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Author
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Topic: Introduction to Multiple Designers Theory
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RBH
Member
Member # 380
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posted 28. September 2002 00:24
An Introduction to Multiple Designers Theory
Prologue
The observation that stimulated my thinking on this topic was of a humble grammatical phenomenon. In reading an array of ID works over the last several months, I realized that virtually without exception, the hypothesized entity responsible for the designs is referred to in the singular. Whether called an "intelligent designer," an "intelligent agent," or an "intelligent agency," it is always in the singular. Only in one or two remarks quoted in newspapers has the plural form appeared, for example in comments from leading ID theorists (e.g., P. Johnson and W. Dembski) that "space aliens" might be the designers. Michael Behe, interestingly, maintained the singular even there: "space alien." However, off-hand public remarks quoted in newspapers can't be taken as serious theoretical statements. The more technical and formal works in ID habitually refer to "designer," not "designers," "agent," not "agents," and "agency," not "agencies." There are occasional exceptions to my generalization. For example, in "No Free Lunch" Dembski has a section titled "Embodied and Unembodied Designers," using the plural form. However, in the very first sentence of that section he reverts to the singular: "Even if we grant the possibility of an unembodied designer, ..." (p. 347). The singular is a powerful default for IDists.
I will not speculate on the reason people habitually use the singular in this context, but it seems obvious that it is an unsupported assumption (perhaps made out of awareness) that if design is responsible for the diversity of structures and properties of life on earth, it was an "it" rather than a "them": there was/is just one designer.
The central message of Multiple Designers Theory is that the unwarranted assumption of a single designer is not only unnecessary, it is an unjustifiable constraint that puts artificial and arbitrary limits on theory and research in ID. Therefore, with the help of a few colleagues I have prepared an introductory outline of Multiple Designers Theory, MDT, to stimulate thinking and discussion.
I do not claim that this is a complete statement of Multiple Designers Theory. That is not yet fully worked out. These preliminary remarks are by way of introduction to the outline of a theory that has the real potential to account for a good deal of observed data and organize disparate lines of ID thought, and that has promise of generating potentially fruitful research programs in intelligent design. It is offered not as a belief system or a finished product, but as a hypothesis for discussion and a basis for elaboration.
I. Brief Multiple Designers Theory Overview
As its name implies, the central tenet of Multiple Designers Theory is that if intelligent design is implicated in the properties and structure of life of on earth, then multiple designers are implicated, not merely a single designer. As I will sketch below, the evidence that is interpreted to be supportive of the design hypothesis almost universally implicates multiple designers rather than just one designer.
The universal ID assumption (and assumption it is) of a single designer is probably an artifact of language. If something - a human artifact or a biological structure - appears to have been designed (say on the formal grounds that Dembski invokes in "No Free Lunch"), so the ID argument goes, it must have had a designer. "Designer" is used in the singular, carrying with it the strong connotation that there is just one designer. That linguistic practice leads ID theorists unconsciously astray in assuming just one designer. I do not recall reading anything in the ID literature that carefully examines or even explicitly mentions the assumption of a single designer, but the assumption is pervasive and it cripples ID thinking.
Multiple Designers Theory rests on the same philosophical, mathematical, and empirical foundations as current Intelligent Design theory. All the support that single-designer ID garners from those disciplines is, a fortiori, support for MDT. In fact, current ID theory is a proper (albeit conceptually impoverished) subset of MDT, a special case that invokes just one designer. Thus MDT automatically inherits the support adduced for current ID.
II. Some Properties of Multiple Designers
The multiple designers of MDT have one of the properties commonly attributed to hypothesized entities like the "intelligent agency" Dembski writes of in such works as "No Free Lunch" and "Intelligent Design Coming Clean." That property is the first described below. Additional properties are implied by the fact that there are multiple designers.
A. The multiple designers are unembodied. They are not of the material or biological world, but they can affect it in the same way(s) that Dembski's "intelligent agency" affects the material world. In "Intelligent Design Coming Clean" Dembski suggests that since in the limit as the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation tends to infinity the energy tends to zero, an unembodied intelligent agent could in principle transmit information (designs) to biological entities via an infinite-wavelength zero-energy signal. That sort of conjecture makes physicists uneasy, invoking as it does a purely mathematical abstraction ("in the limit") to explain the causal efficacy of an unembodied agent acting on physical matter via a zero-energy signal using unfocusable (because of its infinite wavelength) electromagnetic radiation, but that's something to be worked out later as the technical details of Multiple Designers Theory are fleshed out. As Dembski assures us in "Intelligent Design Coming Clean," we don't have to immediately understand how it happens as long as we know it does happen.
B. The multiple designers are not identical to one another. To posit identity of the designers would collapse MDT to the special case of SDT (Single Designer Theory), and the evidence does not permit that. The multiple designers differ from one another in several potentially detectable respects, and those differences are of enormous importance because they can underpin a potentially rich scientific research program. I will discuss that program below.
C. The multiple designers are not perfect designers. That follows from the fact that they are different from one another. Perfect designers would by definition be identical to one another, and their designs would be indistinguishable. Therefore MDT posits that the multiple designers are imperfect in the sense that they do not produce the ideally optimized design, the highest peak on the 'goodness of design' landscape. Moreover, they differ from one another in their very imperfections, and those differences provide cracks into which one can drive MDT research wedges. A significant part of the research program underpinned by MDT will be teasing out the differences in designs that are diagnostic of different designers. The multiple designers leave "fingerprints" on their work, and like human fingerprints, the metaphorical fingerprints that the multiple designers leave behind differ from designer to designer in ways that one may be able to discern with appropriate methodological 'lenses.'
D. There is a finite and limited number of multiple designers. This premise is more difficult to support by empirical evidence than the others, but it is logically necessary to prevent the MDT enterprise from degenerating into a mere list of designed phenomena, a cosmic oddity shop of designs. Scientific theories condense disparate phenomena into similarity classes and explain the behavior of instances of the classes by invoking general principles and laws that refer to those classes rather than to individual instances. If the number of designers is unlimited then in the limit each class would have just one member, and (since in that case no multi-member classes exist) no general laws are possible and therefore there is no science. It is logically possible that there is an infinite number of designers, but in that case no scientific study of design is possible. It is therefore a scientifically sterile speculation.
III. Some Evidence Consistent with Multiple Designers Theory
Multiple Designers Theory does not rest on thin air. There are logical and empirical bases for it. Several lines of evidence already well established in the biological literature are consistent with MDT in addition to the evidence that is usually claimed by orthodox ID theory. I will here indicate just a few of the lines of evidence specifically supportive of MDT that have been suggested. Others will no doubt occur to people more knowledgeable than I.
