Let me clarify that by saying that I mean a theory that purports to be a scientific theory, that makes testable predictions (“if ID was correct we should observe…, if ID were not correct, we should not observe…”) and is an alternative explanation for the diversity and extent of the pattern of life we see on Earth.
This is far from the first time I’ve asked this question. A quick search finds a couple of threads at Uncommon descent but I’ve had no satisfactory replies beyond the usual default that says something like:
The theory of intelligent design holds 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. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.
I wonder if any of our contributors can finally enlighten me as to what the scientific, biological theory of “Intelligent Design” actually entails.
Classic William Dembski:
Can’t link to the original as ISCID is long gone. Preserved here. Has anything changed since 2002?
Has anything changed since 1802?
Paley’s comet keep returning.
Sure there’s a theory.
http://tinyurl.com/h92uxrz
LoL! You post this thread but disallow a similar thread for evolutionism.
But anyway testable predictions come before the theory and ID makes the same testable prediction as archaeology and forensic science- namely when intelligent agencies act they tend to leave evidence of their actions behind. This evidence can be assessed to determine how whatever is being investigated came to be the way it is- via necessity, chance or design.
Also ID predicts whatever is determined to be designed cannot be explained by non-telic processes.
And again:
1. High information content (or specified complexity) and irreducible complexity constitute strong indicators or hallmarks of (past) intelligent design.
2. Biological systems have a high information content (or specified complexity) and utilize subsystems that manifest irreducible complexity.
3. Naturalistic mechanisms or undirected causes do not suffice to explain the origin of information (specified complexity) or irreducible complexity.
4. Therefore, intelligent design constitutes the best explanations for the origin of information and irreducible complexity in biological systems.
Premise 1 is based on all of our knowledge of cause and effect relationships (using Meyer’s definition of information in Signature in the Cell).
Premise 2 is based on knowledge via observation and experimentation
Premise 3 is also based on observation and experimentation
Any and all complaints about that hypothesis have to deal with that
Alan, instead of asking on this lonely blog you could actually do some research. I say what I do about evolutionism because I have already read what all the experts have to say- starting with Darwin.
A simple internet search turns up many hits and many explanations including ENV:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/08/what_is_the_the075281.html
ID makes testable claims, which is the hallmark of science. However no one knows how to test the claim that natural selection and drift produced vision systems. That is the hallmark of pseudoscience
Hi Alan,
This page is about the best one for answering your questions:
http://www.ideacenter.org/content1156.html
FAQ: Does intelligent design make predictions? Is it testable?
Key excerpts:
The Short Answer: Yes. Intelligent design theory predicts:
1) that we will find specified complexity in biology. One special easily detectable form of specified complexity is irreducible complexity. We can test design by trying to reverse engineer biological structures to determine if there is an “irreducible core.” Intelligent design also makes other predictions, such as
2) rapid appearance of complexity in the fossil record,
3) re-usage of similar parts in different systems (i.e., different types of organisms), and
4) function for biological structures. Each of these predictions may be tested–and have been confirmed through testing!
Table 1. Ways Designers Act When Designing (Observations): Intelligent agents …
(1) Take many parts and arrange them in highly specified and complex patterns which perform a specific function.
(2) Rapidly infuse large amounts of information into a system, such that a system might undergo rapid and radical changes in form and function.
(3) ‘Re-use parts’ over-and-over in different systems (design upon a common blueprint).
(4) Be said to typically NOT create completely functionless objects or parts (although we may sometimes think something is functionless, but not realize its true function).
Table 2. Predictions of Design (Hypothesis):
(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.
(2) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.
(3) Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.
(4) The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless “junk DNA”.
End of quote.
My own comments:
Most of these predictions are pretty hopeless.
For one thing, they’re non-quantitative. How much information would we expect to find in the simplest organisms, to the nearest order of magnitude? How rapidly would we expect the Cambrian fauna to appear? Overnight, over thousands of years or over millions? How much, if any, junk DNA is compatible with ID? No answers are provided.
For another thing, even if they are falsified, ID can be made to accommodate that, too. (For instance, a designer might design things gradually, and Stephen Meyer has said that he doesn’t care if the Cambrian fauna arose over billions of years or not: he still thinks they were designed, on purely mathematical grounds, since their bodies contained dozens of proteins. Also, while a designer wouldn’t normally make a thing without a function, he might well allow a one-functional structure to remain in the body of an organism, rather than poofing it away. Hence junk DNA wouldn’t falsify ID, any more than vestigial eyes in cave fish.)
