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Dembski, Darwin and Devils

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Dembski, Darwin and Devils DEMBSKI, DARWIN AND DEVILS JASON ROSENHOUSE Reviews of The Design Revolution by William Dembski, InterVar- sity Press, Downer’s Grove, Illinois., 2004, 334 Pages; God, the Devil and Darwin, by Niall Shanks, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2004, 273 Pages; and Darwinism, Design, and Public Education by John A. Campbell and Stephen Meyer, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI, 2003, 634 Pages. 1. The Design Revolution Since William Dembski’s latest book is subtitled “Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design”, the naive reader might think that he has taken seriously the numerous criticisms leveled at his ideas. More experienced readers will be unsurprised to learn that Dem- bski mostly just repeats the same fallacious arguments he has always made. None of the major criticisms of his work is adequately addressed. After briefly summarizing his ideas for detecting design in natural phe- nomena, I will discuss two of the most fundamental difficulties with his work. Dembski’s primary contributions to evolution-denial are his ponder- ous, repetitive musings about complex, specified information (CSI). It is his assertion that if you find CSI in some physical structure, you can be sure that lurking somewhere in its causal history is an intelligent designer. He further asserts that animals are replete with instances of CSI, implying they did not emerge from natural processes alone. Dembski’s term “information” refers to some event or phenomenon. “Complex” then indicates the probability of the event occurring by nat- ural causes alone is small, while “specified” means the event embodies some pattern describable without reference to the structure itself. In its application to biology, the events Dembski envisions are certain complex, biomolecular machines. The idea is that the particular sequence of heads and tails that emerges when a fair coin is flipped one thousand times is highly im- probable, but this by itself does not make us suspicious. But if the 1 2 JASON ROSENHOUSE sequence consists of one thousand heads, we now have a pattern that is both complex and specified. Consequently, we suspect there is skull- duggery afoot. There is nothing more to Dembski’s work than that, a fact that is easily overlooked when slogging through his excessively technical scribblings. 2. Probability Calculations How are we to carry out an appropriate probability calculation for events whose occurrence is influenced by more variables than we can plausibly measure? Such calculations begin with an enumeration of all the events that might have occurred in lieu of the one we are consid- ering. We then assign a probability to each of those outcomes, which in any nontrivial, real-life case is likely to require far more information than we have. The problem is especially acute when the events we are considering are the endpoints of four billion years of evolution. Dembski is aware of this problem. He writes: The argument starts by noting that if some natural sys- tem exemplifies specified complexity, then it must be vastly improbable with respect to all purely natural mech- anisms that could be operating to produce it. But that means calculating a probability for each such mechanism. This, so the argument runs, is an impossible task. At best science could show that a given natural system is vastly improbable with respect to known mechanisms op- erating in known ways and for which the probability can be estimated. But this omits, first, known mechanisms operating in unknown ways and for which the probabil- ity cannot be estimated; second, known mechanisms for which the probability cannot be estimated; and third, unknown mechanisms. (P. 110). Well said. It’s the second of the three omissions that is most serious. Biologists say that complex systems evolve gradually as a result of natural selection. That is a known mechanism, but one whose effects are too complicated to be captured in a simple probability calculation. Dembski has exactly one card to play in circumventing this objec- tion: The irreducible complexity (IC) of certain biochemical systems. IC is the brainchild of Michael Behe, who coined the term in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box. A system is IC if it is composed of several, well-matched, indispensable parts. Behe and Dembski argue it is im- plausible that such systems could evolve gradually. Though Dembski DEMBSKI, DARWIN AND DEVILS 3 claims to have a general procedure for detecting design in events whose causal history is unknown, in practice he only applies it to biology. He has a few stock examples for illustrating his ideas, but it is only in bi- ology that Dembski presumes to resolve questions of scientific interest. IC is essential for this purpose, because he must preclude the possibil- ity that complex biochemical systems form gradually through natural selection. Which means that Dembski’s entire body of work on complex