A. Design-versus-design: The design-vs.-design pattern is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology. In fact, it is fair to say that some of the most impressive designs in biology appear to have as their primary purpose the defeat or subversion of other designs. Designs engage in various kinds of arms races with one another. Some examples are:
1. Predator/prey arms races.
2. Parasite/host arms races.
3. Male/female arms races.
4. Disease-causing bacteria/drug companies arms races.
Each of these is an example of design pitted against design, directly implicating multiple designers. The fourth example is a particularly interesting hybrid case because we know exactly what one of the designers is: human antibiotic drug researchers. Pitted against the human drug designers is the member of the set of unembodied multiple designers that is responsible for designing bacterial strategies for developing antibiotic resistance. The data tell us that the unembodied designer is superior to human designers: bacterial resistance is winning. There are now disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to the full spectrum of human-designed antibiotics. No new family of antibiotics has been invented by human designers for 20 years. MDT strongly suggests an intense research focus on 'naturally' occurring candidate antibiotic agents since that may make it possible to find and co-opt the work of some other intelligent designer if the design-vs.-design pattern holds. That, by the way, is a general principle that emerges from MDT: It is often better to take advantage of the work of an MDT designer that has already produced a design that (as a side effect) accomplishes a human goal than for humans to try to invent it themselves. Such general guides for practical action do not naturally emerge from Single Designer Theory. However, the 'Failures and imperfections' described below imply a cautionary limit on this recommendation.
B. Designs acting in concert: The fact that different designs sometimes act in concert rather than at odds is also consistent with MDT and points to lines of research, too. Such phenomena as symbiosis and co-evolution raise interesting research questions. Does a flower/pollinator 'team' represent the work of a single designer creating a coordinated multi-component system, or is it the product of two designers working in collaboration? We know from analysis of the organization of human designers on large complicated projects that separate teams of designers often work on different components of the larger project, linked only by a set of common overall specifications and communication protocols. The same may be true in MDT. In any case, the relationships among arms races, symbiosis, coevolution, and cooperation deserve sustained and careful study. However, their very existence is clearly most consistent with the hypothesis of multiple designers. Single Designer Theory cannot comfortably accommodate them.
C. Failures and imperfections of design: That the multiple designers are not perfect implies that their designs will vary in (at least) efficiency, quality, and longevity, and the evidence favors design imperfections. The history of life on earth is littered with failed designs. While some designs may last a long time, others fail quickly and even catastrophically. The multiple designers vary in their skills and abilities, and the variable success of the designs they produce is evidence of those differences. Just as in a genetic algorithm running on a computer one can (roughly) map the topography of a fitness landscape by observing the dynamics of segments of the population as they traverse that landscape, finding peaks and valleys, first forming several clusters around suboptimal peaks and then finally migrating to cluster on the highest peak, so one can discern the fingerprints of various designers as the several designs segregate themselves on a variety of suboptimal peaks on the 'goodness of design' landscape. A difference is that in contrast to a human-designed GA, the multiple (imperfect) designs never converge on a single highest peak. The designs of the multiple designers are dispersed on suboptimal peaks scattered around the 'goodness of design' landscape.
D. Intermittent interventions: By definition, an unembodied intelligent designer must intervene in what would otherwise have been an undesigned biological structure or process in order to impose a design on it. There are indications that those interventions occur intermittently as discrete events in time rather than either continuously or only once at the beginning of things. In "Intelligent Design Coming Clean" Dembski argues strenuously against 'front-loading,' writing quote:
... as a general rule, information tends to appear discretely at particular times and places. To require that the information in natural systems ... must in principle be traceable back to some repository of front-loaded information is, in the absence of evidence, an entirely ad hoc restriction. (Section 7)
MDT fully agrees. The observation of intermittent interventions is much more consistent with multiple designers intervening seriatim - in effect taking turns, perhaps sometimes in response to another designer's earlier intervention on one side of an arms race - than with a single designer repeatedly altering its designs, first taking one side and then the other in an arms race.
IV. Programmatic Research Directions
As I noted in the introduction, Multiple Designers Theory has great potential to drive fruitful research programs. I will here sketch a few lines that the research might follow, pointing also to some potentially useful research methods. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. It includes only those lines of research that strike me personally as interesting. Others will no doubt see more implications of MDT that can be profitably researched. MDT is a rich vein waiting for empirical miners to exploit it.
A. The Unit of Analysis of Design: This question is at the core of MDT (and of SDT - current ID - for that matter). It asks "Just what is it that is/was designed?" In current ID literature most focus is on the molecular level, where "irreducibly complex" biochemical reactions and/or molecular structures are apparently taken to be what was designed. Michael Behe concentrates on this level, and the biochemical theme has been taken up by others. But sticking to that level seems to be a matter of happenstance - Behe is one of the few scientists in ID who has published real scientific research, and he happens to be a biochemist - rather than a considered choice based on systematic research.
The biochemical speculations of Behe and others notwithstanding, I am aware of just one genuinely systematic on-going research effort that is clear on the level of analysis being assumed. That is the baraminology research program centered at Bryan College. There they are focusing on whole organisms - expressed adult phenotypes - as the unit of analysis, attempting (apparently mostly via hybridization analysis) to ascertain the boundaries between basic "kinds." While I think their methodology is problematic (hybridization as a marker of "kinds" has some technical and pair-wise combinatorial problems - think about cross-breeding all possible pairs of 1,000 different potential "kinds" to see if fertile hybrids result!) nevertheless at least they don't waffle on the unit of analysis question: they are attempting to answer it by doing actual research. And their work might someday shed some light on the number of multiple designers there are/were: the number of "kinds" may provide clues to the number of designers if the appropriate unit of analysis is at or near that level.
At the moment MDT is agnostic on the unit of analysis question, but it is emphatically not indifferent to it. A prerequisite for defining the appropriate level(s) of analysis is the research to be performed under the "Design Themes" heading below. The presence or absence of design themes at various levels will provide information about the unit(s) of analysis that are likely to be most fruitfully incorporated into theory. MDT provides a research program to ascertain the appropriate level of analysis; it does not merely assume one.
B. Design Themes: As I have mentioned elsewhere, in the study of human-designed phenomena like works of art or literature, there are more-or-less well-developed research methods for assigning works to designers. Analysis of physical properties (e.g., characteristic brush stroke micro-patterns visible on a painting), statistical properties (e.g., distributions of vocabulary items or syntactic structures), and other properties of human-designed objects are routinely used to attribute an object to one or another creator. The same is true of the unembodied designers of MDT. It should in principle be possible to identify characteristic design properties and even different general design themes that differentiate one from another of the multiple designers. It is likely that the same methods that are used in attributing human-designed objects to one or another human creator could be adapted to attribute biological designs to one or another of the unembodied creators. That suggests the utility of multi-disciplinary research teams involving not only scientists but also those trained and experienced in discerning such things as individual esthetic themes and differing creative motifs among human artists. Their insights could form the basis for hypotheses that can then be tested scientifically.
C. Borrowing among designers: While substantial differences among various candidate design themes are obvious to even the casual observer (e.g., 0-limbed organisms vs. 4-limbed organisms vs. 6-limbed organisms vs. 8-limbed organisms, not to mention organisms bearing odd numbers of limbs, e.g., starfish), it is also obvious even to the casual observer that some design themes are shared among what are otherwise very different designs. For example, flying is a functional design theme that currently occurs in mammals, birds, and insects, and at one time also occurred in reptiles (I am not aware of an extant true flyer among reptiles). Do the repeated occurrences of functional design themes across instances that are almost certainly the work of different designers represent collaboration, borrowing, or possibly outright plagiarism? Are there 'schools' of design theory among the multiple designers that can be traced in shared functional features across different individual structural design themes?
