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Author
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Topic: What comes after detecting design?
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andyg
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Member # 415
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posted 18. June 2003 15:47
Dembski's introduction to his latest book reads as follows: quote:
As a leading proponent of intelligent design, I’m no doubt biased in seeing intelligent design as a revolution that will fundamentally change our conception of science and the world. Nonetheless, there is good reason to think intelligent design fits the bill as a genuine scientific revolution. Indeed, it is challenging not merely the grand idol of evolutionary biology (Darwinism) but it is also changing the ground rules by which the natural sciences are conducted. Ever since Darwin, the natural sciences have rejected the idea that intelligent causes could play a substantive, empirically significant role in the natural world. Intelligent causes might emerge out of a blind evolutionary process but were in no way fundamental to the operation of the world. Intelligent design challenges this exclusion of design from the natural sciences. In so doing, it promises to remake science and the world.
For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that the first aim of the ID program - to reliably detect design - has been accomplished.
It is 2025, and UBS (unbiased bit-stringing) is routinely used to break down objects into bit strings, which are then fed into "Horatio", a super-computer able to analyze the data and spit out the answers "designed" or "not designed".
What is the next phase of the program?
How will the ability to reliably detect design remake science?
What experiments will people be doing differently from the ones they are doing today?
What sorts of reseacrh proposals will be written?
Is there life (or rather science) after detecting ID, and if so, what will it be?
AndyG
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Rex Kerr
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posted 18. June 2003 17:36
One might hope that given a positive result of design, one could then seek to understand the design principles, and use them to rapidly predict how the system works and, e.g., use it to theraputic advantage.
Unfortunately, humans do this naturally, and it's been just short of an abysmal failure in biology so far. Almost all advances have been as a result of extensive experimentation and failed hypotheses about "what makes sense".
There is Mike Gene's approach, which seems to be, "When something seems badly designed, and you think it is designed, study and/or think about it a whole bunch more until you come up with something positive about the apparently bad design." This approach presumes a competent designer, and hasn't been tried enough to be found successful or unhelpful.
One can still ask questions about the mechanism and timing of origin--was it a sudden appearance of new features, or rearrangement of pre-existing features? There are lots of questions whose answers don't depend on the mechanism of generation.
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Pim van Meurs
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posted 19. June 2003 00:03
Andy:
quote:
Nonetheless, there is good reason to think intelligent design fits the bill as a genuine scientific revolution.
I find it fascinating how a scientific 'revolution' is claimed here. So far the evidence that ID has caused a scientific revolution are lacking imho. Such grand standing is not very helpful in advancing a scientific concept of ID.
Andy asks very good questions about assuming that ID can present in the next 20 years or so a workable way to identify intelligent design. But given the approaches so far and the lack of scientific exposure of these ideas it may be too soon to start speculating about what ifs.
I have to take the side of Bruce Gordon here and state that ID is making claims of scientific revolution much too soon. Certainly the present state of affairs does not allow for such a claim.
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Moderator
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posted 19. June 2003 08:30
There are two directions that this thread could take. The first direction is exemplified by Rex Kerr. The second by Pim van Meurs. One is creative. The other stifling. If the next few posts are creative, then I'll let the thread continue, otherwise it will be closed.
[ 19. June 2003, 08:30: Message edited by: Moderator ]
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 19. June 2003 11:06
Say the findings indicate design then issues could arise that require methods quite different from those usually found in science. Say the designer was sophisticated and wants to remain anonymous.
Answering questions as to who or what the designer(s) is(are) and the overall aims of the designed objects may require methods to detect deception that can involve deception themselves. Basically spy stuff.
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Stephen Wright
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posted 19. June 2003 12:41
007 Scientific Observation
Mark:
Sometimes ISCID is a little dry to read. Thanks for the clever comment. While I think the development effort aimed at understanding design in natural processes needs to stay very pragmatic if it is to reach a level of acceptance as an analytical tool, you have raised a good point. I can think of three quick examples where “sneaking-up” on the empirical facts is relevant.
Natural habitat study: The hidden camera and naturalist in the blind covered with fronds is the image that comes to mind. The intimate secrets of real animal behavior are gradually revealing themselves in this way.