Finally, some of them are wrong anyway. There’s good genetic evidence that the lineages of Cambrian phyla go back hundreds of millions of years, even if fossils are lacking. And while I’ve read reports of genes appearing in very distantly related species, I’ve never heard of identical functional parts being found in distantly related species. Also, the online debate over junk DNA has been won hands down by Larry Moran, in my opinion. Junk DNA is real and common. The ID movement needs to face this fact.
I’d like to finish by citing a prediction that I made in my review of Dr. Douglas Axe’s book, Undeniable:
Any takers?
Frankie,
There is just such a thread. You have been posting extensively to it – did you not notice? Its title may not be quite what you were after, but you’ve still chucked everything you can think of at it that falls under the general heading ‘evolutionary theory’.
“Censorship! I can say what I like but I don’t like the title!!!“
There are no clear levels in a continuum.
Hi petrushka,
But is there a continuum of functional complexity? That’s what I’d like to know, one way or the other. To answer that question, I think we need to catalogue functional systems in organisms.
vjtorley,
I don’t actually understand the question.
And how do they know it is actually evidence? Proposed mechanisms? Proposed intelligent agencies with known capabilities ?
As a longtime proponent and present supporter of ID, as a scientific theory, I do not believe ID should be promoted as a science theory, so as far as science goes, I would say “NO” to Alan Fox’s question as a default answer.
The fundamental problem is that we cannot formally prove anyone is intelligent, much less the designer of life. There is no mathematical of physical science definition of intelligence.
Like consciousness, intelligence is an undefined axiomatic premise with no formal proof. I believe intelligence and consciousness exists, but something so fundamental to reality is frustratingly beyond the reach of formal proof — that is the nature of axiomatic foundations — they can be true statements, but not formally provable.
Science is driven by mathematics since the most fundamental science is physics, and physics is a mathematical description of nature. If one cannot describe intelligence mathematically and predict its behavior, one will be hard pressed to define ID as science.
The problem is that intelligence, if there is a free will, is capricious, it should defy prediction in principle as far as how intelligence behaves.
That said, proponents of ID can assert there are a body of scientific theories that support the premise life is designed, if one is wiling to accept life is designed.
Example: life did not emerge from a proteins-first scenario as insinuated by the Urey-Miller experiment. life did not emerge from an RNA-first scenario because the RNA-world doesn’t even have plausible pathways to create the RNAs (at least Urey-Miller made racemic amino acids). A von Neumann self-replicating automata is not the ordinary expectation of ordinary processes…..etc.
Then at some point you must have a non intelligently designed intelligent designer
So what? This depends on how one defines Specified Complexity. Using William Dembski’s current definition, you can only call it SC if it cannot be caused by natural evolutionary forces. Using that definition is useless, especially since it requires the reader to do all the serious work, and the part where one then calls that SC is a useless add-on.
Using Dembski’s original 2002 definition, SC simply means we have a degree of adaptation that is unlikely to arise by mutation (without natural selection). Basically almost all adaptations then are SC — but then there is no proof that they cannot be that well-adapted as a result of natural selection.
So saying we expect to see SC is saying we expect to see adaptation. The same prediction we would make from natural evolutionary forces. Not a very exciting prediction from ID.
No, there is currently no scientific Intelligent Design theory. At best we have an Intelligent Design hypothesis which to date no one has come up with any testable, falsifiable methods of investigation for. To have testable hypotheses the IDiots would have to make some assumptions about the capabilities and limitations of the Designer. Since their Designer is their omnipotent Christian God that’s something none have been willing to do.
That really presents an hypothesis, rather than a theory. In ordinary speech, the word “theory” is ambiguous between meaning hypothesis and meaning an actual scientific theory. ID depends very much on this ambiguity.
No, there isn’t a theory of intelligent design.
The first of those remarks is question-begging, the second is speculative (i.e., there’s no reason to suppose that if there is free will, the activities of free individuals must be capricious or defy prediction).
It seems to me that even if every one of the those predictions turned out to be right, we’d have only some nice objections to current evolutionary theory; even the whole kaboodle of them wouldn’t imply an intelligent designer.
I take it that an intelligent design theory ought to require an intelligent designer, not just suggest that our current understanding of how life got to be just the way it is is deficient.
ID makes no testable claims which are uniquely inclusive of just ID and exclusive of natural non-intelligent processes. The few “predictions” we see are the same things we can see from natural processes i.e. “life will be really complex!” or are complete non-sequiturs “ID predicts the sky will be blue”.