D. Temporal succession of designers: A cursory review of the fossil record suggests that some prominent designs that occurred in early times are no longer present. There are fossils of creatures in the Burgess Shale that appear to have no current analogs. Is it possible to trace the careers of individual unembodied designers in the fossil record? Have individual designers come and gone over the millennia, leaving a record of their work in design themes that appear, flourish for a while, and then disappear?
E. Characteristics of Designers: Perhaps the most exciting potential research program provided by Multiple Designers Theory is directed at ascertaining characteristics of the designers themselves. Since the several designers differ from one another, and since those differences are reflected in the designs they produce, it should be possible to actually do comparative research on the designs in order to gain insights into the designers themselves, to learn something of their preferences, temperaments, abilities, and other such characteristics. Archaeology has long used systematic methods to infer cultural characteristics and processes from physical artifacts, and one should be able to do something similar with the artifacts - designs - created by the unembodied designers of MDT. There is a subdiscipline of psychology devoted to the study of individual differences, too. It may even be possible to make empirically-based inferences about the intentions of the several designers: the teleos of the designers may be empirically accessible to us.
V. Conclusions
A. Multiple Designers Theory is a logical and empirical superset of Intelligent Design. Anyone who is an adherent of current mainstream ID is perforce an adherent of MDT, subject only to the former's arbitrary and ad hoc restriction to a single designer.
B. MDT provides a coherent theoretical structure for understanding a wide range of phenomena that are not easily or plausibly accounted for by a single-designer ID model.
C. MDT insulates ID from the claim of anti-ID critics to the effect that ID pays no attention to the nature of the designers. Empirical research on the nature and features of the designers is a central focus of MDT.
D. MDT provides rich research opportunities and offers the prospect of allowing one to make empirically supportable inferences about the designers themselves. MDT does not merely offer a list of general questions that 'might' be addressed by a research program, it offers specific research proposals and provides concrete methodological guidance for attacking the questions it raises.
On every criterion one might use to judge a scientific theory of intelligent design, Multiple Designers Theory is superior to current thinking in ID.
Personal Note
I am known to be an ID critic, and readers may therefore believe that this description of Multiple Designers Theory is presented as a parody of ID. It is not. It is a logical extension of a dominant stream of thought in current ID. MDT takes the ID thesis at face value and explores an obvious question implied by it. That question is completely legitimate and, as I point out, MDT accounts for patterns of evidence that current ID theory cannot comfortably handle, leads to the kind of research program that current ID has been unable or unwilling to provide, and blunts at least one significant criticism of current ID. It is the kind of theoretical structure and research that ID must build if it is to make good on its claims to scientific utility. Rather than a parody, read it as a challenge to IDists to make good on their promises.
RBH
[ 28. September 2002, 01:25: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Evan
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posted 28. September 2002 12:45
Before I respond specifically to the details of MDT offered below, I would like to make a few general comments to support my belief that this is a valuable contribution to the ID discussion.
My Prologue:
When I first joined ISCID back in March, I offered a ID hypothesis, in a thread entitled “Evolution and Design: a synthesis.” At the time, I pointed out that one of the things it seemed the ID movement lacked was active attempts to offer hypotheses about the details of ID: when did it happen, and particularly how did it happen. The emphasis has been on the theory of design detection as opposed to a more full-fledged attempt to describe the details of ID.
One argument has been that this is the proper order of things, for until we can determine if in fact design has happened, hypothesizing about further details is a moot point. Obviously, ID critics who believe that arguments for the detection of design are invalid might not believe that further discussion is relevant.
Others have argued that while a design inference is scientifically valid, further inferences about the designer are invalid.
I believe that both of these arguments are wrong. I definitely believe that if we accept inferences about the existence of design, we can equally accept inferences about the nature of the designer. This is standard science - we offer hypotheses about the nature of an entity (think quarks, or black holes) based on the consequences that we observe. We work backwards from observed consequences to testable hypothesis about the nature of the source of the phenomena which produces the consequences. If design is detectable, then inferences about the nature of the designer are valid.
Secondly, the first argument, while logically correct, is in fact not correct in practice. It is common in science to explore a concept by hypothesizing what its effects would be, and then looking for those effects. This is certainly what was done with the Big Bang theory (Michael Behe and Mano Singham had an interesting exchange about this at DDD3) - at first the Big Bang was entirely conjectural, but thinking about what its effects would be if it were true led to testable hypotheses that eventually led us to accept the Big Band as a strong theory.
So, I support the development of possible ID theories - let us assume that the details of detecting design can be worked out empirically, if not now then in the future, and let us think about where that might lead.
My response to RBH’s MDT theory:
1) First, it seems to me RBH has done a good job of outlining the evidence for MDT, and has correctly pointed out that the existence of a single designer is in fact a subset of MDT. I think the evidence for MDT is strong enough that it seems to me valid to say that if someone wants to posit a single designer, the burden perhaps is on them to show why a single designer is more likely.
2) Secondly, I think the imperfections we see in design are because the designers are in fact limited in the way they interact with the world. RBH mentions Dembski’s idea that design information might enter the world through an undetectable “infinite-wavelength zero-energy signal.” I believe the mechanism I described in my thread on evolution and design is more likely: the designers manipulate quantum probabilities at the molecular level in genetic events. These manipulations have a limited ability to affect the world - once a design event is attempted, the designer has little impact on how the design plays out. Part of the reason for this is that for macro-phenomena the statistical effects of large numbers of events overwhelm the effect of any small number of discrete quantum interventions.
My second point is that I hypothesize that the designers only interface with the world at the level of genetic molecular activity. For the most part the world (all of physics and chemistry, natural selection, comets hitting earth, etc.) are fully explainable by naturalistic causes and are not subject to design. However, the universe, according to design theory in general, does require, and shows evidence for, intervention at the level of genetic change. Therefore it is reasonable to hypothesize that it is precisely at molecular genetic change, and nowhere else, where intelligence intervenes.
Third point on this topic of imperfection: The evidence clearly shows that the progression of changes in life forms on earth the past 3 billion years or so has been sequential and slow - we see an orderly development as opposed to extremely abrupt new creations. There are no creatures of mammalian complexity in the Cambrian, dinosaurs aren’t recreated suddenly after the great extinction 65 millions years ago, and so on. I think this evidence shows that the designers are fairly limited in their powers. They cannot create whole genomes independently, but can only make small adjustments to existing genomes, and once they introduce a change, the rest of that organism’s life plays out according to naturalistic forces.
3) RBH points out that to some extent our grammar causes a unconscious bias towards the singular (much as it causes a bias towards the masculine when we use “he” to refer to people in general.) I think there are cultural reasons why this is so, the most obvious one being the monotheistic tradition in the Western world.
But I offer as food for thought the idea that the animistic notions of primitive people (who were in much closer experiential contact with living things than we are) are closer to the truth: the world is inhabited by a vast pantheon of life forces, each expressing itself through the interface of it’s particular kind of creature. The wolf, the bear, the eagle, the flower, and so on each have their own “spirit”, so to speak, in an animistic tradition. This seems to be a primitive expression of MDT.
