Intelligent Design: answers to William Dembski

William Dembski is one of the most active intellectual promoters of Intelligent Design. He also has a blog

• Uncommon descent

in which he tries to collect and create various arguments and pseudoarguments to support his agenda. Just like a certain one-dimensional blog where every piece of news is projected onto the one-dimensional axis "may it hurt string theory?" - and if the projection is positive, the news is published - Uncommon descent evaluates articles and sentences according to their ability to hurt mainstream biology and to support Intelligent Design.



While I am among those who find all one-dimensional blogs and especially most of their readers kind of uninspiring, let me admit that in my opinion, neither of the two Gentlemen mentioned above seems to be a complete moron and many of their questions may deserve our time.

Dembski vs. Gross and Susskind

Because of the description of the blog above, it should not be surprising that Dembski celebrates and promotes both Susskind's anthropic comments indicating that many physicists have accepted opinions remotely analogous to Intelligent Design - as well as Gross's statement that we don't know what we're talking about.

Incidentally, when Dembski quotes David Gross, he says "remember that string theory is taught in physics courses". That's a misleading remark. String theory is only taught in courses on string theory, and with the exception of Barton Zwiebach's award-winning MIT undergraduate course, all such courses are graduate courses. What the advocates of Intelligent Design classes at schools want is definitely much more than the current exposure of the basic school and high school students to string theory.

Although Dembski and some of his readers may find these quotations of the famous physicists relevant, they are not. Maybe, we don't know what we're talking about when we study quantum Planckian cosmology, but we know what we're talking about whenever we discuss particle physics below 100 GeV, the history of our Universe after the first three minutes, and millions of other situations.

What Dembski wants to modify about our picture of the Universe are not some esoteric details about the workings of the Universe at the Planck scale or the mechanisms of vacuum selection. He wants to revert our knowledge about very low energy processes in physics and biology. That makes all his comparisons of biology with uncertainty in quantum gravity irrelevant.

Scientists may be confused about cutting-edge physics but that's very different from being confused about the insights in biology that have been more or less settled in the 19th century. Some scientists may think that a coincidence whose probability was 10^{-350} had to happen before our Universe was created or "chosen", but they don't need probabilities of order 10^{-10^{100}}

OK, the answers

Finally, let me answer 5 questions from Dembski's most recent blog article about microbiology:

• (1) Why does biology hand us technical devices that human design engineers drool over?
  

It is because the natural length scale of human beings is 1 meter. This is the size of humans as Nature created them. This is the length scale at which humans are very good in designing things. I claim that the human engineers are better than Mother Nature in creating virtually any object whose structure is governed by the length scale of one meter. The engineers are also better at longer distance scales - and the trip to the Moon is an example. Engineers had to develop some technology before the humans could directly affect matter at shorter distance scales than the size of our hands. We are getting better and we may get better than Mother Nature in a majority of nanotechnologies in the near future. William Dembski shows a remarkable short-sightedness if he justifies his opinion by saying that Nature is superior over technology - because it is all but guaranteed that technology will be taking a lead and the strength of Dembski's position will therefore definitely decrease with time.

At any rate, even the successes of engineers themselves reflect the miraculous powers of Mother Nature because engineers were created by Her, too. I am afraid that this fact is not appreciated by many advocates of Intelligent Design and many other people.

• (2) Why don’t we ever see natural selection or any other unintelligent evolutionary mechanisms produce such systems?
  

Of course that we do. When microprocessors are produced, for example, there is a heavy competition between different companies that produce the chips. Although Intel is planning to introduce their 65 nanometer technology in 2006, AMD may be ahead because of other reasons. This competition is nothing else than the natural selection acting at a different level, with different, "non-biological" mechanisms of reproduction, and such a competition causes the chips to evolve in an analogous way like in the case of animals. (If you want to see which factors drive the decisions about the "survival of the fittest" in the case of chipmakers, open the fast comments.)

Competition also works in the case of ideas, computer programs, ideologies, cultures, "memes", and other things. Indeed, we observe similar mechanisms in many contexts. The detailed technical implementation of the reproduction, mutation, and the rules that determine the survival of the fittest depend on the situation. Some of the paradigms are however universal.

• (3) Why don’t we have any plausible detailed step-by-step models for how such evolutionary mechanisms could produce such systems?
  

