The FAQ at the Discovery Institute CSC site links to an ID “summary” , entitled What Is the Science Behind Intelligent Design?, dated May 1, 2009.  So five years out of date, but worth deconstructing all the same, as it basically gives away the farm.

Here goes:

Intelligent design (ID) is a scientific theory that employs the methods commonly used by other historical sciences to conclude that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Well, no, not to my knowledge it doesn’t.  It employs very odd methods indeed, and even fewer that are actually empirical.  But we’ll unpack that as we go.

ID theorists argue that design can be inferred by studying the informational properties of natural objects to determine if they bear the type of information that in our experience arise from an intelligent cause.

 

OK.  So according to this, the “informational properties” of natural objects can reveal an intelligence properties.  So far, so clear.

The form of information which we observe is produced by intelligent action, and thus reliably indicates design, is generally called “specified complexity” or “complex and specified information” (CSI).

Hold it right there.  Is this supposed to be where you start or where you finish?  If it’s where you start, isn’t ID assuming its conclusion (that a certain form of information “is produced by intelligent action” and “thus reliably indicates design”?  And if you aren’t, then shouldn’t the first project of ID be to establish whether this is indeed the case?

An object or event is complex if it is unlikely, and specified if it matches some independent pattern.

 

Fair enough as a definition.  So let’s see whether, anywhere, there is an ID project aimed at demonstrating that a complex specified object or event is only produced by intelligent action (obviously sometimes it is, but if it was only sometimes so produced, then it wouldn’t “reliably indicate…design”.)

Contrary to what many people suppose, the debate over intelligent design is much broader than the debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution. That’s because much of the scientific evidence for intelligent design comes from areas that Darwin’s theory doesn’t even address. In fact, the evidence for intelligent design comes from three main areas: Physics and Cosmology, the Origin of Life, and the Development of Biological Complexity.

 

OK.

Evidence for Design in Physics and Cosmology

The fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry to allow for advanced life is an example of extremely high levels of CSI in nature. The laws of the universe are complex because they are highly unlikely. Cosmologists have calculated the odds of a life-friendly universe appearing by chance are less than one part in 10^{10^123}. That’s ten raised to a power of 10 with 123 zeros after it!

This is unreferenced.  A bit of googling, and I find it is from Roger Penrose (who, when I last checked was a singular cosmologist), and it is, would you believe it, a quote mine. It’s from The Emperor’s New Mind (1989),  and the relevant passage is luckily online which will save me copytyping:

 

This figure []will give us an estimate of the total phase-space volume V available to the Creator, since this entropy should represent the logarithm of the volume of the (easily) largest compartment. Since

   

is the logarithm of the volume, the volume must be the exponential of , i.e.

   

in natural units!  (Some perceptive readers may feel that I should have used the figure , but for numbers of this size, the and the are essentially

interchangeable!) How big was the original phase-space volume that the Creator had to aim for in order to provide a universe compatible with the second law of

thermodynamics and with what we now observe? It does not much matter whether we take the value or given by the galactic black holes or by the background radiation, respectively, or a much smaller (and, in fact, more appropriate) figure which would have been the actual figure at the big bang. Either way, the ratio of V to W will be, closely

   

This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in .

This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full, in the ordinary denary notation: it would be `1′ followed by successive `0 ‘s! Even if we were to write a `0’ on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe-and we could throw in all the other particles as well for good measure-we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed. The precision needed to set the universe on its course is seen to be in no way inferior to all that extraordinary precision that we have already become accustomed to in the superb dynamical equations (Newton’s, Maxwell’s, Einstein’s) which govern the behaviour of things from moment to moment.

So far so golly-gosh. However, Penrose goes on (note that Penrose is using “Creator” metaphorically here “- he is not arguing for a Creator and reportedly describes himself as an atheist, and his calculation is in any case based on a closed universe, whereas current evidence apparently suggest a flat one):

But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space. The assumption that this constraint applies at any initial (but not final) space-time singularity, I have termed The Weyl Curvature Hypothesis. Thus, it would seem, we need to understand why such a time-asymmetric hypothesis should apply if we are to comprehend where the second law has come from.