spec- ified information, amounting to thousands of pages, contributes abso- lutely nothing to the evolution/creation debate. In the end, the whole argument comes down to the legitimacy of Behe’s claims about IC. If Behe’s premise is granted (something no competent biologist is likely to do), then no dubious probability calculation is needed to conclude that evolution as we know it is in trouble. If it is not granted, then the assumptions underlying Dembski’s probability calculations are plainly false. Dembski asserts that, as a matter of logic, IC systems cannot evolve directly. He writes: The logical point is this: Certain artificial structures are provably inaccessible to a direct Darwinian pathway be- cause they have property P (i.e. irreducible complexity). But certain biological structures have property P , so they too must be inaccessible to a direct Darwinian pathway. (P. 293. Emphasis in original). Here is his definition of “direct Darwinian pathway”: A direct Darwinian pathway is one in which a system evolves by natural selection, incrementally enhancing a given function. As the system evolves, the function does not. (P. 293) Of course, this says nothing about indirect pathways, which biol- ogists believe are quite common in evolution. Dembski dismisses this possibility, but does so only by downplaying the vast literature address- ing biochemical evolution. For a large number of biochemical systems there is quite a lot known about their evolution. More to the point, however, is that IC does not preclude direct Dar- winian pathways. That every part of a machine is currently essential does not imply that it has always been essential. Behe ignored this pos- sibility in Darwin’s Black Box. Dembski tries to evade it by introducing the notion of “minimal complexity (MC),” by which he means that no system less complex than the minimum could perform the function of 4 JASON ROSENHOUSE the full machine. In this formulation it is the combination of IC and MC that rule out direct Darwinian pathways. The problem is that a complex system does not evolve in a vacuum. Rather, its environment evolves along with it. A system may be MC in its present environment, but not be MC in some ancestral environ- ment. Put another way, a simpler system might have been functional in a simpler environment. But including this possibility would make it impossible to apply the concept of MC. As an example, consider the scenario for blood clotting evolution described by Russell Doolittle and others. Every step in its formation was useful for the purpose of blood clotting. This is possible because the nature of the circulatory system in which the system was operat- ing changed over time. The earliest stages of the cascade formed in an ancient invertebrate with a low-pressure circulatory system. Conse- quently, the organism could get by with a relatively slow and primitive clotting mechanism. Our modern blood clotting system evolved in tan- dem with changes in the circulatory system. Consequently, IC is utterly irrelevant to any question of biological significance. 3. Specificity Low probability by itself does not preclude chance as an explanation for an event. To infer design we need something else, and Dembski offers specification for that purpose. The idea is that the event in question should conform to some iden- tifiable pattern. Dembski has offered elaborate statistical justifications for knowing the genuine patterns from the ones imposed by human imagination, but we will lose nothing by ignoring these details. To jus- tify the claim that the bacterial flagellum (the only biological system Dembski considers) is specified, he writes: Certainly the bacterial flagellum is specified. One way to see this is to note that humans developed bi-directional motor-driven propellers well before they figured out that the flagellum was such a machine. This is not to say that for the biological function of a system to constitute a specification, humans must have independently invented a system that performs the same function. Nevertheless, independent invention makes all the more clear that the system satisfies independent functional requirements and therefore is specified. At any rate, no biologist I know DEMBSKI, DARWIN AND DEVILS 5 questions whether the functional systems that arise in biology are specified. (P. 111) I love that last line. Since there are, at present, no biologists at all who use the term “specified” in the peculiar technical sense Dembski envisions, I suspect he is right. Apparently specifying the bacterial flagellum only requires making an analogy between the manner in which it performs its function and some human invention that serves a similar purpose. Nothing technical there. If this is different from looking at a cumulus cloud and seeing a dragon, I do not see how. In illustrating his ideas about specification, Dembski frequently makes reference to Mt. Rushmore. Any particular pattern of cracks and ridges in a mountain is terribly improbable, but the faces on Mt Rushmore fit a clear specification.
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