In some cases we do - and some of these models are really impressive - but if we don't, it reflects several facts. The first fact is that the scientists have not been given a Holy Scripture that would describe every detail how the Universe and species were created. They must determine it themselves, using the limited data that is available today, and the answers to such questions are neither unique nor canonical. The evolution of many things could have occured in many different ways. There are many possibilities what things could have evolved and even more possibilities how they could have evolved.

The fact that Microsoft bought Q-DOS at one moment is a part of the history of operating systems, but this fact was not really necessary for the actual evolution of MS Windows that followed afterwards. In the same way, the species were evolved after many events that occured within billions of years - but almost neither of them was absolutely necessary for the currently seen species to be evolved. Because the available datasets about the history of the Earth are limited - which is an inevitable consequence of various laws of Nature - it is simply impossible to reconstruct the unique history in many cases. However, it is possible in many other cases and people are getting better.

• (4) Why in the world should we think that such mechanisms provide the right answer?

Because of many reasons. First of all, we actually observe the biological mechanisms and related mechanisms - not only in biology. They take place in the world around us. We can observe evolution "in real time". We observe mutations, we observe natural selection, we observe technological progress driven by competition, we observe all types of processes that are needed for evolution to work. Their existence is often a fact that can't really be denied.

Also, we observe many universal features of the organisms, especially the DNA molecules, proteins, and many other omnipresent entities. Sometimes we even observe detailed properties of the organisms that are predicted by evolution. Moreover, the processes mentioned above seem to be sufficient to describe the evolution of life, at least in its broad patterns. Occam's razor dictates us that we should not invent new things - and miracles - unless they become necessary. Moreover, evolution of life from simple forms seems to be necessary. We know that the Universe has been around for 13.7 billion years and the Earth was created about 5 billion years ago. We know that this can happen. We observe the evolution of more complex forms in the case of chips and in other cases, too.

According to the known physical laws and the picture of cosmology, the Earth was created without any life on it. Science must always prefer the explanations that use a minimal amount of miracles, a minimal set of arbitrary assumptions and parameters, and where the final state looks like the most likely consequence of the assumptions. This feature of science was important in most of the scientific and technological developments and we are just applying the same successful concepts to our reasoning about everything in the world, including the origin of species.

In this sense, I agree with William Dembski when he says that science rejects the creation by an unaccessible and unanalyzable Creator a priori. Rejecting explanations based on miracles that can be neither analyzed nor falsified is indeed a defining feature of science, and if William Dembski finds it too materialistic, that's too bad but this is how science has worked since the first moment when the totalitarian power of the Church over science was eliminated.

• (5) And why shouldn’t we think that there is real intelligent engineering involved here, way beyond anything we are capable of?

Because of the very same reasons as in (4). Assuming the existence of pre-existing intelligent engineering is an unnatural and highly unlikely assumption with an extremely small explanatory power. One of the fascinating properties of science as well as the real world is that simple beginnings may evolve into impressive outcomes, and modest assumptions are sufficient for us to derive great and accurate conclusions. The idea that there was a fascinating intelligent engineer - and the result of thousands or billions of years of his or her work is an intellectually weak creationist blog - looks like the same development backwards: weak conclusions derived from very strong and unlikely assumptions; poor future evolved from a magnificent past. Such a situation is simply just the opposite of what we are looking for in science - and not only in science - which is why we consider the opinion hiding in the "question" number (5) to be an unscientific preconception. (The last word of the previous sentence has been softened.)

We don't learn anything by assuming that everything has to be the way it is because of the intent of a perfect pre-engineer. We used to believe such things before the humans became capable to live with some degree of confidence and before science was born. Today, the world is very different. For billions of years, it was up to the "lower layers" of Nature to engineer progress. For millions of years, monkeys and humans were mostly passive players in this magnificent game.

More recently, however, humans started to contribute to the progress themselves. Nature has found a new way how to make the progress more efficient and faster - through the humans themselves. Many details are very new but many basic principles underlying these developments remain unchanged. Science and technology is an important part of this exciting story. They can only solve their tasks if they are done properly. Rejecting sloppy thinking and unjustified preconceptions is needed to achieve these goals.

Incidentally, Inquisition and censorship works 100% on "Uncommon Descent". Whoever will be able to post a link on Dembski's blog pointing to this article will be a winner of a small competition. ;-)

Technical note: there are some problems with the Haloscan "fast comments", so please be patient. Right-clicking the window offers you to go "Back" which you may find useful.