The Design Paradigm

"When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong — or absolutely right."
- Albert Guinon

Critics of ID abound, which as I have pointed out in a previous post on The Design Paradigm, can be a very good thing for ID. How is an intelligent design researcher supposed to approach critiques leveled against ID? What kinds of critics are out there and how can one tell which are helpful and which are simply belligerent? This essay is intended to lay out a few helpful definitions and pointers for those seriously researching intelligent design.

A significant problem in tackling this issue is that, as Steve Fuller observed, "Every new theory is born refuted." (more…)

The late philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, who was for many years probably America’s most distinguished philosopher ….   told me about a year before his death that as far as he was concerned, Darwin’s greatest achievement was that he showed that Aristotle’s idea of teleology, the so-called fourth cause, does not exist.

(Ernst Mayr, interview with Edge.org,  10.31.01)

And then again… did he?  There is an interesting discussion going on at Telic Thoughts and the Evolution List on telic, teleomatic and teleonomic processes.  Mayr’s position is that the appearance of design in nature is fully explained by Darwinian processes, and he chooses to describe the apparent purposefulness of living things as teleonomic, defined as "[a] processes or behavior which owe its goaldirectedness to the operation of a program".  This is as opposed to teleomatic or deterministic forces such as gravity.

The "purposefulness", then, of biological organisms is an emergent property produced by natural selection; the writing of programs based on bits of information supplied by the environment.

Mayr defines a program as "coded or prearranged information that controls a process (or behavoir) leading it toward process (or behavoir) leading it toward a goal." and states that it contains "not only the blueprint of the goal but also the instructions of how to use the information of the blueprint." It is material and exists prior to the initiation of the telenomic process.

But do those definitions even begin to solve the problem? Is it reasonable to conclude that the emergence of teleonomic processes is explicable simply by reference to evolutionary mechanisms?  As Allen states

Clearly, if the overall theory of macroevolution is valid, then there must have been a transition from teleomatic causation to teleonomic causation in biological organisms.

He suggest this transition takes place during the origin of the genetic code; a likely choice, given that necessay origination of a program there.  Certainly the simple molecules of a hypothetical prebiotic soup would have been only teleomatic, and yet the first functioning cell contained a complete program. Somehow in the interim we have managed to build not only the program itself, but also a machine with the capability of reading the program and turning it into action.

The only emperically known source of programs are already-teleonomic entities, and the only observed causes of machines capable of turning instructions into action are intelligent, purpose-driven creatures.  In Cell Biology International Abel suggests that  the origin of life is theoretically irreducible to chance and necessity, and Yockey has argued similarily in other papers.  Is this indeed demonstrable, or will we always be able  to insert our favorite cure-all– natural selection, fairies– into an ill-defined gap?

 [All definitions from "The Idea of Teleology", Ernst Mayr, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 53, No. 1. (Jan. - Mar., 1992), pp. 117-135; avalable here if you are in the Cornell network]

It is now abundantly clear what the vast majority of intelligent design critics think. They see little to nothing that can come scientifically from design-theoretic research.

Many critical of intelligent design would claim that not even a single solitary tittle of independently derived information can result. And even if ID did ever generate anything scientific, that novel use could be had more parsimoniously by current methods. This is because ID is seen as a "science-stopper." According to our critics, ID is scientifically vacuous, as has been claimed at this blog, and in many other venues. Critics claim that all intelligent design researchers can say is, "Yep, that’s designed," followed by dead silence, coupled with crickets chirping in the background. Peter Ward, in his recent debates with Stephen Meyer, basically said that ID cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be useful to science. Additionally, Ward and other critics claim that ID actually discourages scientific curiosity.

- Curiosity and “the ID Effect”
I see clear sociological patterns emerging in the public discussion surrounding ID. Here I will call these patterns “the ID Effect.” Independent of intelligent design, it seems to me that people are curious about science in general. Pictures from the Hubble space telescope, the Mars Rover, and Tiktaalik roseae are a few recent news bites that come to mind. But this general interest is not enough to get many prospective ears into the scientific dialogue.

- "The ID Effect" Postulate 1: Piquing Curiosity
(more…)

At the beginning of last month Cornelius Hunter gave a lecture with that topic at Cornell, and now the video is finally online.  To watch it (in wmv; apologies to linux users) go here.

Many thanks to Jim Hilker and 4U Training Solutions for providing this. 

A little the worse for wear, perhaps, and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep; but even finals have an end.  So welcome back!  Please be patient with us for a few days as we re-adjust to life outside Uris library.  This rest of this week is still a chaotic ‘interim time’ as we finish those few random assignment, and a few of us have last-possible-day exams on friday, but by Saturday the dorms will be closed and spring semester  finished.  We’ll be around and busy all summer, hopefully getting further into all the interesting issues there wasn’t time to research during the schoolyear.

For most of the semester we try to do it all at once– be full time students, taking the most difficult classes, and at the same time be conscientious  IDEA’ers. We work through our homeworks, prelims, lab reports, and at the same time try to answer all our challengers and detractors, explain our position to whoever asks, and in general attempt to do our part of "representing intelligent design on campus". 

But at the end of the year, when study week and finals come around, we give up on the balancing act and, for just a few weeks, pretend we’re ordinary students who never challenged any status quo.  We  shut down our listserve, excuse ourselves from ongoing arguments, and sometimes put  vacation notifiers up in our emails– and then we shut down our computers and move into the library.  For a few weeks we pretend we never dreamed of discussing anything else except what is intrinsically relevant to our classes: the Church-Turing thesis or the undecidability of second-order logic, what transition state theory tells us about the kinetic isotope effect, or the intricacies of genetics. 

So it’s that time of year, and according to tradition, we will all be disappearing.  Since no-one will be able to watch over this website, comments will be temporarily disabled, beginning tomorrow; apologies if that inconveniences anyone, but it can’t be helped.  In a few weeks, finals over, we’ll pick up where we left off.