I don’t want this idea to sidetrack the discussion into possible religious connections with design theory. I do mention it, thought, because I think it is important for us to perhaps consider the cultural biases we might bring to design theory that might perhaps keep us from looking objectively at the evidence.
4) A related issue is this: How are the multiple designers related to each other? RBH pointed out that if we use human design as a benchmark (and design theory commonly does so), then it is reasonable to look for evidence of multiple designers from different cultures (some antagonistic to each other), evidence of teams of designers working together, and so on. In fact, using human design as our model, obviously we are talking about designers in the plural. Humans beings design.
Thus we might ask if the designers are organized in a hierarchical pantheon, with some designers having a larger scope of influence than others, being able to give guidance to designers of lesser power, and so on. This might account for the divisions that we see into phyla, orders, families, etc. Or perhaps the designers are more decentralized, having equal powers and in fact “battling” (either with serious antagonistic intent or more in the spirit of art and sport) to more effectively influence the diversity of life.
Summary: There is lots of food for thought in RBH’s thought, and I think this type of hypothesizing should be encouraged. If we assume, even provisionally, the existence of design of the type outlined by Dembski and Behe (intelligently guided change that causes otherwise improbable biological molecular events to happen), then we ought to be taking the step of speculating on further hypotheses which follow, including hypothesis about the nature of the designers. Clearly a fundamental issue, them is whether there are one or many designers.
The goal of such speculation, as in all of science, is to help work backwards - to use the speculations to develop empirical tests by which one hypothesis or another can be strengthened at the expense of others.
As Feynman once said, part of the value of a good model is that it generates good questions - questions which can then be tested empirically. Speculating about how many designers there are, the extent to which their influence reaches into the world, and the mechanism by which that happens should help design theory build some substance that is currently lacking.
Last point: obviously, all of the above does hinge on the acceptance of the inference of the existence of design itself, and that seems to hinge on probabilistic studies of what types of events, and in fact what events, can truly and empirically be said to be so improbable that natural causation is not a reasonable explanation.
The results of such investigations will obviously influence the future development of an established design theory. If research could show that genera, for instance, are truly “kinds” that natural evolutionary processes can not cross, then that would be evidence for at least investigating the existence of a very large number of designers - the animistic view might be quite plausible.
However, if research shows that just features that came into existence at the origin of life, or perhaps last at the Cambrian, are all that are designed, then the existence of one or a few designers might be more likely.
Also, a really last point.
It seems to me a safe and obvious assumption that if intelligent designers exist and are responsible for introducing and guiding the development of life in a world otherwise subject to and explicable by naturalistic forces, then this should be a universal phenomena that has been played out on countless other worlds. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that these forces have limited themselves, or are limited, to activity on this planet. Of course, having a suitable environment in which they can work is important, but I don’t think we really know how ingenious they might be in creating the mechanisms for life in environments quite different than ours. It seems to me that the more we admit the possibility of such intelligent agents who are somewhat unconstrained (at least a bit) by naturalistic causation, the more likely it is that life is widespread and perhaps more diverse in scope than we can possibly imagine.
Very interesting post, RBH.
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Evan
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posted 28. September 2002 16:24
Another thought has occurred to me: that the designers themselves have grown in their abilities, and that that accounts for some features of the history of life on earth.
I think an analogy could be drawn between the history of humans and the history of the designers. Modern humans spent at least tens of thousands of years with approximately the same hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Then the agricultural revolution suddenly brought about the advent of civilization, which led to the first historically documented intellectual achievements (the Greeks, the Chinese, etc.) Similarly, perhaps the long period of exclusively one-celled life up until 3/4 of a billion years ago or so reflects a period of minimal skill on the part of the designers, and a satisfaction with the results, and perhaps the Cambrian explosion represents an analog to the agricultural revolution in which a period of great learning and experimentation took place among the designers.
I don’t mean, of course, to claim much of an exact analogy between human history / designer history. I offer the analogy, rather, just to stimulate the idea that the designers themselves have grown in their abilities, and the progressive complexity of life on earth is a reflection of that growth. In a lot of ways, this makes more sense than postulating designers who have always had the skills to develop creatures as sophisticated as human beings but for unknown reasons choose to develop nothing but one-celled creatures for almost 3 billion years.
[ 28. September 2002, 16:48: Message edited by: Evan ]
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Jack Foster
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posted 29. September 2002 02:39
Hi RBH. (I'm jazzraptor over at ARN.)
quote:
A. The multiple designers are unembodied.
You've said that MDT can be viewed as a superset of ID. If this is so, I can't see why the multiple designers need to be unembodied. If "space aliens", for instance, are the main designers, then what does the unembodied requirement do to MDT? If one were to accurately infer design, how would one then go on to infer designer "unembodiment"?
I think your main point is a good one. There's no good reason to assume a single designer. And in fact, human bioengineering proves multiple designers. But human bioengineers are not unembodied either. (At least not the living ones.)
A fun post! (I keep forcing myself to not doubt your motives! LOL!)
[ 29. September 2002, 02:46: Message edited by: Jack Foster ]
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charlie d.
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posted 29. September 2002 09:11
I would say that, in the context of MDT, one would have to almost necessarily infer unembodiment because, given the staggering amount of direct intervention required to generate all the existent and extinct designs, and the obvious number and variability in skill and - perhaps - intelligence of designers, it is extremely unlikely that physical designers would not have left physical traces of their action/presence. There are some alternatives though:
- one would be that the designers act from a distance (say, using some directional force field focused onto earth from another galaxy), which however would be indistinguishable from unembodiedment,
- another interesting one would be that the designers are able to take the natural form of whatever surrounds them (they would have looked like amoebas before the cambrian explosion, or dinos in the Jurassic), which would go back to the parallels with animism mentioned before;
- I think the most intriguing one would be that the Designers ARE natural organisms, extremely rare "variants" endowed with the capacity to modify their own genetic material to generate new designs, and transmit such modification to the next generations. As such, they would be able to generate new mutant life forms at every reproductive cycle. Most of their progeny would be "normal" (i.e. not designers), but occasionally among every line a new "designer" is born, and new species can arise. I have to think about this carefully to see what the implications would be, but it could explain things like punctuated equilibria, differential efficiency of designs, design constraints (certainly a mouse would'nt be able to give generate an elephant in a single design swoop), nested design hyerarchies etc. Of course, if this were the case, we might be able to identify and "catch" one, and study it.
[ 29. September 2002, 09:12: Message edited by: charlie d. ]
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Mike Gene
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posted 29. September 2002 09:25
Hello RBH,
I actually read your essay and have some preliminary thoughts as to how you might improve your hypothesis.
1. You write: "In reading an array of ID works over the last several months, I realized that virtually without exception, the hypothesized entity responsible for the designs is referred to in the singular. " Yet I have, on several occasions, referred to designers. Thus, I have to conclude that your sampling is either quite limited or biased. I have no a priori reason to reject your MDT.
