Design With No Designer

Prior to Darwin, essentialist philosophy held that design could not emerge from chaos without a pre-existing mind. Evidence was lacking that such design was even conceivable, therefore the classic definition of design assumed the existence of a designer.Unfortunately for that philosophy, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection dispelled the illusion of intention from the design process. Although we still use metaphors that attribute agency to certain mechanisms ("Natural selection honed the bat's sense of hearing," or "evolution co-opted the vestigial reptilian jawbones for use in the human inner ear"), we understand evolution's design work to be a step-by-step process unguided by any goal-oriented intelligence.It seems obvious that the Intelligent Design Creationists are resurrecting the old mind-first concept of design, and using examples of natural design to infer intelligence. It is my assertion that this inference is unwarranted.

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That is why most IDists fall back on arguments such as "design is self evident"

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This is exactly my point. Michael Behe reinvented the wheel when he testified to the 'loud cry of DESIGN' that he heard when he looked at his pet biological systems. The problem with his inference was that he automatically attributed that design to intelligence, through defining 'design' as 'intelligent design'.Darwin's theory destroyed the foundation of essentialist theory, since it demonstrated design that was attributable to unguided material forces and not intention or intelligence. Since then, the concept of design no longer presupposes a designer.The burden is upon the IDC'ers to reestablish that foundation, but so far all they have proposed are metaphors concerning mousetraps and other products of human design. The fact that these arguments have failed to bring about a scientific revolution, they claim, is due to the 'materialist' conspiracy and not the shortcomings of their outdated hypothesis.

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What I find ironic is that Behe is a biochemist and would probably consider someone a crank if they proposed that oligo concatamers formed in vitro because of a pink unicorn farting in the galactic ether.

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This is not as facetious as it sounds. Recall that Behe is (ahem) careful not to give away the identity of his intelligent designer, arguing that this minor matter is somehow superfluous to his all-powerful Inference. Thus, the FPU hypothesis is at least more specific than anything Behe has publicly proposed. Are you gunning for a fellowship at the Discovery Institute or something?Furthermore, according to Behe's logic, the FPU hypothesis can claim as much scientific support as any materialistic scenario in explaining the origin of irreducibly complex systems. This is because he denies that such materialistic scenarios exist, are plausible, or are universally accepted.To return to our subject, the most glaring of Behe's deceptive tactics (and the one that defines Intelligent Design Creationism in my estimation) is the age-old conflation of 'design' with 'intelligence'. Regardless of whether he's discussing man-made or biological entities, whether the subject at hand demonstrates irreducible complexity or any other property, or whether plausible evolutionary scenarios for such a system do or don't exist, he still needs to reestablish the link between 'design' and 'intelligence' before he has the right to infer intelligent agency.I have argued that Darwin's theory severed that link, and IDC has failed in its efforts to convince us that such a link exists in the context of biological systems.

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Yes, I think it is obvious from the name there isn't a real attempt to do science.

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Hey, let's give Behe at least some credit. Thanks to his work, scientists stepped up their efforts to provide us with plausible accounts of the evolution of the bacterial flagellum and the other biological structures Behe discussed. And no one will ever again dispute the fact that the mousetrap is the product of intelligent design.

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Seems IDists who frequent this site are somewhat silent
on the intelligence aspects ... or how intellgence is
to be inferred if 'dumb design' is also possible.

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Even the critics of IDC who post here get a little ahead of themselves. This impatience is certainly warranted, but I wanted to see how close I could get to an answer on this particular topic.I agree that IDC has yet to formulate its hypotheses in any detail, and needs to address honestly the evolutionary proposals for complex biological systems without making a charge of 'materialistic bias.' I agree that much of the IDC platform is stealth creationism and there's no consensus as to how much overlap there is (or possibly could be) between IDC and evolution.However, my main point here is to establish the criteria for the way IDC equates design with intelligence as a foundational assumption with no supporting evidence other than metaphors and analogies.As always, Peter, your input is greatly appreciated.

Not only that, Darwinism explicitly denies these arbitrary distinctions. If all biological design is the result of the copying of ancestral forms, then you can't isolate the 'origin' of a design from the process by which it gradually came into existence through the copying of its ancestor designs.How many times have we heard the old canard that 'Darwin explained everything in "The Origin of Species" except the origin of species'? This is why creationists have to conceptualize design according to the man-made models, where there are clearer distinctions between creator, process, and product. In Nature there are no such fine lines.

Let's not overstate the case. Certainly there is ambiguity among the concepts of product, design process, and designer when it comes to human creations. However, it's easy at least to visualize a sculptor in the process of chipping away at a block of marble to create a work of art.The emergence of a new species or sensory organ, in contrast, is much more difficult to perceive. As we have discussed, the bacterial flagellum is probably adapted from a previous secretory system, but at what point did it cease serving primarily its secretory function and become a full fledged flagellum?We Darwinists, of course, dismiss such a question as irrelevant. The cumulative variation and selection process over countless generations transformed the system into the one so close to the hearts of IDC proponents today. Coding for the proteins that comprise the flagellum is the very mechanism that contains the design history itself. Any distinctions we could make between design and designer, or designer and product, are arbitrary at best.The Intelligent Design Creationists, on the other hand, dismiss this as just the sort of reductionism that robs Nature of its wonder. Anyone who has read Dembski's treatment of the flagellum as a 'discrete combinatorial object' realizes how desperate IDC is to force us to accept these problematic distinctions.I assert that IDC sells Nature short. I'm second to no one in my capacity to be staggered by the complexity of life on Earth, and impressed to no end by the design work of purposeless processes. It's a sign of IDC's contempt for Nature that people like Behe and Dembski insist upon attributing all its wonder to a generic designer.