Of course a few of the highly touted ID “predictions” are just plain disingenuous like “we’ll see new forms appear suddenly in the fossil record” where “suddenly” means over millions of years.
The hypothesis comes before the entailments, and there is no scientific hypothesis of ID.
One of many metrics no IDCist has ever calculated for any biological system.
Intelligent design creationism is a political movement, not a scientific endeavor. It has always been thus.
There is no scientific hypothesis or theory of ID.
This has never been measured for any biological system by any IDCist. In fact, the metrics proposed thus far appear to be impossible to calculate (see previous discussions here at TSZ).
Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
That’s some FFM quality logic right there.
I wrote that more from experience. Artists and musicians have degrees of freedom. I don’t think it is practical to try to predict in advance what they will design.
Some computer scientists tried to load some collective knowledge about how to write beautiful music. Totally predictable music is uninteresting, nothing a composer would want to write. There is probably something to that effect with writing a compelling novel. There isn’t a way, practically speaking to encapsulate the process musical composition or writing of novels in mechanical fashion — at least none that are compelling, imho.
Like deterministic “random” number generators of a computer, even if fundamentally they are deterministic, from a practical standpoint, we treat them as capricious. That is the problem with ID being promoted as a predictive scientific theory. Even if intelligence is purely deterministic, the predictability is inaccessible to us from a practical standpoint.
If deterministic random number generators are not predictable (unless one has access to the mechanics of the generator), it would seem a free will agent even more so. Predictability is mathematically describable. I suppose capriciousness is more a philosophical question as to how to describe it.
My claim was not so much a discussion of what can happen in principle, but rather what I’ve found in practice.
Predictions must follow from the theory, nobody gives a flying fuck what IDists “predict”. But for something to follow logically from a theory it needs explanatory power.
How can someone obviously smart like Torley fall for that fallacious crap? Why would Darwinism predict no more than three levels of complexity while ID predicts more than 3? Why not 2? or 10?
If that was true, and ID was the answer to the origins of life, then any living form with 3 or more levels of hierarchy must have been created specially, otherwise there’s no reason to believe that 3 levels of hierarchy are problematic for evolution or require intervention from the designer unless that intervention is undistinguishable from evolutionary processes. But Torley accepts common descent. This seems a blatant contradiction
Wrong. There are some premises that have no formal proof, but can be true. It’s a matter of which premises are more believable or have a better payoff. Many decision in the business world and life are made with incomplete information and imperfect knowledge of tomorrow. Some amount of faith in every human soul is in action because of the existence of uncertainty.
Evolutionary theory has zero payoff on infinite time scales even if the evolutionists are right. And even for smaller time scales, evolutionary theory is a bad bet. Graur said, “If ENCODE is right, evolution is wrong.” Pharmaceutical companies are brining medical cures to market because of work like ENCODE, Graur delivers nothing by comparison. Evolutionary theory is a bad bet. Remember Ayala on Alu’s, or Ken Miller on pseudo genes, etc. They wagered a lot on total zero payoff bets, and they’re wrong anyway…
The evidence is at least consistent with ID, not the ordinary evolution of chemical and physical reactions. You want to believe chemical react in a way that produces life, that’s up to you, but there is no theoretical nor empirical basis for believe that. Life looks like a miracle to me, hence I’m willing to accept ID.
I’ll tell you your quality of logic. You demand repeatable scientific demonstrations to believe something, like say a miracle. Well, if miracles were on demand, they would cease to be miracles, and hence a law or principle of chemistry and physics. So, even if miracles exist, you’re epistemology would ensure you wouldn’t recognize nor accept them. You thus show, even if a premise is right, you wouldn’t be able to formally reject it in your own mind. In contrast, my epistemology is more correct than you give it credit for — that is to say, some truths, perhaps the most fundamental truths, are not formally provable. The question is which truths are more believable and which truths have a good payoff if true.
stcordova,
Ha ha. Guess what methodology raised suspicions that the assumed neutrality of beta-globin alleles (I’m assuming that’s the Ken Miller reference) might not be a fully robust conclusion. Yep, that’s right, evolutionary theory. In this instance, conservation across the primate lineage did not accord with a prediction under a strictly neutral interpretation. You are cryptically approving the methods of evolutionary theory in the supposed destruction of evolutionary theory. If they were separately created, phylogenetic ‘conservation’ cannot be robust evidence of function.
I want a list of organisms and their CSI values.
I was referring specifically to this bit of your mental gymnastics that I quoted:
“That said, proponents of ID can assert there are a body of scientific theories that support the premise life is designed, if one is wiling to accept life is designed.”