2. You write: "On every criterion one might use to judge a scientific theory of intelligent design, Multiple Designers Theory is superior to current thinking in ID." I read your MDT as an alternative way of looking at things, not as a "superior" way. I saw nothing to indicate MDT is "superior." You are entitled to your opinion on such matters, but it would seem that you should qualify them as such.
3. You build your argument on the need to clearly distinguish between a single designer (SDT) and multiple designers (MDT). Yet even though this is your driving motivation, you yourself seem confused on this issue. On one hand, you write of human designers as MD: "As I have mentioned elsewhere, in the study of human-designed phenomena like works of art or literature, there are more-or-less well-developed research methods for assigning works to designers. Analysis of physical properties (e.g., characteristic brush stroke micro-patterns visible on a painting), statistical properties (e.g., distributions of vocabulary items or syntactic structures), and other properties of human-designed objects are routinely used to attribute an object to one or another creator. The same is true of the unembodied designers of MDT." Yet earlier, you speak of human designers as a single designer: "The fourth example is a particularly interesting hybrid case because we know exactly what one of the designers is: human antibiotic drug researchers. " That is, "one of the designers" is "human researchers." So which is it? Are human researchers an example of multiple designers or a single designer? Depending on the context, can't they be both?
This leads to an interesting conundrum. You claim that other colleagues have helped you draft this essay. But you cite none of your colleagues, apparently wanting to take full credit for this MDT. Or perhaps there are no colleagues and this was a rhetorical device. Now, is the above mentioned contradiction evidence of MDT or are you personally responsible for the contradiction? How can we tell? Y'see, I can clearly score your/their essay as something that was designed. But without testimonial evidence, and working only with this product of design, how can I distinguish between SDT or MDT as the source of this essay? If your MDT cannot provide the answer to its own inaugural essay, it seems it will have a difficult time with more ambiguous material.
4. I would consider your MDT a subset of ID - it is a version of the Designer-Centric approach. That your "theory" focuses on the "designers" is obvious. The term 'designers' appears 72 times in your essay. As such, it is understandable why it is that you offer no useful suggestions for detecting what is/was designed, despite this being a supposedly serious and honest attempt to expand upon ID. According to your theory, "the most exciting potential research program" is to infer the characteristics of the designers. This is the logical extension of a Designer-centric approach. But it also seems to suffer from an impoverished view of design and designers. Consider the following claim: " Since the several designers differ from one another, and since those differences are reflected in the designs they produce, it should be possible to actually do comparative research on the designs in order to gain insights into the designers themselves, to learn something of their preferences, temperaments, abilities, and other such characteristics."
Yet you provide no map to get from the designed feature to the psychology of the designer. For example, do you think you can tell us anything about the "preferences, temperaments, abilities, and other such characteristics" of the scientists who designed the atomic bomb by using only the atomic bomb as our source of data. Might we infer that they are evil and derive pleasure from destroying masssive amounts of people? What is it about the bomb that says otherwise?
Or put your MDT to the test. For example, I recently finished playing Final Fantasy X. When you finally get to the end, there is a list a credits for the game designers.
Now, I don't think it would be difficult to argue that FFX was intelligently designed on several levels. From the Behe-perspective, it is part of an IC system - to play FFX, you need the PS2 console, a game controller, and the game. From a Dembski-perspective, FFX is a high information state beyond the reach of chance and law. In fact, 4 billion years of evolution has failed to produce anything like FFX as its existence is dependent on the existence of intelligence. But here is the challenge to MDT. Take several MDT proponents who have no previous experience/knowledge of software design and video games. Have them play FFX for 12 hours, gathering data along the way (MDT can supply the criteria, indicative of MD, to help them). Then, after the 12 hours is up, have them a) predict the number of game designers and b) the characteristics of each game designer.
RBH, as the author of MDT, can test it. I'm assuming he has an automobile in his garage. His homework assignment is as follows: Go out and survey the car. Then, using only information about the car (and not relying on independent knowledge about cars), predict the number of designers and each one's characteristics. RBH should clarify explicitly how he got the prediction from the information about the car to help us determine if he was unconsciously relying on previous knowledge about car design and human designers. Then, report the predictions here on Brainstorms and we'll consider methods for testing these predictions.
If MDT struggles with these simple tests, I'd suggest we dismiss this recent designer-centric approach and focus instead on something that has more research potential - the design of life and its biological implications. That is, the MDT approach is still united to the SDT in that they both posit design behind life. If the ability to distinguish and study designers is not practically feasible, we might turn our attention to the designs. After all, without first reaching a consensus on what is and what is not designed, the MDT is more likely to obscure than enlighten.
Of course, we should next consider the evidence for MDT. Here too I was quite disappointed in the "superior" nature of MDT. But I shall have to save that for a latter time. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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Mike Gene
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posted 29. September 2002 09:35
Charlie: I would say that, in the context of MDT, one would have to almost necessarily infer unembodiment because, given the staggering amount of direct intervention required to generate all the existent and extinct designs, and the obvious number and variability in skill and - perhaps - intelligence of designers, it is extremely unlikely that physical designers would not have left physical traces of their action/presence.
Can it be that the MDT is the direct offshoot of that black-and-white extremist thinking that scores Everything either as Design or Non-design (RM&NS)? If so, MDT suffers the problem of ignoring a vast and rich middle ground.
The need for unembodiment exists only in the most Extreme version of MDT. Good scientists ought to be more sensitive to the possibilities provided by the less extreme explanations. Ironically, we can take the MDT in far less extreme terms and determine just how serious about MDT its proponents remain.
But I'm afraid the MDT looks to be simply Designer-Centric Extremism (DCE) - a bad recipe for a real research program. Some of us derive fascination from an attempt to detect and understand design. Others obsess on the "designer" aspect. Consider a sloppy analogy. Traditional IDists would consider a scientists experiment and marvel over the elegance of the experiment and how it could be expanded. MDTers wouldn't really care about the experiment (yawn - another example of survivor bias) but instead would want a "People" magazine profile of the scientist's life.
[ 29. September 2002, 09:45: Message edited by: Mike Gene ]
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Evan
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posted 29. September 2002 13:07
Some comments on Mike Gene’s posts.
1) It is true that some people, and I believe that Mike is one of them, are open to both the possibility of multiple and/or embodied designers. However, this is the exception, and certainly not the assumption of the main public ID advocates. I think RBH would have been more correct to have written “almost without exception” rather than “virtually without exception”, but I don’t believe his focus on a singular unembodied designer means his “sampling is either quite limited or biased.” I imagine a survey of the publicly identified and published ID advocates would support RBH’s claim that a singular unembodied designer is the rule, despite whatever exceptions might be found.
I too have limited my hypotheses to ones which are about unembodied designers. I am open to listening to both hypotheses about and evidence for embodied designers - however, this is not the ID option that I am personally thinking about or discussing.
2) I agree with Mike that it is incorrect to say that MDT is “superior” to SDT (Singular Designer Theory.) Whether one or the other is superior is subject to further research. However, it is correct to say that MDT is more inclusive than SDT, and should be the default hypothesis until and unless specific arguments for a single designer can be given. Just as it is a common argument that naturalistic assumptions preclude design arguments a priori, and should thus be expanded, an argument that the designer is singular imposes an a priori limitation that is not justified. The starting point ought to be that there are designers, of whatever number, and then from the evidence that develops hypotheses about both their number and their specific nature ought to be developed. It may possibly be that arguments for one designer may arise, but possibly not.