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I find it easy to visualise natural selection chipping away
at the bio-sphere and sculpting innumerable, exquisite forms
that are suited to the prevailing environment ... that
doesn't stop people claiming it cannot possibly have
happened that way.

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The more that I think about it, the better the sculptor analogy sounds. If a sculptor gets rid of everything except the intended design, then natural selection wipes out every design except the one which the circumstances recognize as the fittest.

Analogies are indispensible for clarifying a point, or helping a layman visualize a technical scientific concept. They can also be used to draw attention away from problematic areas of a hypothesis, or to support claims that lack any other substantiation. Two examples can illustrate the use and misuse of such devices.In 'Evolution and the Myth of Creationism,' Tim Berra used pictures of Corvette models over three consecutive years to help readers visualize descent with modification. I recall Phillip Johnson coined the term 'Berra's Blunder' to describe the use of man-made artifacts to explain natural phenomena. While I feel Berra could have just as easily used photographs of sharks or birds to make his point, I hardly think he was trying to assert that a) Corvettes evolve naturally or that b) pictures of Corvettes prove a point about natural history.Notice the difference between that example and one from Dembski, who stated that 'we know from experience that Intelligence is capable of producing IC systems.' He failed to mention that the IC systems he used as evidence of the power of Intelligence are man-made artifacts whose origin is not in dispute. This is meant to obscure people's understanding of the issue at hand, not to aid it.

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We cannot know how a designer will designer[sic], but there must be some aspect of intelligently designed artifacts that can differentiate them from dumb design.

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I've heard proponents of IDC argue that our understanding of the genome is an example of the shortcomings of a materialistic scientific outlook. The notion of 'junk DNA' has given way, they say, to the realization that non-coding DNA may have other uses. If we had taken a 'design perspective' from the beginning, they claim, we might be ahead of where we are today in understanding the uses of non-coding DNA.I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the genome. However, the glib notion of 'junk DNA' always rubbed this Darwinist the wrong way. Why wouldn't non-coding DNA be selected out of the genome if it had no use whatsoever? I always suspected that duplicating billions of completely useless nucleotides during every replication would be woefully inefficient.So it goes back to the shortcomings of the 'design perspective' and the inability of IDC to set a threshold beyond which we can assume something is not the product of intelligence. Would the intelligent designer create a genome with any truly useless DNA whatsoever? And how much 'junk DNA' would be enough to falsify the notion that it was designed by intelligence?

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It was simply after reading too much ID literature--- which involves an inordinate amount of analogy and teleology--- that it seemed more appropriate to call it: Intelligent Design and Inferred Organic Teleology theory.

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Tell the Discovery Institute to throw out all their old stationery. Once we agree on a logo we're sending this baby to the printers.------------------
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Students taking courses in that subject will no[w] learn how NOT to tell the difference between a fossil and a wristwatch while in the field.

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Forgive me for being chilled as well as amused by this. Why does your cruel parody of standard IDC-speak sound no more preoposterous than the 'real' thing?The downward spiral that begins with poor science education makes fertile ground for IDC to take root. That in turn leads to school boards being forced to change curricula to suit the IDC agenda, and guess what? Science education gets even worse.People's horror at the prospect of homo sap being a cosmic footnote is understandable considering we've always been told that we're the product of a unique creative act from an intelligent intervener. However, I'd argue that this gives us even more responsibility to forge the kind of world and society that would be a more fitting legacy of our species. Do we really want to be remembered as the species who turned the world into a radioactive sewer and then bequeathed it to rats and cockroaches?I'd be more charitable toward the IDC folks if their crusade to find the fingerprints of the creator in nature were motivated by an urgent need to treat nature with the respect that its creator would say it deserves. Unfortunately, I've never heard any creationists emphasize such a point.------------------
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ID is worse. It clothes itself in pseudo-scientific jargon and tries to present itself as science while simultaneously trying to disguise the religious agenda of its proponents.

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So you'd rather have an honest obscurantist than a fundie in a lab coat? I see your point.Old Sig Freud would be impressed to see the bald-faced demonstration of his notion of projection offered by the IDC folks. To objections that they are religiously motivated, they reply that Darwinism is a religion. To objections that their theory doesn't constitute science, they reply that Darwinism is not science. To objections that there is no evidence for IDC, they reply that there is no evidence for evolution by natural selection.In a way, IDC has more to lose by stripping away the religious jargon of standard-issue creationism. Are non-religious people likely to be swayed merely by Dembski's mathematical proofs? There is every reason, therefore, to assume that proponents of IDC are deliberately avoiding the issue of religion: it's obvious that that's the prerequisite for accepting the theory in the first place.------------------
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As our house IDC theorist has stated, Evidently the absence of any testable hypotheses concerning the possibility of discerning intelligence behind design is part of Intelligent Design Creationism's strategy. This effectively keeps the harsh light of the lab away from the tender bloom that is their theory. That's enough reason to teach it in schools as an alternative scientific theory. "Peer review"? What is this, the Soviet Union?------------------
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It's painfully ironic how often I hear the hideous story of Lysenko used as a cautionary tale against the establishment of a bogus scientific doctrine via state enforcement. I'm sure you've already guessed that the parallel is always made between Lysenkoism and Darwinism. Intelligent-design creationists are good at making it sound like theirs is the sound scientific ideology that is being persecuted by the totalitarian atheistic status quo.Poor old Vavilov would no doubt turn over in his unmarked grave to know that his plight at the hands of Lysenko is being used to push an agenda every bit as unrealistic and scientifically groundless as Lysenko's anti-geneticism.------------------
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