Now that we understand why ID is fundamentally different than the theory of natural selection we can go about trying to test it appropriately. My first step will be to design an experiment that will test a simpler version of the theory. Since the general theory says that a human can look at an artifact and detect an intelligent designer, the first experiment is going to be:
1) look at stimulus A
2) decide if stimulus A was designed by an intelligent being
This seems like a very basic experiment, but there are several things we need to consider before we get started. First, a popular version of ID states that an intelligent being can be inferred when a human perceives something called irreducible complexity. The current experiment skips to the chase and asks whether the human can detect an intelligent creator instead. Why? What we are really interested in is the detection of an intelligent designer and that is pretty easy to describe to novice experimental subjects. If I have to explain "irreducible complexity" to someone before they can participate in an experiment it going to take way too long to get started. Once we determine how people do at this task we will want to investigate to theories of how someone can do it. Second, we will start with a set of stimuli where there are clear right and wrong answers which we can use to judge people's success. This is much more complicated than it sounds, but we will talk more about it. Finally, if we are asking people to judge whether something was designed I think it only makes sense to let them know what it was designed for. After all, a knife has an intelligent design for cutting, but it doesn't have an intelligent design for carrying. In the first experiment, we will assume that every artifact should be used to accomplish a task. The question is: was this artifact intelligently designed to accomplish this task?
Monday, February 22, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Stepping Back
I want to make clear to any reader that this is not intended as a forum for debating ID and natural selection. There are many good sites dedicated to that, but I find it all kind of boring. There is no scientific debate as far as I am concerned, because debates must be based on evidence gleaned from research. There is no real body of research for ID that even puts it in the same tax bracket as evolutionary science. In science, there is nothing if there is no research. Here is a simple experiment to help you understand why I find the ID debate so boring. Let's say you were recently diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease and you wanted to find the best treatment available. Who would you go talk to? Probably a doctor. So you start talking to doctors about your disease and the best treatment options. After talking to a thousand doctors, 999 of them tell you to get a specific treatment, based on the current state of research, and 1 one of them tells you to go pray. My guess is, if you are a rational person, that you would go with the overwhelming opinion of the experts in the field. You don't even need to be an expert in the field, or delve into the details on the arguments in favor of praying, in order to make a rational decision. If you had a serious legal question you would probably take the same approach, assuming you are a rational person. If you are a completely naive observer of nature, and you want to know how the giraffe got such a long neck, you might decide that you should go ask an expert in that field: a biologist. Once you talk to one thousand biologists you might find one of them who tells you that it is clear that an intelligent designer endowed the giraffe with a long neck. All others would be in near total unanimity that the giraffe's long neck came from a process called natural selection over the course of a long time. There is no conspiracy here. The huge majority of biologists could all be wrong, but: the current state of research is very one-sided on this question. There is zero evidence supporting an intelligent designer of giraffe's and mountains of evidence supporting descent with modification. The only people arguing for ID today are marginal at best, completely unqualified or incompetent at worst, and they all have an obvious ulterior motive. Furthermore, none of them are advancing the state of biological science today. Research in ID has produced no compelling evidence to date, and that's why it gets no scientific support. Why hasn't ID produced any evidence? In my opinion it's because the developers of the theory skipped a number of very important steps and thus failed to devise the proper experimental designs to gather evidence.
So why am I still interested in the theory of ID? I think that ID is interesting as a theory because it brings up a number of questions that are not posed in other theories. ID has built into it the assumption that we understand two very complicated things: intelligence and design. These are normally the realm of philosophy or cognitive science, but here in a supposed theory of biology we have them featured prominently. The theory goes that there are mechanisms found in nature (not all mechanisms of course, but only certain ones) which have an irreducible complexity from which we can infer both that the mechanism was designed, and that it was designed by an intelligent being! Well that's some theory! Inferring that something was designed is a pretty big jump in my opinion, and it leads to a lot of interesting questions. Is it really scientific to introduce the inferential powers of a faulty human as a measurement? Should we count on any human's inference to determine if something was designed? What if two human's disagree on whether something was designed? What does the theory say then? This power of inference needs to be understood much better before it can be inserted into a theory like that. Likewise, the inference of an intelligent designer is an added complication. Is there such a thing as an unintelligent designer? Is intelligence sufficient or necessary for design? What does 'design' mean anyway? Are snowflakes designed? Can humans really tell the difference between things that were designed by an intelligent being and other things? Are humans intelligent enough to infer the intelligence of a designer when examining something that is much more complicated than a human is capable of designing, let alone understanding?