Just assume your conclusion and everything makes sense. Typical FFM logic, as I said.
ID is just a bunch of excuses for saying that evolution didn’t do it.
There is no systematic attempt to organize knowledge according to the design principles lacking in life (how would you organize lacking information?), there are just a bunch of excuses for the designer not being brighter than evolution is, and attempts to foist evolutionary data into design frames.
Take life’s complex functionality and try to claim that anything that functionally complex is designed by definition, or at least by probabilities. There’s never any attempt to find the real marks of design (portability, especially), because they know that they couldn’t find them if they tried, and they don’t want to seek and fail to find (design apologists aren’t generally interested in doing much other than saying it must be due to God after all anyhow).
ID is a reaction against evolution, not an actual attempt at discovery and making sense of life according to found principles. They want life to make sense according to their presuppositions.
Glen Davidson
Evidence please
IDC ain’t what it used to be.
And another failed attempt- Biological information has been calculated. Durston et al., has done so. And all you and yours can do is try to handwave it away all the while not realizing that you and yours don’t have a mechanism capable of producing it.
Look you guys can’t test any of your claims- you cannot test the claim that NS and drift produced vision systems. You cannot test the claim those mechanisms produced ATP synthase nor any other protein machine. All of the alleged evidence for UCD is minus a mechanism- why do you think that is?
Knowledge of cause and effect relationships
No Alan, I have an OP that asks for a scientific theory of evolution. Your thread doesn’t reference a scientific theory of evolution. That is because a scientific theory of evolution doesn’t exist.
That is incorrect. Natural selection is always included but it doesn’t matter as it is impotent wrt producing SC.
The criteria for inferring design in biology is, as Michael J. Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, puts it in his book Darwin ‘s Black Box: “Our ability to be confident of the design of the cilium or intracellular transport rests on the same principles to be confident of the design of anything: the ordering of separate components to achieve an identifiable function that depends sharply on the components.”
That alone is more than evolutionism has to offer.
Come on – They’ve only had 19 years.
Perhaps worth revisiting: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/intelligent-design-predicts/
And that’s one reason I support the Discovery Institute. They would lose their tax exempt status if they were a political movement, and using your own reasoning, Patrick, they [the DI] is not therefore “intelligent design creationism.” Whatever that phrase means.
The lawyers win Patrick, and you lose.
of or relating to the mind.
of or relating to disorders of the mind.
Comments don’t have minds, Patrick. Please address the comment, not the person commenting.
“In return for its favored tax-status, a charitable nonprofit promises the federal government that it will not engage in “political campaign activity” and if it does, IRS regulations mandate that the charitable nonprofit will lose its tax-exempt status. This prohibition against political campaign activity (defined as “supporting or opposing a candidate for public office”) is SEPARATE from lobbying or legislative activities, which charitable nonprofits ARE permitted to engage in, although knowing the rules is important, as limitations apply. – See more at: https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/political-campaign-activities-risks-tax-exempt-status#sthash.mRSOcxEs.dpuf
There is if evolution proceeds by small increments.
Do you have any evidence that it doesn’t?
dazz, take a deep breath, calm down. VJT didn’t say what you think he said.
What he wrote was, that given how Darwinian evolution is supposed to work, he would expect a distribution of hierarchical systems. I don’t see anything at all wrong with that hypothesis.
Sounds like a mechanism
“The law of nonprofit organizations can be confusing, because there are two meanings for the word charitable. One refers to a charity that, for example, aids the poor. The other refers to the broader IRS definition that includes all organizations that can accept tax-deductible contributions. These include educational, religious, scientific, patriotic, and many other types of organizations that are classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.”
The Discovery Institute is a 501(c)(3)
Agreed. Vague to the point of vacuity!
Good points!
The possibility of falsification would add some credibility, I agree.
Well said. What worries me is not that ID needs to focus on developing some reality based ideas but that, with Donald Trump in unfettered charge of the US government, it has become irrelevant.
LoL.
Excellent!
That “intelligence” has resisted all attempts at defining it is something of a problem for ID, agreed.
Indeed.
You’re moving into philosophy.
I repeat. Life is designed. Designed by the niche environment. For those of a theistical bent, one could imagine God designing through the medium of the environment, having created the Universe.
No harm in being skeptical about the current state of biology and its ability to explain aspects of life’s current diversity on Earth.
Durston’s fits are not the same as Dembski’s CSI or any of the other myriad metrics proposed at UD.
Send me your lawyers’ contact details and I’ll send them a copy of the Wedge Document.
Reality wins.