Quantum events: Here we have found them behaving one way when we watch and another when we don’t. Maybe sneakyness is a fundamental property of the universe? (This could be related to the property of child behavior, where they intuitively know that being bad is fun, way before it can be socially taught.)
Ken Miller’s book “Finding Darwin's God” has in its last chapters a lengthy exposition of the idea, highly paraphrased, that we would lose our free will of choice if the design of the universe were known to be deterministic. Therefore, a design that was intended to elicit successful choice-makers would have to be withheld from direct view.
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RBH
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posted 19. June 2003 12:53
Andyg asked quote:
What is the next phase of the program?
How will the ability to reliably detect design remake science?
What experiments will people be doing differently from the ones they are doing today?
What sorts of reseacrh proposals will be written?
As I have argued elsewhere, in the Multiple Designers Theory thread, the first task is to develop a taxonomy of designed entities/objects/processes. Are there classes within the set of of designed objects or is the set of designed objects a single undifferentiated aggregation? The first question to ask of such an array is whether it displays any structure - are there classes of designs, design themes or design principles? And this is not merely in aid of testing MDT - it is a general task for design researchers regardless of questions of number, identity, or characteristics of putative designer(s).
Scientific explanations explain an individual phenomenon by assigning it to a class and then invoking natural laws and regularities that apply to classes. We explain the curved path taken by a thrown stone by assigning the event to the class of massy objects accelerated in a 1-g field, and then invoking laws having to do with force, mass, and acceleration along with laws having to do with the gravitational attraction between bodies having masses. For "design" to provide explanations, therefore, it is necessary for laws, principles, or regularities be discovered that allow statements about relationships among classes. Otherwise, if all that can be said of an object is that it is designed or not, then the mere detection of design is inutile, unhelpful, and pretty much vacuous.
RBH
Added in edit
Here is the recommendation I made in the MDT thread referenced above last September (29. September 2002 22:41). Note that it predates Dembski's suggestion of a "Catalog of Fundamental Facts." quote:
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
[ 19. June 2003, 13:34: Message edited by: RBH ]
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Ryan Huxley
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posted 19. June 2003 16:05
I think Rex was on the right track of what at least some ID'ers are thinking regarding the benefits of ID utilized in science:
quote:
One might hope that given a positive result of design, one could then seek to understand the design principles, and use them to rapidly predict how the system works and, e.g., use it to theraputic advantage.
In other words, once design is viewed as legit, then it may change the way we begin to conceive of ways to view problems. For example, IMO, pseudogenes would not warrant much reseach interest with the traditional Darwinist approach - they're just junk relics. But, for ID, these pseudogenes may not actually be junk (and there's at least one instance where this has been found). Additionally, studying introns and exons and how, depending on the direction of "reading," you can have one or the other, seems to at least suggest that what is often asserted to be "junk DNA" is not. IMO, these could be examples of embedding and layering of information, which I would say is consistent with design and, perhaps, not with naturalism.
It seems that the paths one can choose to explore in research become more open once design philosophies are recognized and understood, as Rex has suggested. With ID, we shouldn't be as surprised by finding similar structures in completely unrelated organisms - these could be examples of common design rather than convergent evolution. Getting back to how one's ideas of viable possibilities can effect the approach taken, as a structural engineer, I change my approach to a building design depending on if I have natural soil against the building (say it's below ground level) or just an adjacent engineered structure. Granted, this example is using something that is clearly designed - but, it's to illustrate the point that our views on possible solutions to problems change once design is considered a viable explanation. Additionally, we can begin to consider what types of problems were trying to be solved by the designer(s) - what's the likely end goal in mind and how is that often addressed in other designs (whether man-made or not)? I believe this is why there's interest in TRIZ by ID'ers. IMO, it seems that allowing design would provide different avenues of research than those based on assuming from the get-go that all that we see is a random conglomeration of genetic mutations tinkered on by natural selection. Perhaps we can look to astronomy and cosmology for how their fields have changed after noting that the universe seems to be designed (e.g. Anthropic Principle) became more widely accepted based upon the evidence.
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RBH
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posted 19. June 2003 17:28
One or two remarks on Ryan's posting seem warranted. He suggested that pseudogenes do not warrant much attention in a 'Darwinist' approach, but then notes that there are recent examples of functions found to be associated with pseudogenes. That seems contradictory unless it was ID-based research that found the functions. As far as I know, it was regular orthdox scientists who found those functions.