3) Mike brings up an interesting point when he shows some ambiguity on RBH’s part about the number of designers. Mike writes,
quote:
"The fourth example is a particularly interesting hybrid case because we know exactly what one of the designers is: human antibiotic drug researchers. " That is, "one of the designers" is "human researchers." So which is it? Are human researchers an example of multiple designers or a single designer? Depending on the context, can't they be both?
To some extent this is a semantic issue, and RBH clearly pointed out that language conventions are part of the reason why we possibly unconsciously resort to the singular. One could argue that the sentence “one of the designers is: human antibiotic drug researchers”
is just flat out grammatically incorrect in that the object is plural and the verb is singular.
But Mike’s point is more interesting: we often consider a common class a singular object if the individuals in the class, for the purposes of the classification, are identical in the properties relevant to the classification. We speak of mammals as a singular object when we wish to include just a certain broad set of characteristics, but we would speak of the individuals when we are studying, for instance, a population of chimpanzees.
So it may be that there are multiple classes of designers consisting of individual designers with approximately identical qualities (abilities, type of organism available to it, time period that they operated, etc.)
So, the answer to Mike’s question is “Yes, they can be both,” if we realize that this is primarily a question of how we classify things. However, we need to realize that in the example of drug researchers, in the long run there are a large number of actual individuals playing different roles in the designing.
4. I do have to disagree with Mike when he accuses RBH of an extreme Designer-Centric approach. Speaking at least for myself, my point is that the bulk of the ID theoretical work has been on detecting design, and that is fine. But, as I argued in my post, it is both reasonable and useful to also be hypothesizing on the nature of the designer - it is common scientific practice to say “if this is true, what would be expect to be true about that.” Often these further hypotheses help stimulate questions, issues, and research ideas for the original “this.”
So there is nothing wrong with some people moving on to discussing the designer, and what kinds of things might be inferred about the designer based on possible results that might come in from the detection of designer.
So I don’t think either RBH or myself should be faulted for our interest in this aspect of the situation - it takes many people looking at a problem from many directions to create a viable science.
5) Mike writes,
quote:
As such, it is understandable why it is that you offer no useful suggestions for detecting what is/was designed, despite this being a supposedly serious and honest attempt to expand upon ID.
This is a little repetitive, but I don’t think RBH should be faulted for not offered ideas about design detection itself. This was not the point of his post, and plenty of other people are working on that.
I will also point out that in my post I did refer to some of the possible results from design detection. Right now there is a broad spectrum of design hypotheses, from complete front-loading of all information at the big bang to design intervention needed at the every speciation. Results about what can empirically be shown to be designed will obviously be evidence that can be taken into consideration when looking at hypotheses about the designers. It makes sense to me, and is common scientific practice, to start now looking at what hypotheses about the designers might be more strongly supported by the evidence as it comes in.
6) Mike also writes,
quote:
According to your theory, "the most exciting potential research program" is to infer the characteristics of the designers. This is the logical extension of a Designer-centric approach. But it also seems to suffer from an impoverished view of design and designers. Consider the following claim: " Since the several designers differ from one another, and since those differences are reflected in the designs they produce, it should be possible to actually do comparative research on the designs in order to gain insights into the designers themselves, to learn something of their preferences, temperaments, abilities, and other such characteristics."
Yet you provide no map to get from the designed feature to the psychology of the designer.
I think that a distinction needs to be made about the nature of the designers’ abilities versus the designers’ psychology: I disagree with RBH that the designers’ “temperaments” should be part of scientifically based inferences about the designers. The nature of the designers *abilities* can be inferred from their actions, but inferences about the mental states behind those actions cannot. Among other things, inferences about mental states cannot help but be based on anthropomorphic ideas based on our experience of our own mental states, and we really have no idea whether the designers are motivated by goals, purposes, or feelings anything like ours.
At the very least, it seems to me that we need to be very careful about making statements about the designers’ abilities based on what we clearly know they did (assuming that can be detected, of course) from further speculations about why they have done it.
7) And last, Mike points out that just by looking at an object (a computer game or a car, for instance), we might have trouble judging whether one or many designers were involved.
This example points out to a critical problem in thinking about design: we constantly refer back to examples of human design, and yet in human design we have actual experience of both the existence of the designers and the means by which they both design and implement: in biology we do not. Therefore, it’s hard to ever know whether an analogy based on human experience is apt.
For instance, in the case of the car or the computer game, I *know* these were created by a group of designers, because I know how such things are done. Given the complexity of each of these, as well as the vast diversity of things that humans design (works of art, novels, TV sets, etc.), and comparing those to what we see in biology, it seems to me that groups of designers is by far the most likely choice in biology if we base our reasoning on analogy with what we know about human design.
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Mike Gene
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posted 29. September 2002 21:09
Evan: Speaking at least for myself, my point is that the bulk of the ID theoretical work has been on detecting design, and that is fine. But, as I argued in my post, it is both reasonable and useful to also be hypothesizing on the nature of the designer - it is common scientific practice to say “if this is true, what would be expect to be true about that.” Often these further hypotheses help stimulate questions, issues, and research ideas for the original “this.”
So there is nothing wrong with some people moving on to discussing the designer, and what kinds of things might be inferred about the designer based on possible results that might come in from the detection of designer.
Let me clarify something. If you or RBH desire to adopt a designer-centric approach, go for it. What I reject is the notion that MDT is "superior" to "current thinking in ID." And I see that you also agree with me on this. I have no problem with someone wanting to flesh out an alternative way of viewing things. But if they begin stepping on toes, claiming superiority, they are basically arguing that I am intellectually obligated to abandon my inferior approach and begin a quest to focus on the designers.
I will gladly retract my advice to dismiss if MDTs back off their superiority claims.
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RBH
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posted 29. September 2002 22:41
Mike,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. You wrote "I actually read your essay and have some preliminary thoughts as to how you might improve your hypothesis." I appreciate it. As I said in the Prologue, quote:
I do not claim that this is a complete statement of Multiple Designers Theory. ... These preliminary remarks are by way of introduction to the outline of a theory ... It is offered not as a belief system or a finished product, but as a hypothesis for discussion and a basis for elaboration.
Some brief responses to small points you made: First, you're right, "superior" was probably not the best choice of words. "Inclusive" was probably a better choice. I hereby back off from the claim of "superiority." MDT is more inclusive than current single-designer ID.
Second, referring to the "human researchers" as "a designer" actually does demonstrate the power of the singular default. It slipped through multiple proof readings even when I was trying to take pains to avoid using the singular.
Third, my reference to "colleagues" meant that several other people read and commented on an earlier draft of the post, and I altered the original draft in places to accommodate their remarks. I don't doubt that I also used some of their words in doing so. I have a record of those who commented but without their permission won't publish it, but I assure you, they exist. The 'arms race' material was adapted from posts about ITWA on II. ITWA is originally due to Nic Tamzek.