I want to ask those questions that really come before the theory of ID is ready. I want to go back through the foundation of the theory, where all those huge assumptions were made, performing all the steps that were skipped previously, and develop a set of experiments that are intended to test the theory. I think that a careful analysis of the theory will help everyone understand the component parts (some of which need to be tested independently) and will result in a framework for research that is very different than ID research done up to now, and also very different than research that would be performed for evolution. If I can work through the essential theory of ID I can come up with some experimental designs that will help researchers start gathering evidence. The fact that there are a lot of people promoting a pseudo-scientific theory of ID tells me that there are huge misconceptions about science and scientific theories, and what constitutes a good theory. I want to commit this blog to the task of turning the theory of ID into a truly scientific and testable theory.
The essential question:
I will stop this post with what I consider to be the first problem with the theory of ID in it's typical formulation, which comes from trying to stand it up against evolutionary theory. I want to make the point that the two theories are so fundamentally different that they should not be compared ever. First, in evolutionary theory we start with the observable evidence from archaeology, genetics, population studies, anatomy and so on. The theory of evolution does a great job of explaining all of that evidence coherently. In ID we start with the modern living beings. ID is not attempting to explain all of the other evidence. Many of the non-scientific proponents of the theory simply dismiss all of the other evidence, which is not justified, but for now I think it is important to understand that ID is not concerned with the same body of evidence at all. ID theory starts with modern living things and makes one inference: that the irreducible complexity of the living things means we can infer that they were designed by an intelligent being. So let's forget about all the other evidence for now, because we are not pitting the theories against each other here. Second, while a theory should answer more than a single question, it is helpful to consider the essential question that a theory tries to answer. The theory of evolution by natural selection and ID are not trying to answer the same essential question. Evolutionary theory attempts to address the question: given mounds of evidence from a variety of disciplines, how do we explain the combination of similarity and difference we see in both living and extinct species? ID attempts to answer the question: Can a human can look at some artifact and determine that it was designed by an intelligent being?
So why am I still interested in the theory of ID? I think that ID is interesting as a theory because it brings up a number of questions that are not posed in other theories. ID has built into it the assumption that we understand two very complicated things: intelligence and design. These are normally the realm of philosophy or cognitive science, but here in a supposed theory of biology we have them featured prominently. The theory goes that there are mechanisms found in nature (not all mechanisms of course, but only certain ones) which have an irreducible complexity from which we can infer both that the mechanism was designed, and that it was designed by an intelligent being! Well that's some theory! Inferring that something was designed is a pretty big jump in my opinion, and it leads to a lot of interesting questions. Is it really scientific to introduce the inferential powers of a faulty human as a measurement? Should we count on any human's inference to determine if something was designed? What if two human's disagree on whether something was designed? What does the theory say then? This power of inference needs to be understood much better before it can be inserted into a theory like that. Likewise, the inference of an intelligent designer is an added complication. Is there such a thing as an unintelligent designer? Is intelligence sufficient or necessary for design? What does 'design' mean anyway? Are snowflakes designed? Can humans really tell the difference between things that were designed by an intelligent being and other things? Are humans intelligent enough to infer the intelligence of a designer when examining something that is much more complicated than a human is capable of designing, let alone understanding?
I want to ask those questions that really come before the theory of ID is ready. I want to go back through the foundation of the theory, where all those huge assumptions were made, performing all the steps that were skipped previously, and develop a set of experiments that are intended to test the theory. I think that a careful analysis of the theory will help everyone understand the component parts (some of which need to be tested independently) and will result in a framework for research that is very different than ID research done up to now, and also very different than research that would be performed for evolution. If I can work through the essential theory of ID I can come up with some experimental designs that will help researchers start gathering evidence. The fact that there are a lot of people promoting a pseudo-scientific theory of ID tells me that there are huge misconceptions about science and scientific theories, and what constitutes a good theory. I want to commit this blog to the task of turning the theory of ID into a truly scientific and testable theory.
The essential question:
I will stop this post with what I consider to be the first problem with the theory of ID in it's typical formulation, which comes from trying to stand it up against evolutionary theory. I want to make the point that the two theories are so fundamentally different that they should not be compared ever. First, in evolutionary theory we start with the observable evidence from archaeology, genetics, population studies, anatomy and so on. The theory of evolution does a great job of explaining all of that evidence coherently. In ID we start with the modern living beings. ID is not attempting to explain all of the other evidence. Many of the non-scientific proponents of the theory simply dismiss all of the other evidence, which is not justified, but for now I think it is important to understand that ID is not concerned with the same body of evidence at all. ID theory starts with modern living things and makes one inference: that the irreducible complexity of the living things means we can infer that they were designed by an intelligent being. So let's forget about all the other evidence for now, because we are not pitting the theories against each other here. Second, while a theory should answer more than a single question, it is helpful to consider the essential question that a theory tries to answer. The theory of evolution by natural selection and ID are not trying to answer the same essential question. Evolutionary theory attempts to address the question: given mounds of evidence from a variety of disciplines, how do we explain the combination of similarity and difference we see in both living and extinct species? ID attempts to answer the question: Can a human can look at some artifact and determine that it was designed by an intelligent being?
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