In other words, Penrose sets up this golly-gosh figure in order to define the constraints that we must discover to account for it, i.e. NOT to state, for all time – “the odds [whatever that means in this context, which is not clear]  of a life-friendly universe appearing by chance” but what constraints might give such a universe high odds.  And those constraints need not be intelligent design, any more than the intelligent design must be the reason why an apple falls downwards, even though there are an infinite number of directions available for it to travel in.

Let’s get back to the CSC piece:

The laws of the universe are specified in that they match the narrow band of parameters required for the existence of advanced life.

Yes, but what we do not know are two key things before we know whether they are “unlikely” as required by the “complex” requirement, as given by Meyer above.  Firstly, we do not know whether there are any constraints on which combination of parameters are actuated, and second, we do not know how many trials there were – we might assume one, we might assume many, but the fact is that we cannot say that a thing is “unlikely” unless we know how many opportunities there were for it to occur.  Thus the entire principle of a “probability distribution” is violated here.  A probability distribution is simply a frequency distribution divided by the sum of the observations so that the area under the curve normalises to 1.  Without multiple observations we have no frequency distribution, and therefore no probability distribution.  It’s perfectly possible that the parameters of our universe were fine-tuned by an entity who wanted us to exist, but we cannot infer it from the data available.  So this part of the ID project is dead on arrival.

As an atheist cosmologist Fred Hoyle observed, “[a] common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” The universe itself shows strong evidence of having been designed.

 

And having Fred Hoyle opine thus, in 1981, is scarcely relevant to anything.  Fred Hoyle was a smart man, but many smart people have differed, including many with a lot more data.

Evidence for Design in the Origin of Life: So moving on to OoL, except that oddly, this section doesn’t even mention OoL, unless the writer assumes that the first life forms must have had modern DNA, which no-one actually proposes:

Bernd-Olaf Kuppers has pointed out in his book Information and the Origin of Life that “[t]he problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”  As noted previously, intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents generate large quantities of complex and specified information (CSI).

No it wasn’t.  This is sleight of hand.  We did not “note…previously” any “observation that intelligent agents generate large quantities of complex and specified information”.  It may be true, but without some parameters on “large”, and something to compare it with, this still has to be demonstrated.  And if the definition of “specified complexity” includes the definition of “complexity” as “unlikely” it is pure question-begging.  How do we know whether a mountain is “unlikely” or not? Unlikely under what null?  Or a snowflake? A plant?  And if a plant can generate a new plant, and a new plant comprises specified information, does it generate as much, or more, or less than known intelligent agents, e.g. us?  And if more, in what sense is our own output “large”?  Why bring intelligence in at all?  If a plant can do it?  This is typical of the incoherence that is so often smoothed over in fine-sounding jargon in ID writing.  Going on….

Studies of the cell reveal vast quantities of biochemical information stored in our DNA in the sequence of nucleotides.

 

Well, let’s accept this for now, even though the author has now slid to “biochemical information” rather than “complex specified information”, and even if it is defined the same way, we still don’t know what makes it “unlikely” and thus “complex”.  Dembski tells us that the answer is “unlikely under the relevant chance null” but does not tell us how to find such a thing.  Still, let us agree, per argumentum, that cells contain a great deal of information.  By many definitions of information, it does.  So…

 

No physical or chemical law dictates the order of the nucleotide bases in our DNA, and the sequences are highly improbable and complex.

If this is a premise, the entire ID project is circular.  If it is a conclusion, then we need to see the supporting evidence. In fact, many physical and chemical laws “dictate” the “order of the nucleotide bases in our DNA”: they are highly constrained by the order of bases in the parent DNA, as a matter of both physics and chemistry.  What the author might mean, I guess, is that something like:if you were to make a DNA strand from scratch, somehow, in a test-tube, without a parent strand, no physical or chemical law would make any one sequence more likely than any other.  But that’s not anything like how DNA is assembled – it’s assembled from parent DNA, and each parent DNA has, to our knowledge, its own parent, and the daughter sequence, far from being “improbable” is almost fully determined, which is why we call it “self-replicating”.  And it’s “complex” in the sense that it’s long, but it’s not “complex” in the sense it is unlikely, for the same reason.  In fact, given that the writer has defined “complex” as “unlikely”, to describe DNA as being both “improbable” and “complex” is tautology. And wrong. So again, although it all sounds fine and wonderful, it simply falls apart on the most cursory of scrutinies, unless, as I said, the author thinks that the first living cells had modern DNA.

