to be vestigial but now we understand has a part to play in the immune system. He ignores that people like me, who lack an appendix, still have an immune system and at that, one that is indistinguishable from that in those who have one. Hello? What's going on there? Could it be an example of something redundant, still coded for in our genes, but not vital to our survival? Why have it in your design? Why waste the material in building it?

What does intelligent design predict? That we will find things that look like they were designed. Erm. Okay. That's like saying it predicts the sun will rise tomorrow. No shit. Why things look like they were designed is the fact that needs explaining, not a prediction!

Intelligent design predicts that we should not have appendixes. Dembski should take more care which examples he picks.

9. What evidence would convince you that intelligent design is true and neo-Darwinism is false? If no such evidence exists or indeed can exist, how can neo-Darwinism be a testable scientific theory?

God would have to tell me himself that he designed my appendix. It's as simple as that. It's incumbent on Dembski to tell us what would falsify his "theory". "Neo-Darwinism" is a label, not a theory. Evolution is a fact. That the distribution of alleles in a population changes is not in question. There is evidence that that change is expressed -- lots of it. There is evidence that changes in genes correspond to changes in the phenotype. Lots of that too. It's almost insane to challenge that, and intelligent design "theorists" are at least more cluey than your usual evolutionist in that they accept that evolution is a fact and that it makes changes. However, they insist that it is limited in scope (they don't explain how). They claim that ickle lickle mutations in genes cannot make big body changes. This is easily falsified by looking at fruitflies with legs growing where their eyes should be (easily achieved by shifting a gene).

The theories that make up our understanding of evolutionary biology are testable, and are tested. Explaining how they would be falsified would be very complex. Dembski complains that evolutionists need only show how things could have been evolved to counter arguments that they were not. Well, really, what else could they do? You falsify their theory by showing that that is not how the things evolved! You provide evidence that they did not (Jesus told me is not "evidence" in this context). Scientists will tell you, even, what that evidence might be (not what it is, what it might be, note). Haldane's rabbit in the rocks was an attempt to do just that. Dembski scoffs that Haldane would have dismissed it as "evolutionary convergence". He wouldn't. Show him a 300-million-year-old rabbit and he'd start to wonder about his theory. Show him two in two different places and his theory's fucked.

It still wouldn't make intelligent design right, though. Science is not a competition. It's not a deathmatch. Prove Darwin wrong and there's a hole. You don't just slip what you like into it. Your theory has to meet the same standards. It has to actually fit the hole.

10. Can we determine whether an object is designed without identifying or knowing anything about its designer? For instance, can we identify an object as an ancient artifact without knowing anything about the civilization that produced it?

No, we certainly cannot. We know that human artifacts are human because we know what humans are like. We know what their tools are like and what they create. We don't think that pottery is made by man because it looks like someone designed it. We know it's pottery because we know man makes pots.

Dembski introduces some guff about signs and signifiers at this point. He says that the marks of design are a sign, and need say nothing about the signifier. So archaeologists dig up what look like tools and say they have found tools (they don't, actually, they say they've found what look like tools -- spot the difference).

But signs can be misleading. There's a Brazilian defender whose name is Argelico Fucks. His surname does not signify anything sexual (it's probably derived from the German Fuchs, but I don't know that -- hey, would I be reading too much into it, do you think?). It does not signify that an ancestor of his wanted us to get a thrill from it (if it, ahem, evolved from Fuchs, far from it, the ancestor would be bemused to hear that we are amused by it).

Maybe some of the pebbles on the beach are artifacts of alien civilisations. If we do not know what they make, we couldn't know. They look kind of fashioned, some of them, smooth, you know what I mean... Perhaps...

I know, I know. There's another explanation for pebbles on the beach. It's far more prosaic and doesn't serve any other purpose. But how could you falsify the idea that the sea wore them smooth?

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:13 am