A thought on Intelligence behind Design

I’m not persuaded at all by Dembski’s work, and perhaps the reason conventional science hasn’t bowed before him and dismantled the outmoded edifice of methodological naturalism at his behest is not philosophical stonewalling but because others share my misgivings.The basis of Dembski’s inference of intelligent intervention is Complex Specified Information, but that impressive term boils down to ‘complexity in nature’. Information theory treats all information as complex and specified. Dembski distinguishes between a string of merely ordered numbers (like 12357) and a string of numbers that demonstrates CSI (like the entire series of prime numbers from 1 to 101), but never tells us what the magic threshold is where order crosses over into the realm of CSI. He simply knows it when he sees it.Dembski claims that other sciences utilize the three-stage explanatory filter to infer intelligent intervention, so why not biology? This might seem logical to him, but there are more significant differences between forensics and archaeology on the one hand and biology on the other than ID is willing to admit. I liked Dembski’s example of election commissioner/fiddler Nicholas Caputo, and I fully agree that intelligent intervention is the correct inference in this case. But is the Caputo example applicable to detecting intelligent intervention in biology? It’s always easy to disqualify chance, so I’ll say chance is no issue. However, moving on to necessity illustrates the differences between biology and election-rigging. In the Caputo case, it’s difficult to conceive of any physical or material mechanism that could produce an outcome of any kind. Am I right in drawing a blank there? It’s easy to move on in the Caputo case, but it’s nowhere near that easy in biology. All the time there are new theories being offered about material mechanisms, and Dembski’s explanatory filter must at least claim to take them into account. When the subject is ancient biology, I feel that gauging the likelihood of any or all material mechanisms affecting the outcome is a much more difficult enterprise than Dembski lets on. However, the final step of concluding intelligent intervention is the one that illustrates how different biology and electoral politics are. Caputo’s identity, motives, methods, and political affiliation are all known. They all are essential in our inference of intelligent intervention, and any could conceivably have falsified our inference (for example, if Caputo had been a Republican). No information whatsoever exists about the Intelligent Intervener responsible for the bacterial flagellum.Dembski also makes it seem like his explanatory filter is least likely to produce an inference of intelligent intervention, since that step comes only after he’s gauged the likelihood of chance and necessity. However, the opposite is actually true. He’s made it so he can assume the probability of design is 100% after he’s disqualified the other two options, but I think there are good reasons to weigh the probability of intelligent intervention independently. An archaeologist who claimed to have ‘inferred’ intelligent intervention in an artifact that was hundreds of millions of years old would still have questions to answer concerning the probability of intelligent intervention that far in the past. The more likely design inference would be fraud. (Does that help Dembski’s case?) In effect, while it infers exactly the same thing as the archaeologist, ID considers further questions concerning the likelihood of intelligent intervention in ancient molecular biology both unanswerable and irrelevant.------------------
"Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow."
-John Lennon

I see what you mean. That's just my point, that he doesn't consider it necessary to calculate the independent probability of the flagellum being designed (whatever that would entail) after he's disposed of the other two explanations. As others have rightly noted, Dembski also assumes that chance, necessity, and design are mutually exclusive, and I could think of quite a few instances where that is not true.

Dennett made the point (in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) that the Darwinist model of Design-with-no-designer is so contrary to Mind-first, essentialist philosophy that it still has the power to disturb people. Prior to Darwin, the burden was on nonbelievers to prove order could emerge from chaos without a pre-existing intelligence. The fact that some believers feel the need to resurrect that extinct notion of top-down creation in the face of a mountain of evidence of bottom-up evolution forces them into absolutely futile feats of intellectual gymnastics. I’m not convinced by any of the Intelligence-proving arguments put forward by the ID folks. I’m even less convinced by the accomodating stance taken by some evolution supporters who feel they have to be delicate with the tender sensibilities of people looking for God in a microscope. I suppose it would be comforting if the bacterial flagellum were proof that our lives have cosmic meaning and assurance that the suffering of millions is not in vain. Unfortunately, that’s a lot to ask of a tool that, whether IC or not, helps bacteria along on their often insidious errands.

I absolutely agree. How much evidence of haphazard, short-sighted design do they need before they admit that it may not be guided by an Intelligence? I've always relied on the measure of how much or little impact additional information would have on a certain hypothesis. The Intelligence theorists can accomodate any data whatsoever, because they assume what they're trying to prove. Nothing could conceiveably contradict the hypothesis that 'The Intelligence wanted it designed this way.' This is what makes the theory unscientific: not only its unfalsifiability, but its general lack of utility to guide further investigation.

The above post is a computer-generated string of meaningless characters whose appearance is that of a designed communication emanating from intelligence but is actually the result of unguided mechanistic processes. Proof if you need it.------------------
"Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill. It is a bottomless pit."
-William S. Burroughs

Great point. Behe and the ID'ers assert until blue in the face that biological complexity that fails every conceivable standard of Intelligent Design is still a sign of Intelligence as long as it's Irreducible Complexity. Behe's use of Rube Goldberg cartoons in "Darwin's Black Box" is so ironic it hurts: the joke is that no Intelligence would ever design anything as insanely complex as that. If Behe and his acolytes are so stuck on analogies, why can't they see that a machine so jury-rigged that it will stop functioning if ONE part is removed isn't a testament to Intelligence at all?