Moreover, the coding regions of DNA exhibit sequential arrangements of bases that are necessary to produce functional proteins. In other words, they are highly specified with respect to the independent requirements of protein function and protein synthesis.

 

Nobody disputes that coding regions of DNA sequences are “specified”, in the sense that they are a subset of possible sequences that have phenotypic effects. Non-coding regions are highly specified too.  “Independent requirements of protein function and protein synthesis” doesn’t make much sense to me.  Perhaps an ID supporter can explain.  Certainly not all coded proteins are synthesised, and certainly not all synthesised proteins are functional, in the sense of having phenotypic effects.  And some non-coding regions are specified with respect to which proteins are synthesised, under some conditions, but the author is apparently talking about coding regions.  So perhaps it was a brain fart and he meant that some DNA sequences code for when and where a protein should be synthesised in order to perform some function, and others code for what protein.  But again, this is not in dispute.  The specified part of specified complexity is fine.  It’s the complex part that is incoherent.

Thus, as nearly all molecular biologists now recognize, the coding regions of DNA possess a high “information content”—where “information content” in a biological context means precisely “complexity and specificity.”

If it means “complexity” precisely as “unlikely” or “unlikely under some relevant null” then this is totally imprecise unless the relevant null is provided. This is the eleP(T|H)ant in the room. Certainly regular non-ID biologists “recognize” that if complexity is treated as “unlikely under the null hypothesis of blind draw from a distribution of amino acids” then many protein sequences are highly complex.  But that tells us nothing about an intelligent origin, because we have no idea how unlikely such proteins are under an actual “relevant null”.

Even atheist zoologist Richard Dawkins concedes that “[b]iology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”

Weasel word “concede” here.  Dawkins’ point is a very positive one.  What is fascinating about Darwin’s theory is that it provides a mechanism for how features that do serve the function of increasing the probability that an organism will survive and breed without any single entity having to conceive and enact a “purpose”.

Atheists like Dawkins believe that unguided natural processes did all the “designing”

 

Dawkins may use the word “unguided” but it is a poor one.  Evolutionary forces are powerfully “guiding” in the sense that a stream that starts near a snowy-summit is guided to the ground. You do not need agent with foresight to impart direction to a process.  Evolutionary processes are highly directional – they “guide” always in the direction of maximising a population’s ability to exploit the resources of the current environment, avoid its threats so as to gave the greatest chance of reproducing successfully.

but intelligent design theorist Stephen C. Meyer notes, “in all cases where we know the causal origin of ‘high information content,’ experience has shown that intelligent design played a causal role.”

The is simply false.  The causal origin of the high information object called an acorn is an oak tree, which is not an intelligent agent.  And if the author wants to argue that the oak tree itself is intelligently designed, then s/he is yet again arguing in a circle.  An alien watching a watch maker and an oak tree would conclude that the watchmaker outputs watches and the oak tree outputs acorns.  Why is the oak deemed not to be the non-intelligent “causal origin” of the acorn yet the watchmaker is deemed to be the intelligent causal origin of the watch?  Is there any reason other than that to say that the oak was the causal origin of its acorn would be to concede that not all high information content objects are the output of an intelligent designer? Unless we postulated that a designer designed the oak?  In which case, the logic is trivially fallacious:

• All A that is known to be caused by anything is caused by B,
• Therefore all A without known cause must also be caused by B.

If medics reasoned like this, medicine would still be back in the dark ages.

Evidence for Design in the Development of Biological Complexity: Finally, we get to the third domain of ID, although mostly it’s a recapitulation of the second, only with added Behe:

The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion.

 

OK sorta.

In this regard, ID uses the scientific method to claim that many features of life are designed

Nope.  I have never seen an ID hypothesis – only an attempt to falsify some non-exhaustive non-ID null, usually one that nobody actually proposes. And the number of actual empirical experiments with biological materials is extraordinary tiny.  Again, the only output I have seen from these is to compute that functional proteins are improbably under a hypothesis that nobody proposes.

—not just the information in DNA.  After starting with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI),

 

but apparently ignoring the observation that non-intelligent agents like trees do as well

design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI.