Fourth, I concur with Evan's remarks on "unembodied." I will add only that I was influenced in that choice by Dembski's assertion that "Not only is there no evidential significance to whether a designer is embodied or unembodied, but refusing to countenance the possibility of unembodied designers impedes scientific inquiry" (NFL, p. 350). Remember, my goal was and is to explore the ID approach, and I depend on the ID theorists, among whom Dembski is a significant leader, to provide the lead in these matters.
Fifth, I didn't suggest ways to detect design because I thought that was what Dembski, Behe, et alia, have been doing. Why should I duplicate their work? I'm building on it.
More Substantive Stuff
You're undoubtedly correct in saying that MDT is a subset of the larger ID tent, which (as far as I can tell) includes anyone who believes that naturalistic explanations can't cut it, regardless of their particular version of ID - YEC, EAM, inherent intelligence, space aliens, Raelians, etc., etc. My reading has been mostly confined to YEC (in the late 1980s) and the brand of ID growing out of the Behe/Dembski writings of the last half dozen years. I've read your essays, but to be frank I haven't digested them enough to say anything coherent about them yet. However, MDT is a superset of single-designer ID, and single-designer ID is the dominant paradigm in ID these days as far as I can tell.
You resist my claim that the most exciting research possibilties of MDT lie in the potential to gain some insight into the designers. I may have been a bit exuberant in my list of the characteristics one might discern, but I am comfortable my claim that analysis of designs can at least allow one to distinguish among designers. To give one example, in my company we create large programs of multiple tens of thousands of lines of code (incorporating genetic algorithms, as it happens). Those programs are written jointly by several programmers. Reading through the source code it is not at all difficult to distinguish which procedures and functions were written by the several programmers. They ("we," actually - I'm one of them) have different programming 'styles' - different characteristic ways of organizing and writing their programs, and it's easy to tell them apart. Though I haven't tested this hypothesis, I have little doubt that if I gave the source code to someone else with some knowledge of C programming, they could segregate the whole program into chunks written by the various programmers with high accuracy.
That sort of analysis depends on the designers having at least some freedom in the way their portions are written, and in our case the controls are minimal so we have maximal freedom within our portions. Two programmers may use different syntax to do the same job. Either does the job; the difference is largely a matter of the personal preferences of the programmers because I (manager) don't much care how they do it as long as it runs right.
In contrast, in most large software projects there is tighter control of permissible syntax and so there is more homogeneity of code, but there's still some variability across programmers, and my bet is that careful analysis of the source code will detect at least some of those 'design themes.' Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" has a very interesting example of inferring a 'designer' characteristic from the idiosyncratic use of operating system commands.
Given that I have posited no 'management control' on the multiple designers of MDT, and given that the primary constraints on their activities are therefore (a) the properties of the medium in which they must work (biological material) and (b) the designers' individual characteristics, I would expect differences between design themes to be more apparent in biology than in software or automobiles. Evan suggested that perhaps there is some sort of organization among the multiple designers, thus accounting for hierarchical organization in biology. I'm less sure of that; it's a hypothesis to be explored.
Your proposed tests - playing video games and looking at automobiles - are juvenile and much less than I would have expected of you, a working scientist. They suffer from at least two flaws that follow from the superficiality of the proposed tests.
First, the artifacts you suggest are designed under powerful top-down control. Unless one posits that the unembodied designers of biological structures are themselves managed as tightly as are human designers working on complex projects in heavily hierarchical organizations, one will have difficulty testing MDT on human designs. If I suffer from Designer-centric extremism, you add Top-Down Design Management extremism. I don't. It may be possible to tease apart individual designers' work in at least some cases, but it will be difficult. Therefore, a casual test based on simple-minded observation won't do it. If I were to run the MDT research program, a whole lot of preliminary time and effort would go into carefully examining human designs, both those created by single designers and those in which multiple designers have participated in order to tease out the properties and features peculiar to the multiple-designer systems. That is to provide hypotheses about the research on biological systems. That's what ID needs: specific hypotheses derived from careful study, not vague generalizations based on a few hours of casual observation and armchair speculation.
Second, casual observation, the hallmark of current ID, is a cheap rhetorical red herring. You say quote:
Have them play FFX for 12 hours, gathering data along the way (MDT can supply the criteria, indicative of MD, to help them). Then, after the 12 hours is up, have them a) predict the number of game designers and b) the characteristics of each game designer.
I'll be blunt: That's the sort of remark I'd expect from someone who has never actually done research.
Mike, this is not play time or 'can you think of a clever example' time. It's put up or shut up time. I did Dembskian-style ID a favor: I took its scattered and mostly incoherent and implicit ideas about ID itself (as distinguished from various criticisms of evolutionary theory and empty IDdidit assertions), pulled them together enough to generate a plausible set of hypotheses based on a natural extension of those ideas, and in a couple of days provided both the sketch of a theory and the kind of research program that Dembski a few weeks ago (addressing you, in fact) said he wanted to recruit high school students to someday establish. I'll be damned if on top of that I'm going to do the research for them too!
============
Jack/jazz: My motives are pure: I wanted to show that if one takes ID seriously, at least Dembski/Behe-style ID, there are real research questions that can be asked instead of that vague list Dembski published a while back. If I were an IDer and were even just 20 years younger, I could develop the suggestions I made in the opening post into detailed research programs, and I could in fact do real research on ID as opposed to babbling about logical positivism or metaphysical naturalism as a conspiracy of science or criticizing theism or waxing philosophical about the E. coli flagellum. That is a waste of time, to be blunt. If ID wants to make it as science, let it do science.
Actually doing real scientific research, particularly research in a new and controversial area, is plain hard work, much harder than sitting at a desk writing polemics. I know: I've spent the last 12 years doing something similar. It requires doing the (seemingly endless) preliminary studies to develop more specific hypotheses and reliable methodologies for distinguishing between single-designer structures versus multiple-designer structures, and for distinguishing among the hypothesized multiple designers, and it requires defining appropriate variables and devising observational methodologies and designing appropriate studies and actually getting and analyzing and interpreting some actual real data. I'm not going to do it for them: life is too short for me to waste my time that way. But I have demonstrated that it is not impossible, and that the failure of ID to produce real research is not because one can't think of any to do!
Here's another ID research suggestion, free of charge. Given Mike Gene's criticism of 'Designer-centric' ID, a worthwhile (even necessary) research program for current ID, independent of any presuppositions about the designer(s) - singular or plural, embodied or unembodied, earthly or alien - is to conduct the most basic kind of foundational scientific work: build a taxonomy of designed biological structures and processes. Do the dirty, slow, painstaking work of finding and listing all the structures and processes that are classified as 'designed' by the criteria Dembski and Behe provide. Then do the factor analyses and cluster analyses and correlational analyses to find structure in that list if structure there be. If there is no detectable structure in the list, then ID has provided nothing of use to science. As I said in my OP, in the absence of classifications, in the absence of generalities about classes of instances, all one has is a sort of cosmic oddity shop full of isolated instances. Let ID show it can provide more than a cosmic oddity shop using the tools it pushes for detecting design.