Ryan also suggested that similar structures in "completely unrelated organisms" might be examples of common design rather than convergent evolution. That will depend on the level of abstraction at which the structures are "similar." The underlying physics and chemistry put constraints on what is possible, and hence, for example, human-made buildings are not completely unconstrained - the facts of gravity, stress loading and transmission, and materials put boundaries on what is possible to build. So one would expect it to be in biology - physics and chemistry put boundaries on the range of 'solutions' to the adaptive problems faced by organisms. In some sense, for example, the wings of bats and birds are very similar, since aerodynamic considerations put boundaries on what will worko by way of flight appendages. Similarly, many large fish and dolphins have similar shapes, also constrained by hydrodynamics - if you want a designed object to go fast underwater, or alternatively, if natural selection favors going fast underwater, the range of potential shapes is sharply bounded.
Ryan remarks that "allowing" design would open up new avenues of research. As far as I know, design is completely "allowed." No one is prohibiting ID proponents from doing research. What is unlikely to happen (unless and until andyg's hypothetical situation comes to pass), is that 'orthodox' scientists will take up the design research program in any significant numbers. One makes bets with one's career decisions, deciding what lines of research are more or less likely to be fruitful paths. Once I was a tenured professor, I could do research on essentially anything I choose. And my research choices were made in the light of what was likely to be theoretically interesting and fruitful - productive of interpretable and useful outcomes. Unless and until design research provides some chance of actually bearing fruit, it's not a real viable pathway. Once again, I urge ID proponents to spend less time critiquing evolution and exhorting the troops, and to spend their time and effort on designing (!), executing, and publishing actual design-based research. The dearth of such research is a discouraging sign for potential workers.
Finally, Ryan commented that it might be helpful to assess how astronomy and cosmology have been changed in light of anthropic considerations. As far as I know (and that's not very far!), the various anthropic proposals have produced no significant or even visible alteration in the ways astronomers and cosmologists actually do research, nor to my knowledge has there been significant effect on the research questions they address. I'd welcome more informed comments, though. Is there a cosmologist in the house?
RBH
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Rex Kerr
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posted 19. June 2003 17:57
Actually, I intended to suggest that what seemed like a newly open path was already mostly explored, due to human nature. We think in terms of design, even when things are not designed. (We think in terms of motivations and feelings even when things don't have them--e.g. the apple "wants" to fall towards the earth, etc..)
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Mark Szlazak
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posted 19. June 2003 18:33
Stephan, one could also add aliens (not immigrants but E.T's), those that develop bio-weapons and also so-called skeptics (Skeptical Inquirer types) that ... ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
[ 19. June 2003, 23:12: Message edited by: Mark Szlazak ]
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andyg
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posted 19. June 2003 20:50
There have been some interesting points so far. I think Ryan's discussion of "Junk" DNA and introns is not really focusing on what I intended, as it seems he's still wonderng whether these could be shown to be consistent with design or evolution. My point was to speculate of a time in the future when we can point to a host of features such as these and reliably detect the presence or absence of design.
One avenue that has been alluded to is the relationship between design and evolution. Some ID proponents, like Behe, seem comfortable with the idea of evolution, speciation and common descent, with the proviso that certain structures are to complex to have evolved by chance. Once design of these structures is confirmed, it would be interesting to try and detect when the design event occurred. For example, certain structures Behe has classed as IC are ancient - like flagella, whilst others may be more modern - like clotting cascades. This surely suggests mutiple deisgn events at different times. I am sure other ID proponents are less convinced of the evidence for evolution in general (such as Johnson) and would presumably envisage much earlier and more comprehensive design events. The combination of the reliable design detector with molecular phylogenetic analysis might be informative in a Behe-esque scenario.
Ryan - perhaps unwittingly - touches on another point. Speaking of introns and junk DNA, he writes: quote:
IMO, these could be examples of embedding and layering of information, which I would say is consistent with design and, perhaps, not with naturalism.
