In the recent discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the Templeton Foundation distancing itself from ID, there’s been no mention that in 1999 the Templeton Foundation had a brief dalliance with ID. That year, in Santa Fe, Paul Davies convened a private conference titled “Complexity, Information, and Design: An Appraisal.” In attendence at the conference were Sir John Templeton himself, Charles Harper, Paul Davies, Charles Bennett, Gregory Chaitin, Niels Gregersen, Stuart Kauffman, Harold Morowitz, Ian Stewart, Laura Landweber, and yours truly. The proceedings of that conference then appeared with Oxford in 2003, edited by Niels Gregersen, under the new title From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning. Design, however, figured centrally in the discussions of the original conference. Moreover, the original title of the conference, “Complexity, Information, and Design,” was mine — I recommended it to Charles Harper, who then mentioned it to Paul Davies, who then ran with it.
At the time, I was in regular touch with Charles Harper, a senior administrator with the Templeton Foundation and currently a public voice of the foundation expressing disapproval of ID. He had received a preprint of my book The Design Inference, had it vetted in-house (notably by British statistician David Bartholomew), and found it not entirely without merit. Indeed, at the time we discussed expanding Templeton’s “portfolio” to include some representation of ID. A year or two later, Templeton interest in ID dried up. The official story has always been that ID is bad science, bad theology, and bad politics. But I would suggest that the real reason is Templeton’s craving for respectability among the scientific elites, and ID, for now, is too iconoclastic for Templeton’s comfort.
It might interest readers of this blog to know that Charles Harper and I had explored a much bigger follow-up conference to the 1999 conference in Santa Fe. What follows is a conference proposal that I sent to Harper in 1999. At the time, he was interested in making this conference happen. I would still be interested in doing a conference like this and would welcome Templeton’s involvement.
=====================================================
THE ORIGIN OF INFORMATION
An Interdisciplinary Conference on Complexity, Information, and Design
***DAY 1***
Conferees arrive.
EVENING PLENARY:
Manfred Eigen, “The Origin of Biological Information”
[[Eigen in _Steps Towards Life_ writes, “Our task is to find an algorithm,
a natural law that leads to the origin of information.” This quote can
serve as both leitmotif and foil for the conference]]
***DAY 2***
MORNING SESSION: BIOLOGY
Moderator: Manfred Eigen
Speakers: Bernd-Olaf Küppers**
James Shapiro
Michael Behe**
Michael Denton
[[James Shapiro is a senior professor in molecular biology at the
University of Chicago; he adopts an information processing model of
biological systems and regards the Darwinian mechanism as insufficient for
biology; he is nonetheless thoroughly mainstream; he has debated Behe and
resists Behe’s design inference]]
[[Although Denton’s natural theology in _Nature’s Destiny_ has some
weaknesses, he has some wonderful ideas about biological form and can give
a great talk on this subject]]
AFTERNOON SESSION: COMPUTATION
Moderator: David Gelernter**
Speakers: Mitch Marcus**
Gergory Chaitin**
David Goldberg**
Rosalind Picard
[[Rosalind Picard was at the Life After Materialism conference]]
EVENING PLENARY:
Roger Penrose, “Can Computers Generate Information?”
***DAY 3***
MORNING SESSION: SELF-ORGANIZATION
Moderator: James Gleick
Speakers: Stuart Kauffman**
Chris Langton
Thomas Ray
James P. Crutchfield
[[James Gleick wrote the famous popularization titled simply _Chaos_–he
might want to see some of his old buddies and give his impressions on what
has happened to the field in the intervening years]]
[[Chris Langton is the Santa Fe Institute researcher who has been the main
force behind the artificial life movement]]
[[Thomas Ray’s Tierra program is probably the most successful attempt to
model evolution computationally; he’s on the faculty of the University of
Oklahoma and a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute: see
http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/]]
[[James Crutchfield has been with the Santa Fe program for years; I heard
him at a conference on randomness back in 1988–he’s articulate and sharp;
he has a book coming out titled _Computational Mechanics of Cellular
Processes_ (Princeton), which examines the information question by modeling
dynamical systems via computational mechanics; this is an edited collection
of over 1,300 pages]]
AFTERNOON SESSION: DESIGN
Moderator: Frank Tipler
Speakers: William Dembski**
Stephen Meyer**
Paul Nelson
Jonathan Wells
EVENING PLENARY:
Mary Midgley**, “What’s So Special about Life?”
***DAY 4***
MORNING SESSION: MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS
Moderator: Ian Stewart**
Speakers: Keith Devlin
Persi Diaconis
David Berlinski
David Bartholomew**
[[Devlin has written much about information and favorably reviewed The
Design Inference]]
[[Persi Diaconis is perhaps the premier statistician in the United States;
his work on how many shuffles does it take to render a deck of cards random
has appeared in Time magazine; his is brilliant and interested in
everything; I’ve known him since 1986; he’s one of the editors of the
Cambridge series carrying _The Design Inference_]]
[[David Berlinski was at Mere Creation; he’s extremely clever and will
liven the session; he will serve as a nice counterblast to Diaconis’s
thoroughgoing skepticism]]
AFTERNOON SESSION: PHILOSOPHY
Moderator: Ernan McMullin**
Speakers: Alvin Plantinga**
David Chalmers
Daniel Dennett
Fred Dretske
[[David Chalmers wrote _The Conscious Mind_ two years back in which he
posits information as a fundamental entity needed to explain
consciousness]]
[[Daniel Dennett of _Darwin’s Dangerous Idea_ fame speaks to just about any
subject and will be an interesting foil]]
[[Fred Dretske wrote _Knowledge and the Flow of Information_ (MIT) some
years back; he should help the discussion]]
EVENING PLENARY:
Bill Gates, “The Future of Information”
***DAY 5***
MORNING SESSION: THEOLOGY
Moderator: Nancey Murphy
Speakers: Alister McGrath**
Keith Ward**
J. P. Moreland
Niels Gergersen
AFTERNOON SESSION: THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
Moderator: Chris Isham
Speakers: Paul Davies**
Lee Smolin
Walter Bradley
John Barrow**
EVENING PLENARY:
Sir John Polkinghorne, “Information, Science, and Divine Action”
***END OF CONFERENCE***
DESCRIPTION:
The evening plenaries are self-explanatory. For the morning and afternoon
sessions each speaker would have 30-40 minutes for a presentation. After
his or her presentation each speaker would sit down with the other speakers
and begin a panel discussion. After a few minutes the panel would then
opened be to the audience. The moderator would have the role of framing the
session, introducing the speakers, and keeping a firm hand on time
constraints and any other things likely to get out of control. There would
be a 30 minute break at the middle of each session.
I would like to see a conference proceedings come out of this, preferably
published by MIT Press.
=====================================================