Intelligent Design

Warwick U sociologist Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent, and I have been corresponding about how scientists who are sympathetic to intelligent design can make a bigger impact, and what the next generation of ID textbooks should look like. Me: So what should the ID guys do? Create a complex life form from scratch in under 100 days? That would show that intelligent design is required. Nature never done that. But if they can’t do it, does that prove intelligent design is not necessary? I don’t think so. He: First, ID needs to stop living up to its critics’ image of the movement as purely negative, i.e. ‘not-evolution’. Because ID has been largely cultivated in a US context, ID Read More ›

I’ve been reading Paul Davies’ book, The Goldilocks Enigma (published in the U.S. as “Cosmic Jackpot”) over the last week or so. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a full appreciation of scientist’s thinking about the world we live in. Davies is, IMO, the best expositor of the ‘popular science’ book. He blends, better than anyone else I’ve read, the more technical aspects of physics and real-world analogies that help one to grasp the technical depth he presents.

The Goldilocks Enigma is about what we would call the “anthropic principle”. But Davies, if you will, ups the ante with the inclusion of the implications he says derive from treating ‘dark energy’ in a quantum mechanical way (that is, including so-called ‘quantum fluctuations’). While all of life seems, from the free parameters that we measure, ‘fine-tuned’, the greatest ‘fine-tuning’ comes from the calculation that one does to determine the density of dark matter assuming quantum fluctuations all across the electro-magnetic spectrum up to, and including, EM waves having Planck length (about 10^-33 cm). This calculation results in a density figure of 10^93 grams/cubic centimeter. What is the actual density of dark energy as actually measured? 10^-28 gram/c.c. Thus, the calculation is off by a factor of 10^120. Davies also tells us that calculations have been made indicating that if the dark energy density was off by a factor of 10—that is, if it was 10^-27 instead of 10^-28, then galaxy formation would not be possible; and, hence, no life. This means that dark energy density is ‘fine-tuned’ to one in 10^120.

This last number gets Davies’ attention. Here is what he writes:

“Logically, it is possible that the laws of physics conspire to create an almost but not quite perfect cancellation [of the energy involved in the quantum fluctuations]. But then it would be an extraordinary coincidence that that level of cancellation—119 powers of ten, after all—just happened by chance to be what is needed to bring about a universe fit for life. How much chance can we buy in scientific explanation? One measure of what is involved can be given in terms of coin flipping: odds of 10^120 to one is like getting heads no fewer than four hundred times in a row. if the existence of life in the universe is completely independent of the big fix mechanism—if it’s just a coincidence—then those are the odds against our being here. That level of flukiness seems too much to swallow.” (italics in the original)

Well, anytime someone starts talking about science and coin flips, IDists are interested.
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Joel Verwegen, a University of Toronto psychology and biology student, hopes that regular Post-Darwinist and Uncommon Descent readers will respond to his invitation to view a PBS debate on the subject and answer a questionnaire. (The debate link is in the q-aire.) He tells me, a) This is a social cognition study for the ID-evolution community. d) Though no personal information will be collected or released, should individuals wish to insure anonymity, I will be accepting submissions from anonymous email services. b) The study involves viewing a short debate and completing a questionnaire. c) Time requirements are ~30 minutes. He assures me that no attempt will be made to shrink wrap your head. So do oblige him if you possibly Read More ›

Jeff Schloss, formerly an ID supporter and Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute (until August 2003 — click here for Way Back Machine), has since been distancing himself from ID and even going on the offensive against it. I witnessed the beginnings of this offensive at a symposium featuring Ron Numbers, Howard Van Till, Schloss, and me in 2007 at Grove City College (go here for the program). His criticisms of ID at that event seemed to me naive and ill-considered. Yet he did seem to advance them sincerely, and I hoped to have an opportunity try to persuade him otherwise, which unfortunately never happened. Schloss’s critical review of EXPELLED, however, raised his opposition against ID to a new level and Read More ›

Second Baptist in Houston (www.second.org) is a terrific church with a huge membership. My good friend Ben Young is a pastor there and runs two contemporary services at two different campuses Sunday mornings. I was there on Sunday, July 27th at those two services, with Ben and I having a conversation in front of the congregation and then fielding questions. The church is high-tech, so in addition to questions from the microphones, we were also taking text messages from people’s cell phones. Below are all the questions received (about 250 total). Such text message questions give people a fair degree of anonymity. It’s interesting what people ask when they feel less self-conscious: Read More ›