 

which is fallacious, and of course untrue.  Many designed objects contain very little CSI, if CSI is defined as information that is both unlikely (under some non-design null) and specified.  A stick placed on a stump to show which way an advance party has gone is designed and informative, but is highly likely under the null of non-design, therefore not complex. The author has made the rookie error of thinking that P(A|CSI) =P(CSI|A).  Another brainfart, I think. Perhaps the author meant to write: design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object contains high levels of CSI it was was designed.  But that would be fallacious too, because we have no prior reason to think that non-designed objects cannot contain high levels of CSI. This was simply asserted at the outset, and must be demonstrated before ID has any basis on which to make this claim.

 

Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information.

This I would like to see.

One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be tested and discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures through genetic knockout experiments to determine if they require all of their parts to function.  When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.

 

Well, no, because for a start, an object could be irreducibly complex (i.e. fail if any part was removed) and yet not possess CSI (be perfectly likely under some null, even a non-design null).  A wind-blown arch, for instance.  And secondly, there is no reason to assume that that because an object fails with any one part missing, that the penultimate structure had that one part missing. Again, the arch is a classic example. Thirdly, the entire IC concept is predicated on the idea that there can be no Darwinian pathway to an IC structure. But who says that Darwinian pathways are the only way to get an IC structure – again, an arch is IC, and was not achieved by Darwinian means.  Fourthly, Darwinian pathways only need to proceed via intermediate stages that confer a benefit in the current environment.  That benefit need not be the benefit conferred by the IC structure in question. Fifthly, we know from both biological and in silico experiments (Lenski’s lab being the poster child) that drift is also an important factor in evolutionary pathways and that because of drift, IC features can evolve via steps that are not only neutral but also by steps that are actually quite markedly deleterious.  Lastly, even if the previous five nails were not enough for Behe’s coffin, there is no way of demonstrating empirically that postulated intermediate steps were not advantageous, because advantageousness depends not only on the feature in question but on the environment, which is subject to change.  And so while it is possible that IC structures exist, and exist because a Designer intervened, there is no obvious way of knowing which these are.

This method has been used to detect irreducible complexity in a variety of biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum.

Nope.  Pallen and Matzke provided a perfectly plausible pathway for the bacterial flagellum. It may not be how it evolved, but it falsifies the claim that it could not have done, which is the whole point of the IC concept.  In any case, I know of no empirical studies that have been used to demonstrate the Irreducible Complexity of the bacterial flagellum, just armchair handwaving.

Moreover, the more we discover about the cell, the more we are learning that it functions like a miniature factory, replete with motors, powerhouses, garbage disposals, guarded gates, transportation corridors, and most importantly, CPUs.

 

Yes, in some ways; in other ways “factory” is an extremely poor metaphor. It functions if anything more like a metropolis, serving its own survival, and, unlike a factory or a metropolis, its own propagation.

The central information processing machinery of the cell runs on a language-based code composed of irreducibly complex circuits and machines:

 

This is simple assertion, and in any case, “irreducibly complex”, as we have seen, is not even a theoretical bar to evolvability.  And it isn’t a “language-based code”.  It may involve a “code” but the code is not “language based” in any sense that makes any sense. It does run on cascades of signals.

The myriad enzymes used in the process that converts the genetic information in DNA into proteins are themselves created by the process that converts DNA into proteins.

 

Not quite.  Many enzymes are made solely of RNA, so this is importantly wrong, because this fact allows the cell to bootstrap its way to protein synthesis.

Many fundamental biochemical systems won’t function unless their basic machinery is intact, so how does such complexity evolve via a “blind” and “undirected” Darwinian process of numerous, successive, slight modifications?

 

From simpler to complex just as Darwin postulated. As I’ve pointed out above, there are at least five reasons why irreducible complexity is not a bar to evolution.

Since cellular language requires an author,

 

Assuming the conclusion again.

and microbiological machines require an engineer,

And again.

and genetically encoded programs require a programmer,

 

And again.

increasing numbers of scientists feel the best explanation is intelligent design.

 

Which would be odd, if true, unless (as seems to be usually the case, they were working in fields in which they did not train), because, as I have shown, the entire ID case as presented here, boils down to:

1. Some things are both highly specified and unlikely unless designed.
2. We know they are unlikely unless designed because Intelligent designers produce such things.
3. Yes some non-intelligent things also produce such things too, but they were probably designed themselves.
4. We know this because (click to return to 1)