You make a valid distinction between design as a concept and Intelligent Design. It seems we've both noticed the semantics involved in Behe's conflation of the two definitions. This is a point he belabors in "Darwin's Black Box" but never comes close to resolving: the believer in Intelligent Design must overlook suboptimal design in nature, while the critics of ID are obliged to know why it's proof of Intelligence even if suboptimal. The answer given is usually that we can't assume the Intelligence wouldn't design something that way. We may be excused for wondering why ID proponents can determine how an Intelligence would design, but not how it wouldn't.There's a more interesting issue lurking there as well. I'm fully aware of the limitations of the human body and the suboptimal design of many of the structures therein, but I'm still staggered by how wonderful it is. It's impressive only because it's the product of billions of years of design work carried out step by step. As you noted, it's much less impressive if it were carried out by an Intelligence with the sole intention of creating a Human Being.

All machines? By your definition, then, an Intelligent Designer could not design a machine (biological or otherwise) that could function with a part removed from this 'irreducible core'? Wouldn't this, in fact, be proof positive of Super Intelligent Design and not the opposite?

That's a matter of interpretation. I think both the definition and the relevance of 'irreducible complexity' are lacking.Behe himself describes IC thus: "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."His description ignores the fact that some of the biological phenomena he calls IC can be reduced. Dolphins evidently do without the Hagemann factor, an important step in human blood clotting. Of course, Behe described the blood clotting cascade as IC.What we want to know is why IC is offered as proof of Intelligent Design when it could be equally offered as evidence of a design flaw. Successive changes to a system could indeed incorporate improvements that only subsequently became essential. It seems more logical to me that a sign of truly Intelligent Design would be a system composed of interactive parts that did not cease functioning due to the removal of any one part.So if you agree that the blood clotting cascade is IC, then dolphins shouldn't be able to do without the Hagemann factor. However, if you agree that the Intelligent Design is in their ability to do without that important step, you've effectively refuted Behe.

The point is not that certain things are or are not IC. It's extremely convenient that you should limit IC to structures too small to fossilize and therefore extremely difficult to establish any sort of developmental pathway in detail.However, my argument is that using IC as evidence for Intelligent Design is presumptuous. Why is this property (however it's defined) your automatic proof of Intelligent Intervention? What is it about this particular property that justifies an inference of Intelligent Design?

I agree. Behe went to great lengths to point out molecular machines for which (at the time of his writing "Darwin's Black Box") there existed precious little evolutionary analysis, then turned around and claimed that the proof they were Intelligently Designed was the fact that scientists had only speculated about possible evolutionary pathways!Recall that Behe was the person who claimed that scientists would never establish a plausible ancestral sequence between land mammals and cetaceans, mere months before Thewissen and co. started digging up whale fossils with legs. Nostradamus he ain't.

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My ID inference hinges on the fact that molecular machines are machines (as all machines are IC at some level). They are not like machines - they are machines.

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You're proving my point that Behe and his acolytes use metaphor and analogy in lieu of evidence or testable hypotheses: if molecular machines are (or are even just like) machines, then anything true of machines can also be said of molecular machines.I mentioned before that ID assumes what it is trying to prove. An inference of Intelligence already assumes that the only thing capable of producing machine-like phenomena is Intelligence. In fact, these same biological structures we're discussing are the things that run counter to your assumption, since there's no evidence that these machines (or anything else in biology) were the products of Intelligence. Therefore you have no reason to use them as support for your inference.[This message has been edited by MrHambre, 06-25-2003]

No one mentioned origin-of-life, we're talking about the assumption that ALL MACHINES ARE THE PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENCE. Where is your support for this assumption, seeing that it is the basis of your inference? You want to call a flagellum a machine, that's fine, but the only reason you feel justified in invoking Intelligence to explain its origin is because you've already decided that ALL MACHINES ARE THE PRODUCT OF INTELLIGENCE.

A very wise man (okay, it was Wounded King) once summed up IDers' logic thus:

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When you have eliminated the possible, whatever remains, no matter how irrational, must be the truth. Is that how it goes?

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And that's about the size of it.

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1. You have provided no evidence that indicates the flagellum evolved.

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2. You have provided no evidence that indicates RM&NS brought the flagellum into existence.

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Ian Musgrave at the University of Adelaide has published a detailed naturalistic model of a possible developmental pathway through which the BacFlag may have evolved from a bacterial secretory system. The model relies solely on step-by-step improvements made to the ancestor system through RM&NS. Page not found | Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences | University of Adelaide
If you're not satisfied with this model (and I'd bet you won't be), kindly show us a similarly detailed proposal for the process through which the BacFlag was intelligently designed.

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3. You have provided no argument that indicates a teleological explanation for the origin of the flagellum is wrong.

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4. When asked what type of data about the flagellum would cause you to suspect ID, you are stumped.

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The burden is on intelligent-design creationists to show us why we should suspect that intelligence is responsible for a biological structure, since intelligence has never demonstrated the ability to produce any living organism or structure thereof.

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5. You have no way of distinguishing a non-teleological origin from a teleological origin for the flagellum.

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Neither do you. For proponents of IDC, the assumption of intelligent design is sufficient. The 'dual model' concept of intelligent design creationism simply argues that there is not enough evidence of evolution, therefore IDC wins by default despite the utter lack of positive evidence of IDC.

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6. In light of 4 and 5, it seems safe to conclude that if the flagellum was indeed designed, you would tell us otherwise.

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That would be safer to say if you were actually to prove that it was intelligently designed. Perhaps if there really were persuasive evidence of the intelligent design of any living thing, you would be correct in calling us dogmatic.

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In light of 6, how much weight should I assign to your incredulity about ID?

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Exactly the same weight you would assign to our incredulity and skepticism concerning any other theory that lacks evidence.{edited to add link}
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Quien busca, halla[This message has been edited by MrHambre, 07-17-2003]