Tuesday Aug 05, 2008 Ultimate Issues Hr: The edge of Evolution Dennis Prager talks to Micheal Behe, professor of biology at Lehigh University and author The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Originally broadcast on July 03, 2007 Click here to listen to the podcast. Don’t miss the last several minutes where Dennis goes ballistic when someone claims that you can’t be a doctor or medical researcher if you don’t believe that random genetic accidents turned bacteria into bananas. It’s hilarious. I wish either Dennis or Mike would have informed the caller of the fact that no medical school in the world requires medical students to take a course in evolutionary biology. That serves to underscore Read More ›

www.uncommondescent.com/audios/Lilley_Firing.mp3

Reader Randy writes me to say,

Given the hooplah over ice being found on Mars, Titan and other places, I wonder if any of the ID guys have come out with predictions that we will not find ancient lifeforms trapped there? Expelled and other venues make much hay out of the odds for randomly chaining amino acids into enzymes and then proteins, and “The Privileged Planet” for the seemingly unique position Earth is in for having life. If those numbers are anything like accurate it would seem absolutely safe money to bet that the next planet over never managed hitting that jackpot. So is anyone using ID to make just that prediction?

One could easily postulate a designer who liked creating life on many planets and thus get around this if extinct life is found on one or both or many planets or moons, but then what is the point in making such a fuss about the odds, if the designer routinely flaunts them?

I offered to start a discussion on it at Uncommon Descent, but replied on my own account:

Strictly speaking, I don’t know that ID predicts that life cannot be found elsewhere than on Earth. For all we know, life actually got started on Mars and came to Earth.

ID would predict that random chaining of molecules will not produce life for the same reason that scattering Scrabble pieces will not produce a novel. In both cases, design is required to arrive at a specific target.

That said, a designer might very well produce life on different planets for the same reasons as a novelist might very well write different novels.

But we usually find that works by a given novelist in a specific genre have key similarities. William Faulkner’s novels are easily distinguishable from those of Ernest Hemingway.

So an ID theorist would probably expect to see that life on other planets shares many characteristics with life on Earth – that is, there will be a similarity of themes and styles (assuming there is only one intelligence involved, but most theists will assume that of course).

See also:

So what if fossil bacteria are found on Mars? Polls show many Americans expect Star Trek!

Water? On the moon? And what else?

Water inferred on Mars

The image of life on Mars is from NASA.

Other recent Colliding Universes posts: Read More ›

I’m currently rereading Bill Dembski’s No Free Lunch. On page 180 we read:

In The Fifth Miracle [Paul] Davies goes so far as to suggest that any laws capable of explaining the origin of life must be radically different from any scientific laws known to date. The problem, as he sees it, with currently known scientific laws, like the laws of chemistry and physics, is that they cannot explain the key feature of life that needs to be explained. That feature is specified complexity. As Davies puts it: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.”

But then Davies puts blind faith in the notion that once a self-replicator appears, specified complexity (i.e., complex specified information) can mysteriously be had on the cheap, as though there are known laws that can account for this. Of course, there are no known such laws, and, in fact, such a notion is just as much a get-something-for-nothing scam as the origin of the first cell through chance and necessity is.
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Imagine if you will a rather pathetic little boy oppressed by a domineering father and overshadowed by older sisters assuming maternal roles that directed his every move.  Under such conditions it’s not surprising that certain survival strategies would be employed by the boy to establish his place in the family pecking order.  Thus it was, according to biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, that a young Charles Darwin stole his father’s peaches and plums only to “discover” them later in heroic fashion and would invent “deliberate falsehoods” in order to gain attention.  In school he would regale classmates with stories of fantastic birds and remarkable flowers, flowers he could change into different colors.  “Once,” write Desmond and Moore, “he invented an elaborate story designed to show how fond he was of telling the truth.  It was a boy’s way of manipulating the world” (1).  But what happened when the boy, whose insatiable need for attention never waned, became a man.  How might he then manipulate the world?  This question, which few have dared to even pose, has been asked and answered in a provocative new book by former BBC writer/producer, Roy Davies titled, The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime, just released by Goldensquare Books (http://darwin-conspiracy.co.uk/). 

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Well, if we go by Britt Peterson’s survey article, “Darwin to the Rescue”, in Chronicle Free, even its supporters don’t totally disagree, despite all the huffery:

Gottschall points out that much of his writing has been published in scientific journals. He admits, however, that under the name of Literary Darwinism “there’s also a lot of crap. There really has been a lot of crap. Now the question is, what does that prove? Does it really prove that it’s futile and jihadist and all of that? Or does it prove that we need to do a better job? Because you can also go out and find hugely depressing lists of problems in quantitative approaches.”