RBH
[ 29. September 2002, 22:59: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Jesse
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posted 29. September 2002 22:46
Mike, do you think a case can be made that MDT is superior to versions of ID which assume that each species (or genus or family or other fairly low-level grouping) was separately designed by a single designer? Certainly the evolution of all vertebrates from a common ancestor by RM&NS is not accepted by all ID proponents.
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Xenon
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posted 30. September 2002 00:00
First of all, kudos to RBH for taking the next logical step in design theory. The idea that any inference about the nature of the designer is somehow irrelevant to ID itself has always seemed puzzling to me. I have yet to see just how one can completely divorce the two inferences. Indeed, it seems that for every mention of a design, there is at least some mention of a designer (or designers!), placed in some context of the design. The very notion that the designers 'intervened' in the natural progression of the universe to produce life makes them subject to inquiry, whether scientific or philosophical. After all at least two positive assertions must be made about the designers -- they exist (and here I defer on the philosophical notion of 'existence'), and they can interact physically with our world! That we can appreciate the logic of the designs in a mechanistic manner says to me something else about the designer. Yet, to make these subtle claims about the designer on the one hand, and to dismiss further inquiries about the designer on the other, is illogical in my opinion. Can we truly make no intelligent claims about the nature of designers with whom we have had no contact, but whose designed products are in our possession?
Perhaps, IDers ought to take a page from their own play book. They publicly denounce scientists of being materialists and positivists for not taking teleological thinking seriously and for closing an entire avenue of research that they assert can be fruitful science. Why, then, in the spirit of opening minds -- indeed, 'retraining the scientific imagination' -- should they now appear so hush-hush when 'designer-centric' hypotheses appear? Dembski writes in his treatise, _No Free Lunch_, "It is always possible to ask for further explanation. Nevertheless, at some point scientists stop and content themselves with the progress they have made... So too with design, the question is not whether design theorists have resolved all lingering questions about the designing intelligence responsible for specified complexity in nature. Such questions will always remain." (p.354) Here, I agree that questions about the designers will invariably arise. But, I disagree with the perception Dembski gives that scientists stop looking for answers because they are content with the progress they've made. He also goes on to surmise, "The worst thing that can happen to a design-theoretic framework is that design ends up being superfluous." (NFL, 364) I would argue that to make the designers superfluous is a worse result intellectually. To deflect inquiries about the designers smacks of politics and deliberate evasion.
"Evan: For instance, in the case of the car or the computer game, I *know* these were created by a group of designers, because I know how such things are done. Given the complexity of each of these, as well as the vast diversity of things that humans design (works of art, novels, TV sets, etc.), and comparing those to what we see in biology, it seems to me that groups of designers is by far the most likely choice in biology if we base our reasoning on analogy with what we know about human design."
I agree, Evan. The heavy reliance by IDers in using human design to exemplify design in biology lends to this rather interesting conclusion. In fact, we constantly differentiate between designers. Entire national economies depend on consumers being able to choose the quality of products which, even though they may be based on similar design, are nevertheless different in quality.
I disagree however that the examples provided by Mike Gene provide any initial challenge to MDT theory. Just as ID describes 'just enough' necessary evidence to infer design, it seems to me that MDT also describes 'just enough' evidence to infer a plurality of designers. In our search for the 'best explanation,' RBH's post provides a good starting point for looking at the evidence. However, the requirement to determine the *exact* number of designers, as per Mike, is akin to critics requesting specific claims about the identity of the designers. Can we, though, after surveying the computer code to FFX determine whether or not the game was the effort of only a single individual or multiple individuals? I submit that we can. Computer code is highly modular, and from experience, redundant code that allows the modules to be compatible with other modular codes is always a sure sign of multiple coders. These 'hooks' allow other programmers to black-box the modules, and is generally considered good programming practice in team projects. One good marker is the existence of 'obsolete' code that passes control to newer code which accomplishes the same function, combined with explicit reference to the older code from another module. However, to appreciate such a feature requires at least someone who is aware of computer programming and maybe game development. Again, the requirement that the putative researchers have no experience in software design is unrealistic. After reading the extensive criticisms detailing how ID proponents are not versed in the science they are supposed to be criticizing, I find Mike Gene's criticisms of MDT ironic.
Nevertheless, I am encouraged by this discussion.
Xe
[ 30. September 2002, 00:27: Message edited by: Xenon ]
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Mike Gene
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posted 30. September 2002 00:29
Hi RBH,
You write Your proposed tests - playing video games and looking at automobiles - are juvenile and much less than I would have expected of you, a working scientist. They suffer from at least two flaws that follow from the superficiality of the proposed tests.
Actually, I've never claimed to be a working scientist or expert of any kind. My juvenile examples were crafted simply to flush out the fact that you have no useful criteria for detecting multiple designers, let alone arriving at your even more ambitious goal of learning something substantial about the character of the designers. Now, I have no problem with someone going this route and I wish ya luck. But as I mentioned, this is a designer centric approach and one should simply recognize it for what it is. And I just don't see how someone is going to achieve your objectives working only with the designed-thing in question. This whole topic of design vs. no design is ambiguous enough and I think your approach merely amplifies the ambiguity. For example, if we take your own example with programming it would seem to me (as an outsider) that your MDT approach is dependent on extensive previous knowledge of the designers and their acts of designing. It looks to me that your ideas about MDT have a very limited reach and are dependent upon the retrieval of very specific types of information that revolve around the designer. And this is what designer-centrism is all about. The question, in my mind, is how one goes about studying the world, with an ID perspective, without such information, given that the truth of design does not entail we'd necessarily possess such knowledge. Can it be done? How far out can it be extended?
Look, it would be truly fantastic if the designer centric approach could be run, just as it would be great if we had ways to recover and analyze the actual common ancestors from evolution's past. If someone can get a method running, I'll be quite interested. In the meantime, there are other ways to apply ID concepts.
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Mike Gene
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posted 30. September 2002 00:57
Hi Xe,
You write: However, to appreciate such a feature requires at least someone who is aware of computer programming and maybe game development. Again, the requirement that the putative researchers have no experience in software design is unrealistic.
But this is what tips the whole argument in my favor.
Can you run a MDT approach without a) independent knowledge about the designers and b) independent knowledge about the designers' acts of designing?
Time is short...perhaps in a few days I'll return to the evidence cited in favor of MDT.
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Mike Gene
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posted 30. September 2002 01:17
One more thing before I forget (and these days, I have developed quite a talent of forgetting). RBH writes: Third, my reference to "colleagues" meant that several other people read and commented on an earlier draft of the post, and I altered the original draft in places to accommodate their remarks. I don't doubt that I also used some of their words in doing so. I have a record of those who commented but without their permission won't publish it, but I assure you, they exist. The 'arms race' material was adapted from posts about ITWA on II. ITWA is originally due to Nic Tamzek.
Fine. My point, however, is that I needed the testimonial evidence from the designer to resolve the issue of the number of designers behind the original essay. However, the essay itself was insufficient to make this determination. It could have easily went either way. The only thing that remained clear was that the essay was designed.
IP: Logged
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