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Detecting Design

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Detecting Design Detecting Design *Random or designed? How does one tell? Quick Intro to Intelligent Design from a Sympathetic and Christian Perspective What is ID? definitions Is design detectable? the explanatory filter The ID argument bacterial flagellum on E. coli implications objections Conclusions/Discussion 1 “….teleology was a mistress that no biologist could live without, yet he would be ashamed to be seen in the street with her.” -A.C. Burton “….scientific explanations are never complete….they always depend on philosophical presuppositions [which may] have to find their justification in the realm of religious belief” -Del Ratzsch “Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance.” -Blaise Pascal “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” -Revelation 4:11 Definitions, cont’d species: a separate reproductive community; i.e. creatures that can mate with each other are members of the same species micro-evolution: adaptation within a species that gives the adapted creature an advantage with respect to survival and/or reproduction (e.g. finch the dog is the beaks, bacterial antibiotic resistance) most diverse species on earth, macro-evolution: the theory that all living and has been organisms came to be what they are by a purely subject to much selective breeding; random, purposeless process, first via (a) pre- there are about 400 modern dog biological processes to get a primitive life form, and breeds then (b) mutation and natural selection on the organism, and nothing more (no guiding intelligence, conscious purpose, personal creator or other non-naturalistic mechanism) 2 Macro-evolution’s “Descent with Modification” Matter and energy Subatomic particles: Atoms Molecules Quarks, gluons, etc Pre-biological evolution RNA/DNA/proteins w/ ability to reproduce and process Eubacteria Archaebacteria energy Prokaryotes (no cell nucleus)=the simplest living organism Single-celled organisms Eukaryotes (nucleus enclosed by its own membrane) Ancestral fish Multicellular Plants: Coelacanth, etc Mosses, ferns, seed plants, flowers, etc Amphibians Worms Sponges Modern fish Reptiles Arthropods: Mollusks Insects, crustaceans, etc Lizards, dinosaurs, etc Archaepteryx Invertebrates (145X106 yrs ago) Mammals Birds Human, whale, bat Penguins, hummingbird, ostrich, etc Vertebrates (arrows represent “descent”) Definitions, cont’d naturalism or “metaphysical naturalism”: the doctrine that nature (the fundamental particles that make up what we call matter and energy, together with the laws that govern how those particles behave) is all there is, and that nature is the only thing that is ultimately real or meaningful. All else, including God, is an illusion. natural selection: the “survival of the fittest” or “the differential survival of mutant forms [which possess an advantage with respect to survival and/or reproduction]” 3 What is Science? (No universally-accepted, formal definition) A process that attempts to be empirical (involving experiments and observation) be rational be objective and public, self-checking make testable predictions seek to understand the universe or parts thereof, leading to formation of theories (coherent networks of propositions and presuppositions), ultimately providing a systematic, rigorous account find and describe regularities or “law-like” behavior follow the evidence wherever it leads has no good grounds for rejecting/barring evidences of design {many do reject design as inconsistent with science because, they claim, it results in “scientific laziness” methodological naturalism or “provisional atheism” is essential to science (Ratzsch, p. 122)} Science also is subjective (Thomas Kuhn’s work made this clear): personal presuppositions, biases, systems of interpretation, and religion play a role in determining what the “facts” are not always “cool, reasoned, wholly dispassionate” nothing is religiously neutral, but some subjects more neutral than others the Pythagorean theorem human origins or behavior is inductive, tentative assumes uniformity of nature a priori employs “bridge principles” between observed patterns and theoretical entities (e.g. quarks and gluons) is embedded in a world-view, a presuppositional framework (e.g. Nova special on Newton) Definitions, cont’d ALL parts of the system need to be present for the mousetrap to function; such systems are not put together gradually, step-by-step. irreducible complexity: A system performing a given function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well- matched, mutually interacting, non-arbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system’s basic, and therefore original, function. The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core. (Wm. Dembski) 4 What is “Intelligent Design"? A movement dedicated to showing that 1) macro-evolution is not so much a theory based on lots of evidence as it is a philosophical position, an attempt to make science “applied materialistic philosophy” [see Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, for this type of critique], 2) there exist complex organisms that could not have come to be by mutation and natural selection alone, are not explained by physical laws, and so evidence design [M. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box and Wm. Dembski’s No Free Lunch], and 3) intelligent causes are empirically detectable, making ID a “positive scientific research program” [Wm. Dembski’s The Design Inference] A diverse movement, a non-monolithic group (the question of “designedness” and the Designer are two different questions) macro-evolution SELECT AN OBJECT OR sees chance and Defining “Design” EVENT necessity ultimately accounting for ALL Was there any other possible outcome, design: that which is i.e. was it NOT the result of a known inferred by a process of deterministic process? elimination, using the CONTINGENCY? NECESSITY explanatory filter; what’s NO Is the probability of its existence left once you’ve YES low enough to eliminate chance as eliminated “chance” and the cause? “necessity”; OR an COMPLEXITY? CHANCE NO intentionally produced Is the object or event pre- YES pattern, where a pattern described, suitable, a “target”,NOT is an abstract structure ad hoc? SPECIFICATION? CHANCE that resonates, matches NO or meshes in certain ways with the mind YES (Wm. Dembski’s DESIGN explanatory filter) 5 An explanatory filter example Radio signal received from outer space that beats out (from the movie all the prime numbers between 2 and 101 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17,….. “Contact”) Do the laws of physics allow for other sorts of radio signals to be transmitted under these circumstances? CONTINGENCY? NECESSITY NO YES Is the prime number sequence long enough? COMPLEXITY? CHANCE NO YES Is this sequence of numbers particularly special? SPECIFICATION? CHANCE NO YES DESIGN SELECT AN OBJECT OR Explanatory filter examples EVENT Was there any other possible outcome, i.e. was it NOT the result of a known deterministic process? CONTINGENCY? NECESSITY We can rationally discriminate NO Is the probability of its existence YES low enough to eliminate chance as between the cause? COMPLEXITY? CHANCE intentional copying (design=plagiarism) NO YES Is the object or event pre- vs. chance similarity between articles or described, suitable, NOT ad hoc? SPECIFICATION? CHANCE numerical tables NO intentional favoritism of candidates YES (“design”) vs. impartial drawing of DESIGN names messages from aliens (“design”) vs. random or regular radio signals [SETI] utensils made by ancient peoples (“design”) and objects that have come to be by natural processes (erosion, wind) Can we do the same in biology? 6 Darwin’s falsifiability criteria The Origin of Species, Chapter 6. “Difficulties of the Theory/ Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication/ Modes of Transition”: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.” ∴Organisms which are irreducibly complex are a problem for macro-evolution Reductio ad absurdum if Macro-evolution (M), then (A) all creatures came to be by gradual, step-wise process of mutation and natural selection, i.e. M⊃A Not all organisms come to be by gradual, step-wise process of mutation and natural selection , i.e. ~A Hence Macro-evolution is false: M⊃A ; ~A, ∴~M E. coli bacterial flagellum video (Japan Sci. and Tech. Corporation) 7 Wm. Dembski’s Argument (in No Free Lunch, 2002) Flagellum on E. coli observed Explanatory filter Are there there other types of applied to the flagellum organisms or bacterial propulsion of E. Coli bacteria systems? CONTINGENCY? NECESSITY Edited video of BF NO Is the mechanism complex enough (of sufficiently low nanomachine from Japan YES probability) to NOT be explainable by gradual Science and Technology mutation and natural selection? COMPLEXITY? CHANCE Corp: ShortbactFlagellum2.wmv NO YES Dembski’s bacterial Is this part of a living organism? SPECIFICATION? CHANCE flagellum complexity NO calculation via analogies YES Universal improbability bound = of (a) cake-baking and 1/(max. # events in the universe); DESIGN max. # events in the universe ≈ (age of (b) typographical errors universe/smallest time-scale) X # protons in the universe ≈ 10150 ≈ 2500 Cake-baking analogy Bact. flagell.
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