Unintelligent By Design?

Stephen C Meyer writes in today's Telegraph that intelligent design is not creationism and that we should treat it as a scientific theory on a par with evolution.  I was going to write a post disputing the logic of this but I was hardly worried about it.  Then I saw this link at Gav's Politics and I got more concerned.  Less than half of Britons believe evolution best explains the development of us and more than 40% would like to see intelligent design taught in British schools.

I never thought that I would ever write a post filed under 'religion' and 'science', let alone believed that half of us would be unable to tell the difference.  Meyer thinks he can tell the difference and goes to great lengths to explain why ID is science and not religion.  He writes

"British readers have learnt about the theory of intelligent design (ID) mainly from media reports about United States court battles over the legality of teaching students about it. According to most reports, ID is a "faith-based" alternative to evolution based solely on religion."

The legality issue, as it has been raised, is to do with the constitutional clause that requires a separation between church and state.  Hence why advocates are claiming it has nothing to do with religion.  The media probably got confused in their reporting because the courts have ruled that ID is a faith alternative which is why it can't be promoted in schools.  It can't have helped that the people pushing ID were the same people that were pushing creationism a few years ago.

"ID holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by a designing intelligence. The theory does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over time, or even common ancestry, but it disputes Darwin's idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected."

We shall give Meyer the benefit of the doubt that ID really doesn't challenge evolution, even though its most vocal proponents do.  For the record, evolution is not wholly blind or undirected all creatures continually mutate and traits that enable survival will flourish.  Thus evolution is directed by natural selection, just as markets are directed by the 'invisible hand'.  In the same way as the invisible hand can produce what appears to be a designed solution, when in fact agents are merely responding to their environment, evolution is capable of developing solutions which appear designed.  While Smith used the invisible hand as an analogy, Meyer has decided to take it a step further and assume that a guiding hand must really exist.

He uses the "flagellar motors" found in cells as an example of something that is "irreducibly complex".

"This creates a problem for the Darwinian mechanism. Natural selection preserves or "selects" functional advantages as they arise by random mutation. Yet the flagellar motor does not function unless all its 30 parts are present. Thus, natural selection can "select" the motor once it has arisen as a functioning whole, but it cannot produce the motor in a step-by-step Darwinian fashion."

I do not want to harm the debate by pretending I know a lot about flagellar motors because I don't.   What I do know is that his argument has several flaws.

Firstly, evolution is not a mechanism, it is a complex system which involves chaotic behaviour.  There is absolutely nothing mechanistic about it whatsoever (the same is true of the "price mechanism" by the way).  I'm sure Meyer would love my admitting to the existence of chaos, he clearly enjoys poking fun at the idea of solutions randomly occurring and then being selected.  Don't forget that snowflakes are also random but for a few simple constraints.

Secondly, the flagellar motor may not do what it does now without 30 parts but that does not mean a less evolved motor couldn't do another job. Meyer says that the intermediate stages wouldn't perform any worthwhile function.   To know this would require an er.. godlike omniscience, he simply couldn't know well enough to decisively repudiate the claim.  Also, single mutations can cause major changes.  Perhaps some day we will learn to track back our DNA and discover what all these things looked like before they did what they do now, and knock this claim on the head once and for all.

Meyer goes on to claim that as the evolutionary process has been shown not to explain the level of complexity we see.  It hasn't but I'll accept that evolution has not been shown to explain everything, so the theory should not be held as infallible.  We should be prepared to challenge current thinking if a better explanation comes along, as has happened before in evolutionary theory which has itself evolved.  However it does not follow that if the theory does not immediately explain everything then the rest must be due to god.  Meyer's assertion that if something seems to complex to have evolved then it must have been engineered ignores the fact that engineers are increasingly trying to mimic evolution to find better designs.  A quick search of Wikipedia on the subject led me to this:

Because they do not make any assumption about the underlying fitness landscape, it is generally believed that evolutionary algorithms perform consistently well across all types of problems (see, however, the no-free-lunch theorem). This is evidenced by their success in fields as diverse as engineering, art, biology, economics, genetics, operations research, robotics, social sciences, physics, chemistry, and others.

So while Meyer is trying to claim that complexity means a designer is necessary, engineers are trying to harness the power of evolutionary systems to solve increasingly complex problems.

Meyer claims that ID has a scientific premise and that it was reached by looking objectively at the evidence.  He even cites the conversion of Anthony Flew from atheism to ID.  Flew may have approached the question from a neutral point but ID was conceived to fit god into the gaps.  Essentially he is saying science can't explain this, ergo there is a god.  Science cannot explain everything now but inserting a god asks as many questions as it answers.  Meyer offers no description of the creator's properties (pretty important in a scientific hypothesis), but merely stipulates that one exists and must be the answer to all the questions science has yet to answer. His "theory" could never be proven or disprove.  If, and probably when, someone works out how the flagellar motor came to be, their work will also pose new questions (as the island of our knowledge grows so too does the shore of our ignorance) and then Meyer will simply shift his ground and propose god is the answer to those questions.  We should keep an open mind, even with regards to the existence of a god, but there is a difference between being open minded and trying to find the question to an answer you've already decided upon.

Comments

[Gavin Ayling]

Sorry it's taken me so long to read this -- I saw your trackback but have been run off my feet. I think I'll post a new link to your post as it is great reading.