Obviously, design and naturalism are not mutually exclusive, despite what Ryan hints above. Nevertheless, once we have reliably detected design in living things, will we be in any better shape to determine whether such features arose by naturalistic means? What avenues of investigation would ID proponents suggest to determine this?
More to follow if time permits.
AndyG
[ 19. June 2003, 20:52: Message edited by: andyg ]
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Stephen Wright
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posted 20. June 2003 14:29
Andy,
Design is a naturalistic process when accomplished by people. We clearly have the capability to bind several disparate facts into a unified concept. When design is performed by means of mental computation, the evidence of design is manifest when the design is actualized. The mind’s work creates a new product that displays just those same characteristics that Dr. Behe is pointing out. The major exception is that it is not realized as a physical heritable trait.
The pathway from mental pattern to behavioral pattern to changes in physical development associated with that pattern is not seen as connected straightforwardly in today’s common viewpoint. The generative mechanism that ties behavioral information to the changing genomic information is not apparent. This mechanism could be discovered! We may come to understand biological information processing to be more dominating and influential over material genetic structures than currently assumed. Here’s another guy who suspected this to be the case.
In the Descent of Man, Darwin goes into the subject regarding the influence of mind in his theory. The following quote from Chapter 3 shows he believed that purposeful behavior became converted to instinct and became inherited.
quote:
“I am, however, very far from wishing to deny that instinctive actions may lose their fixed and untaught character, and be replaced by others performed by the aid of the free will. On the other hand, some intelligent actions, after being performed during several generations, become converted into instincts and are inherited, as when birds on oceanic islands learn to avoid man. These actions may then be said to be degraded in character, for they are no longer performed through reason or from experience. But the greater number of the more complex instincts appear to have been gained in a wholly different manner, through the natural selection of variations of simpler instinctive actions. Such variations appear to arise from the same unknown causes acting on the cerebral organisation, which induce slight variations or individual differences in other parts of the body; and these variations, owing to our ignorance, are often said to arise spontaneously. We can, I think, come to no other conclusion with respect to the origin of the more complex instincts, when we reflect on the marvellous instincts of sterile worker-ants and bees, which leave no offspring to inherit the effects of experience and of modified habits.”
Additionally from Summary of the Descent of Man.
“The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment is that man is descended from some less highly organised form………..
A great stride in the development of the intellect will have followed, as soon as the half-art and half-instinct of language came into use; for the continued use of language will have reacted on the brain and produced an inherited effect; and this again will have reacted on the improvement of language.”
I find Darwin’s actual words very congruent with information theory. I find the word induce, a perfect choice as it implies a specific behavior becoming an active influence on the adaptation process. If the root-cause mechanism for human design capability is found, it may well be seen as only a change in amplitude from a capability used by historical organisms who have been designing their way to new appendages all along. In my imaginary future visualization, the pathway for evolutionary change will be reasonably clear, Dr. Behe’s work will be sensible as well as predicted by theory and RM as the means to explore the design space of organic life forms - forced to take a secondary role.
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andyg
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posted 20. June 2003 16:12
Stephen,
I found your comments rather hard to understand. For example, you write:
quote:
When design is performed by means of mental computation, the evidence of design is manifest when the design is actualized.
I cannot see how this is always true. If I conceive a plan to place ten rocks on a hillside in such a way that they look as though they are part of the natural landscape, how will an independent observer be able to detect the evidence for the design?
Second, what do you mean by this statement:
quote:
The pathway from mental pattern to behavioral pattern to changes in physical development associated with that pattern is not seen as connected straightforwardly in today’s common viewpoint. The generative mechanism that ties behavioral information to the changing genomic information is not apparent.
You then quote Darwin's thoughts on innate behaviour, but then suggest organisms have benn "designing their way to new appendages all along". What is the evidence for this?
AndyG
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Mike Gene
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posted 21. June 2003 17:59
RBH: quote:
He suggested that pseudogenes do not warrant much attention in a 'Darwinist' approach, but then notes that there are recent examples of functions found to be associated with pseudogenes. That seems contradictory unless it was ID-based research that found the functions. As far as I know, it was regular orthdox scientists who found those functions.
There is nothing contradictory here, as most regular orthodox scientists don’t employ Darwinian theory in their research. We need to remember that most biological research is carried out with little or no dependency on origin views.
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