The original idea was to put literary criticism on a “science” footing, in order to rescue it from competing nutty ideas.

The literary Darwinist traces “evolution” themes (= war and sex among cave men) in, oh, Jane Austen and T.S. Eliot. Charts, graphs, PowerPoints.

But their efforts have not been well received.

For the Literary Darwinists, however, the urgency is so high that they see their work, whatever its flaws, as the literary academy’s last, best hope — if, of course, it has the courage to embrace the inevitable. “We’re desperate,” says Gottschall. “The field is really, really desperate. Morale is so bad. No one really knows what to do. Everyone is saying what I am, in some way — they have the same critique, the same feeling that our old ways are just plain spent.

I studied HELL (Honours English Language and Literature) in the bad old days (’71) before my profs had heard of any of these fads. HELL was the course you took if you wanted to be a writer. We studied the history of criticism as well as of literature – a good approach in my view, and an excellent inoculation against fads.

Now, as for literary Darwinism, it has a small, rightful place, as follows: Some famous writers were in fact conscious Darwinists, and the Darwin theme in their work repays study.

I recall, for example, that early twentieth century British playwright George Bernard Shaw had a habit of editorializing on why his characters married whom they did. In Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle marries the foolish Freddy, instead of Professor Higgins (but the movie version was compelled to almost redact this fact, because sentimental taste simply could not endure it). Such themes resonate through Shaw’s work. Darwinian themes are also easy to spot in the work of H.G. Wells.

Seriously, one can dispute design in nature perhaps, but not in plays and novels. These works of art are not created by “selfish genes” to blindly spread themselves.

Oops, I better be careful. Next, I will hear from some pontificator about the “selfish meme” that blindly spreads itself in literature … “The hardwired brain memes do all the writing but fool the writer into believing she is sweating over the word processor herself” … As if.

(Oh wait! For all I know, that’s next month’s New Scientist feature.)

Also, just up at  Colliding Universes: Read More ›

To listen to this song in mp3, click here. SHE’S GOT NO BRAIN By Jim Rogers Little machines that go Integrated just so Blueprint incognito What makes it grow Put together so fine Personalities shine Words of poetry rhyme How can you know What a wonder it is It’s a silly thing to think we’re dumber Than Mother Nature who’s got no brain For evolution it’s quite the bummer Because she can’t explain What clearly needs a brain Mother Nature’s got no brain Nanotechnology In cell biology Professors eulogize It’s Darwin I surmise DNA transcription Protein configuration Gene translocation Godly revelation What a wonder it is It’s a silly thing to think we’re dumber Than Mother Nature who’s got no Read More ›

For two hundred years, scientists have believed that the eyespots of butterflies and moths evolved to look like large eyes in order to frighten off predators. A bird might think that the bright eyespots are the eyes of a concealed cat, for example. It sounds logical, but there is a hidden assumption: We are assuming that a predator such as a bird pays attention to the same features that we would.. But does it? Cambridge behavioral ecologist Martin Stevens and his team decided to test the longstanding assumption: Go here for the rest.

In this month’s Nature Genetics, there is an article by Zhou, et. al., dealing with the generation of new genes in Drosophila melanogaster—the fruit fly. While only having access to the abstract, I nonetheless was struck by one of their findings: the rate of new functional gene generation. As finding number 6 in the abstract, the authors write: “the rate of the origin of new functional genes is estimated to be 5 to 11 genes per million years in the D. melanogaster subgroup.” Noting that Drosophila melanogaster has 14,000 genes (a very low gene number), the simply calculation is this: 14,000 genes/8 new functional genes per million years= 1.75 billiion years for the formation of the fly genome. This, of Read More ›

Although I have posted on this article before, I don’t think Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig and Heinz-Albert Becker’s Nature Encyclopedia of Life Sciences article on carnivorous plants has received the attention it merits. The section on the origin of carnivorous plants (pp 5-6) discusses not only the spectacular examples of irreducible complexity that can be seen in these plants, but also the issue of “evolutionary convergence”. While the similarities between species in the same branch of the evolutionary “tree” may suggest common descent, similarities also frequently arise independently in separate branches, where they are better explained by common design than common descent. Loennig and Becker note that “carnivory in plants must have arisen several times independently of each other…the pitchers might have Read More ›